Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 54

POV: Adeline

I didn't leave.

I should have. Every rational thought I possessed screamed that I had worn out my welcome, that staying was a cruelty I was inflicting on everyone—on the pack that now looked at me with suspicion, on Freya who didn't know what to say, on Aiden who couldn't bear to be in the same room as me.

But I stayed.

I told myself it was because I had nowhere else to go. Five packs had already rejected me; a sixth would simply confirm what I had always suspected about my own worthlessness. I told myself it was because leaving now would look like guilt, like running, like proof that Luca had been right all along.

But the truth was simpler and more pathetic.

I was waiting.

For what, I couldn't say. Permission to stay. Permission to go. Punishment that would at least acknowledge I still existed. Some sign from Aiden that the door he had closed wasn't locked forever—that if I stood on the other side long enough, bleeding patience onto the threshold, he might eventually let me knock.

The days blurred together, gray and shapeless.

I kept to my cabin. Took my meals early or late, when the dining hall was empty. Walked the perimeter at hours when the paths were clear. I made myself small, invisible, a ghost haunting the edges of a life I had briefly been allowed to touch.

And Aiden—

Aiden didn't speak to me.

Didn't look at me.

The first time it happened, I almost convinced myself it was coincidence. I had been crossing the compound toward the supply shed when he emerged from the packhouse, flanked by Luca and Marcus. My feet stuttered to a halt. My heart lurched into my throat. I waited—for acknowledgment, for coldness, for anything.

He walked past like I was a stranger.

Not angry. Not pointed. Simply... absent. As if the space I occupied held nothing of interest. As if I had become furniture, scenery, a smudge on the glass he had long since stopped trying to clean.

That was worse than hatred.

Hatred would have meant I still mattered. Hatred was a form of attention, a proof that I had left a mark deep enough to wound. But this—this studied blankness, this careful unseeing—felt like erasure. Like he was practicing for a world where I had never existed at all.

My wolf keened inside me, pressing against the walls of my chest.

Go to him. Make him see us. We're still here.

But I couldn't. I had forfeited that right the moment I chose secrets over trust.

The bond, though—the bond didn't care about betrayal.

It lived beneath my ribs like a second heartbeat, and no amount of distance could sever it. I felt him constantly now, a presence at the edge of my awareness that I couldn't ignore no matter how hard I tried. When he was near, the thread between us pulled taut, humming with a tension that made my skin feel too tight. When he was far, it stretched thin but never broke, carrying echoes of him across the compound like whispers I couldn't quite translate.

And what I felt through it—

Anger would have been easier. Anger was clean, defined, something I could understand and perhaps eventually weather. Anger burned hot and then burned out; it was a fire that consumed itself given time.

But this wasn't anger.

This was hurt.

A hollow, throbbing ache that pulsed through the bond like blood through a wound that wouldn't close. I felt his grief like a bruise pressed against my own chest—constant, tender, impossible to ignore. Every time I caught a glimpse of him across the compound, every time his scent drifted past on the wind, the ache sharpened into something almost unbearable.

He was in pain.

Because of me.

And I couldn't fix it. Couldn't apologize in any way that would matter. Couldn't reach across the chasm I had carved between us and offer anything that would make the hurt stop.

All I could do was feel it. Feel him. And know that I had done this.

Three days after the confrontation, I saw him near the training grounds.

I had been walking back from the river, taking the long path that wound through the oldest pines, when I rounded a bend and there he was. Standing at the edge of the clearing, arms crossed, watching the younger wolves spar. The late afternoon light caught the angles of his face, turned the scar along his jaw into a pale ribbon of silver.

He must have sensed me. The bond flared—a sharp, bright pulse of awareness—and his head turned.

Our eyes met.

One second. Maybe two. Long enough for me to see what lived behind that careful blankness he had been wearing.

He wasn't angry.

He was wounded. Lost. Like something essential had been carved out of him and he didn't know how to function around the absence. His black eyes held mine with an expression I couldn't name—grief and confusion and something that might have been longing, buried so deep I could barely sense it.

I looked away first.

I couldn't bear it. Couldn't stand there and watch the damage I had caused written across his face like a letter I had written in my own hand. My wolf howled inside me, desperate to close the distance, to press her muzzle against his chest and beg forgiveness in whatever wordless language their kind understood.

But I turned. And I walked away. And I felt his gaze on my back like a brand until the trees swallowed me whole.

That night, I couldn't sleep.

I lay in my narrow bed, staring at the ceiling, listening to the sounds of the pack settling into darkness around me. Distant murmurs. A child's laughter cut short by a parent's gentle shushing. The creak of cabin doors, the soft pad of footsteps on packed earth.

Normal sounds. Pack sounds. The rhythm of a life I had almost believed could be mine.

Then—

A howl split the night.

Low at first, barely audible, rising from somewhere deep in the forest beyond the compound. But I knew that voice. Knew it in my bones, in my blood, in the place where the bond had rooted itself like a tree that would not be moved.

Aiden.

His wolf's voice climbed into the darkness, raw and ragged and full of a grief that needed no translation. It wasn't the howl of an Alpha rallying his pack or marking territory or calling a hunt. It was the sound of something broken trying to find its shape again.

Mourning.

That's what it was. He was mourning.

My wolf surged toward the surface, desperate to answer. Every instinct I possessed screamed at me to shift, to run, to add my voice to his and let him know he wasn't alone in the dark. That whatever he had lost, I was still here. Still his mate, even if he couldn't forgive me. Still bound to him by something neither of us had chosen.

I buried my face in my pillow and bit down on the fabric until my jaw ached.

I didn't answer.

I couldn't. Answering would be a lie—a promise of comfort I had no right to offer, a claim to closeness I had already betrayed. He was howling his grief into the night, and I was the reason for it. Adding my voice would only deepen the wound.

So I lay there in the dark, listening to his heartbreak echo through the trees, and I let the tears soak silently into cotton while my wolf wept inside me.

When the howl finally faded, the silence was worse.

I rolled onto my side, curling around the hollow space in my chest.

My hand found its way beneath the pillow without conscious thought. My fingers closed around smooth wood, worn edges, the faint trace of cedar that had nearly faded but never quite disappeared.

The token.

The one he had given me weeks ago, after the pack run. A simple thing—a small carved disc, barely larger than a coin, etched with the Willow Ridge symbol. A welcome gift. A sign that I belonged.

I should throw it away.

It meant nothing now. Or worse, it meant everything it had always meant, and I had proven myself unworthy of it. Keeping it was a cruelty—to him, to myself, to whatever ghost of possibility still haunted the space between us.

My fingers tightened around it.

I couldn't.

I pressed the cedar token against my chest, curled tighter into myself, and waited for morning to come and prove that surviving this was still possible.

It didn't feel possible.

But I held on anyway.