Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 111

POV: Adeline

"You need something to wear."

I looked up from the patrol schedules I'd been reviewing—old habits dying hard—to find Freya standing in my doorway with an expression that meant trouble.

"I have clothes," I said, gesturing vaguely at the wardrobe. "Plenty of clothes."

"Not for this." She stepped into the room, closing the door behind her with a decisive click. "Not for him."

The words landed somewhere soft in my chest. The pledging ceremony was three days away, and I had been carefully not thinking about what I would wear, what I would look like, what any of it would mean. Easier to focus on schedules and logistics. Safer.

But Freya had never let me hide in safety.

The pack's seamstress lived in a small cottage near the eastern edge of the compound—a place I had passed a hundred times without ever stopping. Freya practically dragged me through the door, ignoring my protests about not wanting to be a bother, about not needing anything special, about a dozen other excuses that withered under her determined glare.

The woman who greeted us was ancient. Silver hair cropped short, hands gnarled with age but steady as stone, and eyes—moon's mercy, those eyes. They looked at me like they could see through skin and bone to something underneath. Something true.

"So," she said, her voice carrying the rasp of decades. "The Luna finally comes to me."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to—"

"Hush." She waved away my apology like it was a gnat. "You're here now. That's what matters." Those knowing eyes swept over me, assessing. "I've been waiting. Had a feeling about this one."

Freya squeezed my hand. I squeezed back.

The dress took shape over hours that felt like minutes.

I stood on a low platform while the seamstress—Marta, I learned, though she seemed to exist beyond names—circled me with measuring tape and fabric swatches and the focused intensity of an artist at work. Freya sat nearby, offering commentary that Marta mostly ignored, her ancient fingers moving with a certainty that bordered on magic.

White fabric, soft as moonlight. Silver threads woven through in patterns that caught the light when I moved—not ostentatious, not elaborate. Simple. Beautiful. The kind of beauty that didn't shout but whispered. The kind that felt like truth.

"Not too much," Marta murmured, more to herself than to us. "She doesn't need much. The beauty's already there. Just needs framing."

I didn't know what to say to that. I had never been the beautiful one, the desired one, the one wolves looked at with wanting. I had been the survivor. The rejected. The one who carried too much tragedy to be wanted.

But Marta's hands kept moving, and the dress kept taking shape, and something in my chest kept cracking open whether I wanted it to or not.

When it was finished, Marta turned me toward the mirror.

I didn't recognize the woman looking back at me.

She was—I was—dressed in white and silver, the fabric draping in clean lines that made me look taller, stronger, more myself than I had ever felt. My dark hair fell loose around my shoulders. My eyes, usually guarded, looked almost soft. Almost hopeful.

Someone who survived.

That was what I saw, underneath everything else. Not the curse. Not the rejections. Not the girl who had crawled out of Ash Hollow's ashes with nothing but grief and guilt and a desperate will to keep breathing. I saw the woman who had survived all of it. Who had kept surviving until survival became something else entirely.

Until it became this.

My throat tightened. My eyes burned.

"You're beautiful."

Freya's whisper came from just behind me, her reflection appearing in the mirror beside mine. Her eyes were wet, her smile trembling at the edges.

"I don't feel—" The words stuck. I didn't know how to finish them. I don't feel beautiful. I don't feel like I deserve this. I don't feel like any of this can be real.

"You're beautiful," Freya repeated, firmer now. Her hands found my shoulders, gripping tight. "And you deserve this. All of it. Him. The ceremony. The pack. You deserve every single piece of the happiness you've found."

I wanted to argue. Old instincts, old wounds, old voices whispering that I was too broken, too damaged, too much and simultaneously not enough.

But Freya's eyes held mine in the mirror, fierce and certain.

And Marta watched from the corner with those knowing eyes, nodding once like she had never doubted.

For the first time, I let myself believe it.

Not completely—that would take time, maybe years, maybe the rest of my life. But enough. Enough to stop fighting the reflection in the mirror. Enough to see what they saw, even if only for a moment.

Beautiful. Deserving. Enough.

I touched the silver threads at my waist, felt the whisper of the fabric against my skin, and let the last of my protests dissolve.

"Okay," I said softly. "Okay."

Freya made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and pulled me into a hug that nearly knocked us both off the platform. Marta tutted about wrinkling the dress, but her eyes were smiling.

Three days until the ceremony.

For the first time, I was ready to count them.