The cottage wasn’t much. Two rooms, a sloped roof, and ivy already creeping up the stone. But it stood — strong, proud, defiant — on the ridge above the glen, where morning mist clung to the wild grass and the forest whispered of beginnings.
Aria stood at the edge of the porch, her arms folded tight against the dawn chill, staring at what she’d built with her own two hands. The wood bore the marks of sweat and stubbornness. The beams had been raised not by craftsmen, but by friends — wolves who had chosen her when the council had not.
No marble floors. No velvet drapes. No servants or sentries or politics.
Just a home. Hers.
Calla tugged at her tunic, sleepy-eyed and barefoot. “Can I have honey with my porridge?”
Aria smiled. “Only if you promise to brush your hair first.”
The girl grinned wide and darted inside, trailing the scent of clover and ash behind her. Aria followed slowly, stepping over the threshold with a feeling she couldn’t name — part pride, part grief, part healing.
This was the life no one had given her. She’d taken it. Carved it out of exile.
And for the first time, she didn’t feel like she was surviving.
She felt like she was living.
Inside, the cottage was alive with warmth. A cast-iron stove hissed and crackled with breakfast. The hearthstone glowed amber. On the walls, talismans Zara had carved hung beside Calla’s drawings — wolves with stars for eyes, stick figures holding hands under a crescent moon.
The table was scratched but sturdy. The mismatched chairs wobbled slightly but held.
There was a small shelf of books Aria had brought from StoneRidge. Not treaties or war records — just stories. Legends. Poems she’d loved as a child and forgotten until now.
One of them sat open, its spine cracked, the page marked with a wildflower.
“And she who walks the edge of the woods
becomes the forest, not the flame.”
She closed it gently.
Later that morning, Zara arrived with bundles of herbs and a smirk that said she hadn’t slept in two nights.
“You need protection wards,” she said, dropping dried wolfsbane and sunroot on the table. “And probably a proper perimeter. This place is too damn charming to stay secret forever.”
“I have you,” Aria said simply.
Zara’s eyes softened. “You have more than that. Kael’s old guard is splintering. And the younger wolves? They’re watching. Waiting. You’re not just a mother with a new roof.”
“I don’t want another war.”
“You won’t have one. You already won.” She grinned. “Now hang this over the door or I’ll hex your stew.”
The day passed gently.
Calla played in the clearing with her forest toys — a hand-carved wolf, a feathered arrow, a stone polished smooth in the river. She laughed when a bluebird landed on her outstretched hand, like magic answering her joy.
Aria mended the curtains, pausing only to hum an old lullaby.
When the breeze turned cool, she lit the lanterns Zara had enchanted to flicker like moonlight. They lined the path down to the stream, where wolves sometimes came to sit in silence, not as subjects, not as soldiers, but as kin.
As dusk fell, a soft knock came at the door.
It wasn’t Kael.
It was Thorne — once his second, now no one’s — with a pack of food and no expectations.
“I heard you built something worth seeing,” he said.
“I did.”
He didn’t step inside. Just stood there, like the world had shifted beneath him and he wasn’t sure how to stand on it.
“Need any help with the fence?”
“Yes,” Aria said, meaning it.
Thorne nodded, set down the bundle, and left.
And somehow, that too, was peace.
That night, Calla curled into her blankets, her cheeks flushed with dreams and freedom. Aria watched her sleep, brushing a curl from her forehead, heart tight with something fiercer than love.
Fierce enough to protect this child, this home, this life — even if the whole world tried to take it again.
She stepped outside.
The sky was velvet-black, stars blooming across it like frost. The moon hung heavy, not yet full, but pregnant with promise.
She didn’t howl.
She didn’t need to.
The forest heard her anyway.
And in the silence that followed, Aria Vale smiled.
She was no longer running from the Alpha’s house.
She had built her own.
