One year later
If I’ve learned anything this past year, it’s that survival isn’t quiet.
It doesn’t arrive gently or politely.It doesn’t ask permission or wait for wounds to close.Survival is loud.Messy.Defiant.It claws its way out of you when the world has already decided you should have stayed broken.
A year ago, I thought surviving meant enduring.Now I know better.Surviving meant choosing.
The cabin breathes around me as dawn breaks through the trees.Wood creaks softly as the fire settles into embers, the scent of pine and smoke woven so deeply into my bones I’m not sure I’ll ever smell anything else the same way again.Outside, the forest hums with life, birds calling, leaves whispering secrets I no longer feel like an outsider to.
This place used to feel like exile.
Now it feels like peace.
I roll onto my side, the heavy furs warm against my skin, and my gaze lands on Altero.He’s awake already, propped on one elbow, watching me the way he always does, like he’s still half-afraid I might vanish if he looks away too long.
His storm-grey eyes soften when I smile at him, the hard edges of the man who once refused fate melting just enough to remind me that I broke him as surely as he claimed me.
“You’re staring again,” I murmur.
“And you’re still breathing,” he replies, voice rough with sleep and truth.“I like to make sure.”
I snort softly and reach out, brushing my fingers along his jaw.The scar there is familiar now, mapped and memorized like every other piece of him.He leans into my touch without thinking, a reflex born of belonging.
A year ago, he wouldn’t have let me do this.
A year ago, he thought love was a chain.
A year ago, I thought I was unworthy of it.
We were both wrong.
Gabriel learned that the hard way.
He tried everything.Apologies wrapped in pretty words.Flowers left on my parents’ doorstep like offerings to a goddess he never believed in when it mattered.Promises whispered to the Alpha about broken bonds and mistakes that could be undone.
He even stood before the pack once.Begging.Not for me—never really for me—but for the power he lost when he rejected me.
The sound of his voice still echoes sometimes, thin and desperate, as he pleaded for “reason.”As if reason had anything to do with fate.As if I hadn’t already paid the price for his cowardice in blood and pain.
All he accomplished was something no one expected.He brought Maddox and Altero back together.Not as rivals but as brothers.
Peace doesn’t always look like forgiveness.Sometimes it looks like acknowledgment—of wounds, of choices, of paths taken that can’t be undone.Maddox came to the cabin once, alone, stripped of his rank and his followers, and stood in the doorway like a man unsure whether he was welcome.
Altero didn’t bare his teeth and that alone was a miracle.
They talked for hours.I didn’t listen.Some things aren’t mine to hold.But when Maddox left, his shoulders were lighter, and when Altero came back inside, something old and bitter had finally loosened its grip from my mate.
We moved back onto pack land not long after.Not into the heart of it.Close enough and on our terms.
The pack learned quickly that I am not the girl who collapsed on a stone altar and bled into the dirt while they watched.I am the woman who walked back in with her head high and her mate at her side, and did not ask for their approval.I don’t want it or need it.
My parents tried to speak to me.Once.I listened and that was more than they deserved.They explained tradition.Fear.Duty.The weight of expectation.All the things they hid behind while I was breaking apart alone.I let them finish.I even thanked them for their honesty.
Then I told them forgiveness is not owed.It is earned.And they had not earned mine.Walking away from them hurt less than I expected.Walking toward myself felt better than I ever imagined.Both were easier than words could ever explain.
I shift closer to Altero now, pressing my forehead to his chest.His arm tightens around me instantly, possessive without being asked.The bond hums between us—steady, unyielding, and alive.It no longer burns like a wound.It sings.
“You’re thinking too loud,” he mutters.
