The worst was over.The laws were in motion.The web was gone.The market was being remade into something that no longer smelled of fear.On the surface, everything in my life was louder—laughter, training, arguments, and plans.Underneath, things were quieter.Quiet enough that the things we hadn’t said yet had room to rise.***It was Alden who found me first.I was in the west garden, where the stone wall was low enough to sit on, and the ivy hadn’t entirely taken over yet. The late afternoon light slanted through the leaves, dappled on my boots.He came without his cloak, without a stack of documents, looking, for once, less like an Alpha and more like a man whose shoulders had finally remembered how to drop.“Is this seat taken?” he asked, nodding to the stretch of wall beside me.“Yes,” I said. “By you.”He smiled and settled next to me, forearms braced on his thighs, gaze on the training yard below where two of our newer recruits were clumsily attempting a drill Jax had setWe
Last Updated : 2026-02-04 Read more