Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 20

POV: Adeline

The fire found me again.

I stood in Ash Hollow's clearing as flames devoured everything I had ever loved. The packhouse collapsed in a shower of sparks. The cabins crumbled. Wolves screamed—sounds I had heard once in waking life and would hear forever in sleep.

Caleb lay in my arms, his blood soaking through my clothes, his eyes finding mine as the light left them.

"Why didn't you save us?" he whispered. But his voice was wrong. Deeper. Colder.

His face shifted. The features rearranged themselves into something familiar and terrible.

Ronan smiled up at me from my dead mate's body.

"You can't run forever, little wolf."

I woke screaming.

The sound tore from my throat before I was fully conscious, raw and animal and utterly beyond my control. I was sitting up, clawing at the blankets, my heart slamming against my ribs like a caged thing trying to escape.

The cabin door burst open.

Freya stood in the doorway, silhouetted by moonlight, her face tight with concern. She crossed to me in three quick strides and gripped my shoulders.

"Adeline. Adeline, look at me."

I couldn't. The dream still had its claws in me. I could smell smoke. Could feel blood on my hands that wasn't there. Could hear Ronan's voice echoing in the hollow places where my pack used to live.

"You're here," Freya said firmly. "You're in Willow Ridge. You're safe. Breathe."

I tried. The air came in ragged gasps, too shallow, never enough. My wolf thrashed beneath my ribs, panicked and feral with remembered fire.

"I can't—" I choked. "I can't—"

Freya's grip tightened. Something shifted in her expression—a decision made.

"Come with me."

She didn't take me back to bed. Didn't offer soothing words or warm drinks or any of the gentle comforts I might have expected. Instead, she pulled a blanket around my shoulders and led me out into the cold night air.

We walked through the sleeping compound, past darkened cabins and the banked coals of the central fire. My bare feet found the frozen ground, but I barely felt it. The cold was distant, muted by the nightmare still burning behind my eyes.

Freya stopped at a small hut set apart from the others, nestled against the tree line. Smoke curled from its chimney. A faint glow emanated from within.

She knocked once, then pushed the door open without waiting for an answer.

"I brought her," she said to the figure inside. "The dreams are getting worse."

Elara sat by her hearth, wrapped in layers of dark wool, her silver-streaked hair loose around her shoulders. Those pale grey eyes found mine across the candlelit space, and something in them held me still.

"Leave us," Elara said to Freya. Her voice was soft, but it carried the weight of command.

Freya hesitated. Glanced at me once—will you be alright?—then nodded and slipped back into the night.

The door closed.

Elara rose with the careful movements of age and crossed to a shelf lined with jars and dried herbs. Her hands moved with practiced certainty, selecting ingredients I couldn't name, crushing them into a small clay pot.

"Sit," she said without turning.

I sat. The chair was worn smooth with use, positioned near the fire's warmth. The hut smelled of woodsmoke and something underneath—bitter roots, dried flowers, the accumulated scent of a woman who worked with the spaces between waking and dreaming.

Elara poured water into the pot and set it over the coals. The liquid darkened as it heated, releasing a sharp, medicinal smell that made my nose wrinkle.

"What is that?"

"Not for sleep," she said. "For clarity." She lifted the pot and poured the steaming liquid into a cup, then pressed it into my trembling hands. "You can't heal what you won't feel."

I looked down at the dark surface. My reflection stared back—haunted, hollowed, nothing like the gamma I had once been.

"Drink."

I drank.

The taste was bitter enough to make me grimace, coating my tongue and throat with something that felt almost alive. Warmth spread through my chest, but it wasn't comforting. It was searching. Exposing. Like a hand pulling back curtains I had kept deliberately closed.

Elara lowered herself into the chair across from me. Her pale eyes held mine with an intensity that left no room for evasion.

"You think your mate is dead," she said.

The words landed like stones. I flinched.

"He is dead." Her voice remained soft, matter-of-fact. "I can feel the severed bond in you. The place where he used to live, now hollow. That wound is real."

My throat tightened. I didn't want to hear this. Didn't want to sit in this hut with this strange woman and her bitter tea and her eyes that saw too much.

"But you haven't let him go."

"I—"

"He's still burning inside your chest." Elara leaned forward, and the firelight caught the lines of her face, the accumulated wisdom of someone who had walked through griefs I couldn't imagine. "You carry him like a torch. You tend the flames because you think letting them die means forgetting. Means betraying."

I couldn't breathe. The tea's warmth had become pressure, pushing against walls I had built two years ago and reinforced every day since.

"Do you want to carry a corpse forever?"

The question cracked something open.

I had held Caleb's body while he died. Had felt his last breath leave him, had watched his eyes go empty. And then I had kept holding him—not his body, which the flames took, but his memory. His absence. The weight of a love that had ended too soon and a guilt I couldn't shake.

I had carried him across five territories. Through five rejections. Into Willow Ridge and straight into the arms of a man who made me feel things I had no right to feel.

I had never put him down.

The sob broke from me like something escaping a cage.

I doubled over in the chair, the cup nearly slipping from my fingers before Elara caught it. The sounds that came from my throat weren't human—they were animal, raw, the grief of a wolf who had been running for two years and had finally stopped long enough to feel what she was running from.

I wept for Caleb. For the life we should have had. For the pups we had talked about in quiet moments, the cabin we had planned to build, the decades of growing old together that Ronan had stolen with fire and fury.

I wept for my pack. For the elders who had taught me. For the children who had looked up at me with trust I couldn't honor. For every wolf who had burned while I survived.

I wept for myself. For the woman I had been before the fire and the hollow thing I had become after. For the guilt I wore like a second skin and the hope I kept trying to suffocate because I didn't believe I deserved it.

Elara said nothing.

She moved from her chair to the floor beside me, her aged hands finding my back, my shoulders, the shaking curve of my spine. She held me the way a mother holds a child through a nightmare—present, patient, asking nothing.

The sobs went on. They emptied me out, draining something that had been dammed behind my ribs since the night Ash Hollow burned. I cried until my throat was raw and my eyes burned and my body had nothing left to give.

And still Elara held me.

Dawn crept through the cracks in the shutters before I finally stilled. The fire had burned low. My face was swollen, my chest ached, but something inside me felt... lighter. Hollowed out, yes—but the hollow was clean now. Scoured. Room for something other than grief.

Elara helped me straighten. Her pale eyes studied my face with quiet assessment.

"Better," she murmured. Not a question.

"I feel—" I searched for words. "Empty."

"Good. Empty can be filled with new things. Full of old grief leaves no room."

She rose and crossed to her shelf again, returning the cup, arranging jars with the unhurried movements of routine. I watched her, exhausted beyond thought, grateful beyond expression.

"Elara," I managed. "Thank you."

She paused. Turned. Those grey eyes found mine one last time.

"There's more you're carrying," she said quietly. "Not grief. Something else. Something you haven't spoken."

My blood chilled.

"I can feel it in you. A secret that burns differently than loss." She didn't accuse. Didn't press. Simply stated fact. "When you're ready to release that too, come back."

She opened the door. Morning light spilled in, pale and cold and clean.

I walked back to my cabin on unsteady legs, the weight of Elara's final words settling into my bones alongside the emptiness she had helped me find.

The grief, at least, was beginning to loosen its grip.

The secret remained, coiled and waiting, growing heavier with every day I let it stay buried.