Chapter Eighty-Five: Aurielle Duvall

There’s nothing quite like coming home.

The second I crossed the boundary line into my town, something in my chest loosened. My shoulders dropped. My grip on the steering wheel softened. I rolled the window down just enough to let in the familiar scent of pine and open road—clean air and distant woodsmoke. The land here smelled different. More honest. More mine.

And gods, how I’d missed it.

Being near Moonveil had felt like living inside a bruised ribcage. Tight, fragile, sore in ways that didn’t always make sense. No matter how composed I looked on the outside, I’d been walking on land where pieces of me had broken apart, piece by piece. There were ghosts in the walls, memories in every hallway, and a mirror in every pair of eyes that saw me only as “Matthias’s ex-wife” or “the luna who lost her alpha's child.” I wasn’t Aurielle there. I was a shadow of the woman I used to be.

But here?

Here, I could breathe again. I stopped to give the wolf at the gate the new code, then drove into m