Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 36

POV: Adeline

Freya found me on the porch of the guest cabin, watching the sunset bleed orange and violet through the pines.

I had come here to be alone—to process the weight of the day, the way "pack-sister" still echoed in my chest like a bell that hadn't stopped ringing. But when I heard her footsteps on the wooden boards, I didn't ask her to leave.

She sat down beside me without invitation, tucking her legs beneath her the way she always did. For a long moment, neither of us spoke. The evening air carried the scent of woodsmoke and cooling earth.

"There's something you should know," she said finally. Her voice was quieter than usual, stripped of its familiar warmth. "About Aiden. About why he is the way he is."

I turned to look at her. Her face was serious in a way I hadn't seen before—not grave, exactly, but careful. Like she was handling something fragile.

"He told me about his father," I said. "The nightmares. The scars."

"He told you some of it." Freya's gaze stayed fixed on the treeline. "But there's more. And after today—after what you did for Mira, after the way he looked at you—I think you should hear it. Not from him. He'll never tell you everything. He thinks it makes him weak."

My chest tightened. "Freya—"

"His father's name was Garrett," she continued, as if I hadn't spoken. "He ruled Willow Ridge for twenty-three years. And he ruled it through fear."

The words fell into the space between us, each one landing with weight.

"Not the kind of fear that protects a pack from enemies. The kind that makes wolves flinch when their Alpha enters a room. The kind that punishes questions with bruises and dissent with broken bones." She paused, her jaw tightening. "Aiden was his only son. His heir. And Garrett believed that an Alpha had to be carved from pain."

I thought of the scars I had seen on Aiden's back. The layers of them. Old and new, faded and fresh.

"He started when Aiden was young," Freya said. "Small things at first. Tests of endurance. Punishments for showing softness. By the time Aiden was twelve, he had learned not to cry no matter what his father did to him. By fourteen, he had learned not to scream."

My hands had curled into fists without my realizing it.

"The scar on his face—the one that runs from his temple to his jaw—Garrett gave him that when he was sixteen." Freya's voice had gone flat, controlled, the way people speak when they're holding back something that might otherwise break free. "Aiden had tried to stop him from beating one of the omegas. A girl who had dropped a tray during a feast. Garrett dragged him into the hall in front of the entire pack and carved the lesson into his skin. 'This is what mercy costs,' he said. 'Remember it.'"

The sunset had faded to purple and grey. I barely noticed.

"How did it end?" I asked. My voice came out rough.

"Aiden ended it." Freya finally looked at me, and in her eyes I saw something fierce beneath the sorrow. "He was eighteen. Garrett had killed a wolf—an elder who questioned one of his decisions. Just... killed him. In front of everyone. And something in Aiden broke. Or maybe it finally finished forming."

She took a breath.

"He challenged his father that night. In the old way—combat for the right to lead. Garrett was stronger, more experienced. Everyone thought Aiden would die." A ghost of something that wasn't quite a smile crossed her face. "He didn't die. He fought for two hours. Took wounds that should have ended him three times over. And when it was finished, Garrett was dead and Aiden was Alpha."

The silence stretched between us, heavy with the weight of what she had shared.

"He rebuilt this pack from ashes," Freya said softly. "Every law, every tradition, every way we treat each other—he made it the opposite of what his father created. He made it safe. Made it good. Made it the kind of place where wolves actually want to belong." She turned to face me fully. "But he's never believed he deserves any of it. He looks in the mirror and sees his father's eyes looking back. He wakes from nightmares convinced he's becoming the thing he killed."

I couldn't speak. My throat had closed around something sharp and terrible.

"That's why I'm telling you this," Freya continued. "Because I've known Aiden since we were children. I've watched him carry this alone for ten years. And I've never—" She stopped, swallowed. "I've never seen him look at anyone the way he looks at you. Like maybe, if you stayed, he might finally believe he's allowed to have something good."

She stood, brushing off her skirt with hands that weren't quite steady.

"He won't ask you for anything," she said. "He'll wait forever if that's what you need. But I thought you should know what you'd be waiting for. And what you'd be healing, if you ever decide to stay."

Then she was gone, her footsteps fading into the evening, leaving me alone with a truth I didn't know how to hold.

I made it to my room before the tears came.

They didn't come gently. They wrenched out of me in great heaving sobs that I muffled against my pillow, my whole body shaking with the force of a grief that wasn't even mine. I wept for the boy Aiden had been—the child who learned not to scream, the teenager carved open for the crime of mercy, the eighteen-year-old who killed his own father to save his pack and then spent a decade wondering if that made him a monster.

I wept for every scar I had traced with my eyes without understanding what it cost him to wear them.

I wept for the way he touched me so carefully, as if gentleness was a language he had taught himself in defiance of everything he'd been raised to know.

And somewhere beneath all of it, I wept for myself—for the recognition that bloomed like a bruise in my chest, the understanding that we were both made of wounds we hadn't chosen and healing we didn't know how to accept.

The tears eventually stopped. I lay in the darkness, hollowed out, my face swollen and my pillow damp. Outside, the night had gone fully dark, stars scattered across the sky like scattered salt.

I got up.

I didn't think about it. Didn't plan it. Just moved—out of my room, through the quiet packhouse, up the stairs to his door.

I knocked once, soft.

The door opened. Aiden stood there in a loose shirt, his hair unbound, his eyes widening slightly when he saw me.

"Adeline? What's—"

I stepped forward and took his hand.

He went still, watching me with those dark eyes that had seen too much and survived anyway. I lifted his hand slowly, turned it palm-up between us. The scars there were finer than the ones on his face—thin white lines crossing his palm and fingers, the evidence of defensive wounds, of a boy who had tried to shield himself before he learned that shielding only made it worse.

I bent my head and pressed my lips to the center of his palm.

His breath caught.

I kissed the scar that curved toward his thumb. The one that crossed his lifeline. The ridge of tissue along his wrist where something sharp had cut deep.

"What are you doing?" His voice was barely a whisper, rough with something I couldn't name.

I looked up at him. My eyes were probably still red from weeping. I didn't care.

"Loving the parts of you that were hurt."

Something shattered behind his eyes.

He pulled me against him—sudden, fierce, his arms wrapping around me so tightly I couldn't breathe. I didn't need to breathe. I just held on, my face pressed to his chest, feeling his heart pound against my cheek.

He buried his face in my hair. His shoulders shook—just once. A single tremor that moved through his whole body, a decade of grief compressed into one moment of release.

Then stillness.

We stood there in the doorway, wrapped around each other, and I understood that this was what healing looked like. Not fixed. Not finished. Just two broken people holding each other up, refusing to let go.

For the first time, that felt like enough.