Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 115

POV: Adeline

The path was lined with wolves.

I stepped out of Elara's hut into morning light that seemed to glow from within, and found them waiting. Not in formation, not arranged by rank or protocol—just there. Standing along the worn dirt path that wound through the compound toward the sacred clearing, their faces turned toward me like flowers toward the sun.

My pack. Our pack.

The air caught in my chest.

I recognized every face.

Luca stood near the front, his expression fierce with an emotion I'd never seen him wear openly. Not amusement. Not the careful blankness he used as armor. Something raw. Something proud. He nodded once as I passed, and I nodded back, and that was enough.

The elders clustered together further down—wolves who had lived through generations of pack history, who remembered Aiden's father and grandfather, who had watched this compound rise from wilderness. Their eyes held weight. Approval. Welcome.

The pups were there too, held in their parents' arms or standing on unsteady legs, watching with the wide-eyed wonder of children who didn't fully understand what they were witnessing but knew it mattered.

All of them. Every wolf I had come to know over these months—the ones who had been suspicious at first, the ones who had welcomed me immediately, the ones who had fought beside me and bled beside me and mourned beside me. They lined the path like an honor guard, and none of them spoke.

They didn't need to.

They were witnessing. Honoring.

I felt their presence like a physical force, holding me up, carrying me forward.

The walk felt endless. Felt like seconds.

My feet moved without my conscious direction, following the path I'd walked a hundred times but never like this. Never in white and silver. Never with moonflowers in my hair. Never toward what waited at the end.

The sacred clearing came into view gradually—first the ancient oaks that marked its boundary, then the stone altar at its center, then the wolves who had gathered to witness the ceremony itself.

And then—

Him.

Aiden stood at the altar.

Black clothes, formal and fitted, the kind I'd never seen him wear. His hair was pushed back from his face. His shoulders were squared. And the scar—the one that curved beneath his eye, the one he'd carried since childhood, the one that told the story of everything he'd survived—was visible, unhidden, proud.

There were tears on his face.

He wasn't trying to hide them. Wasn't wiping them away. They fell freely, tracing silver lines down his cheeks, and his eyes—moon's mercy, his eyes—were fixed on me like I was the only thing in the world that existed.

Through the bond, I felt everything he felt. Awe. Gratitude. Disbelief that any of this was real. Love so vast it seemed to fill the space between us, so fierce it burned.

You're beautiful, he thought toward me. You're here. You're really here.

I'm here, I thought back. I'll always be here.

Our eyes met.

Everything else fell away.

The wolves lining the path. The pack gathered in the clearing. The weight of tradition and ceremony and all the words we would speak. None of it mattered—not in that moment. There was only him, standing at the altar, crying openly, looking at me like I'd hung the moon in the sky.

There was only me, walking toward him, my heart so full it felt like it might burst.

The distance between us shrank with every step. Fifty feet. Thirty. Twenty.

I didn't look away. Neither did he.

The bond hummed between us, alive with everything we were about to promise. Everything we'd already promised, in a hundred smaller ways, over all the days and nights that had led us here.

Ten feet. Five.

He reached out his hand.

I took it.

His fingers closed around mine—warm, steady, trembling just slightly with the force of what he felt. I stepped up beside him, into the space that had been waiting for me, and turned to face the pack that had become my home.

The sacred clearing was silent. Expectant. Full of wolves who had witnessed everything we'd been through, who knew the cost of this moment, who understood what it meant for two broken people to choose each other again and again until the choosing became permanent.

Elara stood before us, ready to speak the words that would bind us.

But for one more breath—one more heartbeat—I just looked at him.

My Alpha. My mate. My future.

I had walked toward him across impossible distances. Through rejection and loss and war and healing. Through everything that had tried to keep us apart.

And now, finally, I had arrived.

Forever was waiting.

I was ready.