Ten Years Later

Aria Voss did not startle easily anymore, but the knock on her study door at this hour made her still.

"Come in," she called, closing the ledger in front of her, trade projections for the Voss pack's northern farms, dull enough to make a person's eyes glaze, exactly the kind of work her uncle had been quietly funneling to her for the last two years. Let her prove herself useful, she'd overheard him say once. Let her earn the council's trust before we ask anything real of her.

She hadn't understood, then, what "real" would eventually mean.

Damion Voss let himself in without waiting for an answer, which was his particular way of reminding people who actually ran this pack. He'd aged well in the decade since her father's death, silver at the temples now, a permanent furrow between his brows that made him look perpetually thoughtful, trustworthy, safe. The Alpha Council loved him. The pack loved him. Aria had loved him too, once, in the raw aftermath of losing everything, when he was the only steady hand left to hold.

She still loved him, if she was honest with herself in the dark hours when honesty was unavoidable. She just no longer trusted that love the way she used to.

"You look tired," he said, settling into the chair across from her desk without invitation.

"I look like someone who has read four hundred pages about grain tariffs." She set the ledger aside. "What do you need, Uncle?"

His mouth curved, not quite a smile. "Council session tomorrow. I need you there. Early."

"You need me at every council session. This is not new information."

"This one is different." He watched her carefully, the way he sometimes did when he was deciding how much of a thing to say aloud versus let her discover on her own, a habit she'd noticed years ago and never mentioned, because noticing it was more useful than confronting it. "There's a proposal on the table. Something the Council has been circling for months without the nerve to say out loud."

Aria's stomach tightened, though her face gave away nothing. Ten years of practice had made that particular skill instinctive. "Say it, then. You clearly want to."

"Peace," Damion said simply. "A real peace, this time. Not another fragile truce that collapses the second someone's cattle wander over the border. A binding one. With the Thornes."

The name landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water, the ripples took a moment to reach the surface, but reach it they did. She kept her hands folded on the desk, still, deliberate.

"The Thornes," she repeated.

"Kade Thorne has held the Alpha seat for three years now. Whatever his father was, whatever he was as a boy", Damion's eyes flicked to hers, and there it was, the smallest test, the smallest probe to see how much old grief still lived behind her calm, "the Council believes he's different. Pragmatic. Tired of the losses on both sides. There's real appetite for this, Aria. On both sides of the border."

"And you want me at the session to do what? Take notes?"

"I want you there," Damion said, leaning forward, "because whatever they propose to seal this peace, it will likely require a Voss willing to be part of it. Publicly. Visibly. And I trust no one else in this pack to represent our family's interests the way you would."

Aria studied her uncle's face for a long moment, searching for the shape of whatever he wasn't saying. She'd learned, over the years, that Damion rarely told her a full truth when a partial one would do just as well, not out of cruelty, she'd always assumed, but out of some instinct to protect her from things he thought she couldn't carry.

She was done being protected. She had been done for nine years.

"Fine," she said. "I'll be there."

Damion rose, satisfied, and paused at the door. "Aria." His voice softened in the way it used to when she was younger and grieving, and he was the only person who could reach her. "Whatever happens in that room tomorrow, I need you to trust that I have always had your interests at heart. Everything I've done since your father died, I've done to protect this family."

"I know," she said, and she almost believed it.

After the door closed, Aria sat alone in the quiet study for a long time, staring at the cold hearth, turning her uncle's words over like stones in her palm. A real peace. A binding one. Something about the phrase made the old scar in her chest throb, faint and familiar, like a limb that ached before a storm.

She thought of her father kneeling in the snow. She thought of a name she'd spent ten years turning into a weapon in her mind.  "Kade Thorne," a stranger she had built an entire architecture of hatred around without ever once seeing his face.

Tomorrow, apparently, that would change.

She didn't sleep well that night. She told herself it was ordinary anticipation. She would spend the next decade wishing she'd been honest with herself about what it actually was.