Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 45

POV: Adeline

The scream came from the herb garden.

I was crossing the clearing with an armful of clean bandages—supplies for the wolves still recovering from the border skirmish—when the sound split the morning air. High and raw, edged with a terror that made every wolf in earshot freeze.

I dropped the bandages and ran.

Elara lay crumpled between rows of lavender and sage, her silver hair spilled across the dark earth like spilled moonlight. Her body convulsed, spine arching, hands clawing at the soil as if trying to anchor herself to something solid. Her eyes had rolled back, showing only white, and sounds emerged from her throat that weren't quite words—fragments of speech, shattered syllables, the broken language of visions too powerful to contain.

"Get back!" Freya was already there, kneeling beside her, hands hovering without touching. "Don't try to hold her down—it makes it worse."

Other wolves gathered at the garden's edge, their faces pale with fear. Elara's episodes were known but rare, and never like this. Never with screaming. Never with the particular quality of horror that twisted her features now.

Then, as suddenly as it began, it stopped.

Elara went limp. Her eyes closed. For one terrible moment, I thought she had stopped breathing.

Then her chest rose with a ragged gasp, and her eyes flew open—pale grey, wild, seeing something the rest of us couldn't.

"Get her inside," Freya ordered. "Quickly. Before—"

Elara's hand shot out and seized my wrist.

Her grip was iron. Impossibly strong for a woman her age, fueled by whatever force still coursed through her from the vision. I tried to pull back instinctively, but her fingers only tightened, nails digging crescents into my skin.

"I saw them," she rasped. Her voice was wrong—layered, as if multiple versions of herself were speaking at once. "Ironclaw. They're not coming to kill you."

The words landed like blows. Around us, the gathered wolves went silent.

"They're coming to take you back."

Back.

The word carved through me like a blade.

Back implied before. Back implied belonging. Back implied that I had been theirs once, that Ironclaw had some claim on me that gave them the right to retrieve what they had lost.

I had never belonged to Ironclaw. I had never set foot in their territory, never spoken to their Alpha, never been anything to them except a target—the sole survivor of a pack they'd destroyed.

Unless Elara had seen more.

Unless she had seen the truth I had buried so deep I sometimes forgot it was there.

"Elara." My voice came out strangled. "What did you see?"

Her grip loosened slightly, but she didn't release me. Her eyes focused on my face with an intensity that made me feel stripped bare, every secret visible, every hidden thing dragged into the light.

"The one who leads them—" Her voice fragmented, struggling against something. "He wears... familiar blood. Not the same face. But the same blood."

Familiar blood.

Not the same face.

But the same blood.

The words hit me like a physical blow. I couldn't breathe. Couldn't think. Couldn't do anything but stand there with Elara's hand locked around my wrist and the truth clawing at the walls I had built to contain it.

She had seen Ronan.

She had seen him leading Ironclaw toward Willow Ridge. And somehow, impossibly, she had sensed the connection—the blood that tied him to Caleb, the brotherhood that had been severed long before Ash Hollow burned. She didn't know the details. Didn't have the full picture. But she had glimpsed enough to understand that Ironclaw's Alpha was not a stranger to me.

That he was family. Or had been, once.

That his claim on me was older and more complicated than anyone in this pack could imagine.

"Elara." Freya's voice cut through, sharp with concern. "You need to rest. The vision took too much—"

"Please." The word escaped me before I could stop it, barely louder than a breath. I leaned closer to Elara, close enough that only she could hear. "Please. Don't tell anyone."

Her pale eyes held mine. The wildness was fading, replaced by something older—the weariness of a woman who had seen too many secrets, carried too many truths that weren't hers to bear.

"It's not mine to tell," she said softly.

Relief crashed through me, so intense my knees nearly buckled.

"But it will come out." Her voice was gentle now, almost kind, but the words carried the weight of prophecy. "Secrets like this don't stay buried, child. They grow. They fester. And when they finally break free, they destroy everything in their path." Her thumb brushed across my pulse point—a gesture almost maternal. "Better to release it yourself than to let it be torn from you."

I couldn't respond. My throat had closed around something too large to swallow.

Elara's hand finally released my wrist. She slumped back, exhaustion claiming her, and Freya was there immediately—helping her stand, supporting her weight, guiding her toward the healer's cottage with murmured words of comfort.

I stood frozen in the herb garden.

Around me, the gathered wolves began to disperse, their whispers rising and falling like wind through leaves. I caught fragments—what did she mean, take her back, familiar blood—and each one struck like a thrown stone.

They didn't understand. Not yet. But the questions were there now, planted like seeds in fertile soil. It was only a matter of time before someone started connecting pieces, started wondering why Ironclaw was so determined to claim me, started asking what I hadn't told them.

The first crack in the dam.

I had known it would come eventually. Had felt it building with every day I stayed silent, every moment I let Aiden look at me with trust I hadn't earned. But knowing and experiencing were different things, and the reality of it—the sick, swooping terror of being so close to exposure—was worse than I had imagined.

Familiar blood.

Ronan. Caleb's younger brother. The boy who had drawn strange symbols in the dirt, who had left Ash Hollow to join the wolves who would one day destroy it. The man who had stood in the flames and smiled at me while my pack burned, who had let me live when everyone else died, who was circling closer with every passing day because he wanted something from me that I still didn't fully understand.

They're coming to take you back.

Back to what? Back to him? Back to some twisted vision of belonging that existed only in his fractured mind?

I didn't know. But the not-knowing was almost worse than the certainty of danger.

I forced my legs to move. Picked up the scattered bandages with hands that wouldn't stop shaking. Walked toward the packhouse with my spine straight and my face carefully blank, because if I let the mask slip now, I would shatter completely.

Elara knew.

Not everything. Not the full truth. But enough. Enough to look at me with those ancient eyes and see the rot at the center of my secrets.

One person.

One crack.

And cracks had a way of spreading.

I climbed the packhouse steps and paused at the door, pressing my palm flat against the wood. Inside, I could hear voices—Aiden's among them, calm and commanding, the voice of a man planning the defense of his pack against an enemy he didn't fully understand.

An enemy connected to me by blood and history and a thousand things I should have told him weeks ago.

It will come out.

Elara's words echoed in my skull.

She was right. It would. The only question was whether I would be the one to speak it—or whether it would be ripped from me by circumstance, by discovery, by Ronan himself arriving at the gates to claim what he believed was his.

I had time. Maybe days. Maybe hours.

But the countdown had begun, and I could feel every second slipping away like sand through desperate fingers.