Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 17

POV: Adeline

The trees glowed like captured stars.

Lanterns hung from every branch—paper and birch bark, some painted with wolves and moons, others left plain to catch the firelight inside them. They swayed in the evening breeze, casting dancing shadows across the clearing where the pack had gathered. The air smelled of pine and woodsmoke and something sweeter underneath, honey mead warming in clay pots near the central fire.

Wolves laughed around me. Children darted between adults, carrying lanterns of their own making, their faces flushed with excitement. Someone had brought out instruments—a fiddle, a drum, pipes that wove a melody through the chatter. The compound had transformed into something from a story, golden and alive.

I stood at the edge of it all and felt the distance like a physical thing.

Ash Hollow had celebrated differently. Our festivals had been quieter, more intimate—small gatherings around hearth fires, songs passed down through generations I would never hear again. I didn't know the words to these songs. Didn't recognize the steps of the dances that were forming near the fire. Didn't understand which lantern shapes held which meanings.

An outsider watching joy she couldn't access.

My wolf curled smaller in my chest, homesick for traditions that had burned with everything else.

"You're doing that thing again."

Freya appeared at my elbow, a cup of something warm pressed into my hands before I could protest. Her dark hair was loose tonight, threaded with small white flowers, and her eyes held the particular gleam of someone who had already sampled the honey mead.

"What thing?"

"The thing where you stand in the shadows and look like someone stole your favorite bone." She clinked her cup against mine. "Drink. It helps."

I took a sip. The mead was sweet and potent, warmth spreading through my chest almost immediately.

"I don't know the traditions," I admitted. "I feel like I'm intruding on something that isn't mine."

"It's a party, Adeline. The only tradition is making too much noise and eating too many honeycakes." Freya's expression softened. "You don't have to know the steps. You just have to be willing to move."

Before I could argue, she seized my free hand and pulled me toward the dancers.

"Freya—"

"Stop thinking." She spun me into the loose circle that had formed around the fire, her grip firm and brooking no argument. "Just feel."

The music swelled around us—fiddle and drum weaving together in a rhythm that lived somewhere older than thought. Bodies moved in patterns I didn't recognize, but Freya was right. The steps didn't matter. What mattered was the movement itself, the warmth of the fire on one side and the cool night air on the other, the laughter that rose and fell like breathing.

I stumbled at first. Moved wrong, stepped when I should have turned. But no one corrected me. No one frowned or pulled away. They simply absorbed my mistakes into the dance, adjusting around me with the easy grace of wolves who understood that every new member needed time to find the rhythm.

Something loosened in my chest.

The song ended. Another began, slower, more intimate. Couples formed, hands finding hands, bodies drawing closer. Freya grinned at me and melted into the crowd, leaving me standing at the edge of the dancers with my half-empty cup and my racing heart.

"May I?"

The voice came from behind me, low and familiar. I turned to find Aiden standing with his hand extended, palm up, waiting.

He had dressed simply—dark shirt, sleeves rolled to his forearms, hair pulled back in its usual low bun. But the lantern light caught the planes of his face, softened the scars, made his eyes look less like stone and more like deep water.

I set down my cup and took his hand.

His palm was warm against mine, rough with the calluses I was learning to recognize. His other hand settled at my waist—light, careful, leaving space for me to pull away if I needed to. We began to move together, not quite dancing, just swaying with the music's current.

"You looked lost earlier," he said quietly. The words were pitched for my ears alone, private beneath the melody.

"I was. A little."

"The Lantern Festival isn't about knowing the right way to celebrate." His thumb shifted against my palm, a gesture so small I might have imagined it. "It's about remembering that light exists. Even in the dark months."

We turned slowly, the fire's warmth washing over us in waves. Around us, other couples moved in their own private orbits, but I was aware only of him—the steadiness of his presence, the gentle pressure of his hand at my waist, the way his eyes never left mine.

"My mother used to make lanterns from birch bark," he said.

The words came out soft, almost hesitant. As if he were offering something fragile that might break if handled wrong.

"She'd spend weeks preparing them. Carving patterns, fitting the seams just right. She said they carried wishes to the moon." A faint smile touched his mouth, there and gone. "I used to help her hang them in the trees. We'd stand together and watch them glow."

I heard what he wasn't saying. The past tense. The hollow space where a mother used to be.

"What did you wish for?"

He was quiet for a long moment. The music swelled and softened around us.

"I stopped wishing when I was sixteen," he said finally. His voice held an edge I hadn't heard before—something that spoke of a specific night, a specific loss, a door that had closed and never reopened. "My father made sure of that."

The scars. The ones that mapped his face and torso. I understood suddenly where they had come from, and the understanding settled in my chest like a stone.

"But I think I'm starting again," he added quietly. His dark eyes found mine, and something in them made my breath catch. "Recently. I think I'm starting to remember what it feels like to want something."

He was giving me his tenderness.

Not his trauma—he had kept that locked away, offered only its edges, its aftermath. He was giving me the soft thing that had survived despite everything. The part of him that still knew how to hope.

That was harder. That undid me more than any confession of pain could have.

"Aiden," I whispered, and I didn't know what I meant to say after.

His thumb moved across my knuckles.

Once. A single stroke, feather-light, there and gone in the space of a heartbeat.

The world tilted.

Such a small gesture. Such a simple thing. But the sensation of it radiated up my arm and into my chest, spreading warmth through places I had kept carefully frozen. My wolf pressed toward the contact, toward him, toward everything his touch promised.

I was dizzy with it. Dizzy with wanting and fearing and standing on the edge of something I couldn't name.

The song ended. The dancers stilled, then began to disperse—heading toward food and drink and laughter. But Aiden didn't release my hand immediately. He held it for one breath longer than necessary, his eyes searching mine.

Then he stepped back, and the cool night air rushed into the space between us.

"Thank you for the dance," he said.

"Thank you for telling me about the lanterns."

He nodded once, and something passed between us—an acknowledgment of what had been shared, what had shifted, what was still becoming.

I watched him walk toward a cluster of wolves who needed their Alpha's attention, and I pressed my hand against my chest where my heart beat too fast beneath my ribs.

Terrified.

Exhilarated.

The two sensations tangled together until I couldn't tell where one ended and the other began. I was falling faster now, the ground rushing up to meet me, and I still couldn't make myself stop.

And beneath the joy, beneath the lantern light and the lingering warmth of his touch, the secret burned hotter than ever.

Because every moment of tenderness he gave me was another moment I repaid with lies. Every piece of himself he offered was another piece I would shatter when the truth finally emerged.

I looked up at the lanterns swaying in the trees, carrying wishes to the moon, and I wondered what it would feel like to deserve someone's hope instead of stealing it.