Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 92

POV: Adeline

The forest swallowed us whole.

No moon tonight—only the faint scatter of stars between the clouds, cold pinpricks of light that did nothing to soften the darkness pressing between the trees. We moved in wolf form, eight shadows flowing through the undergrowth, our paws silent against the frozen earth.

I ran at the front.

It had been Aiden's decision, offered without hesitation in the moments before we shifted. You know him, he'd said, and I'd heard what lived beneath those three words—the trust that had cost him something to give, the understanding that my history with Ronan wasn't just a wound but a weapon.

So I led. And with every stride, I felt the strange inversion of everything I'd spent five years believing. The knowledge I'd carried like a shameful secret, the connection I'd hidden because I feared what it would cost me—now it guided us through enemy territory like a dark and twisted compass.

The scent hit me first. Ironclaw wolves had passed this way recently, their musk sharp with aggression and something metallic beneath it. Blood. They'd dragged prey through here, or a body. I veered left, leading the pack along a ridge where the wind would carry our scent away rather than toward the patrol routes.

Behind me, I felt Aiden's presence through the bond—steady, watchful, trusting me to read the terrain that existed only in my understanding of the monster who'd shaped it.

Tripwire.

The thought crystallized a half-second before I saw it—a thin glint of something strung low between two birches, nearly invisible against the frost-touched ground. I pulled up short, and the pack halted behind me in a ripple of arrested motion.

Freya's wolf pressed close, her amber eyes catching the faint starlight. I could almost hear her voice in the tilt of her ears: What is it?

I nosed toward the wire, then traced the line of it with my gaze. There. A disturbance in the brush fifteen feet ahead—a pit, poorly concealed beneath scattered branches. And beyond that, another glint. The traps were layered, designed to catch anyone who avoided the first and stumbled into complacency.

Ronan's work. He'd always preferred redundancy in his cruelty—never one wound when three would serve.

I knew this because Caleb had told me, in those quiet hours when the weight of his family's legacy had pressed him toward confession. His brother's methods. His brother's mind. The darkness that had driven Ronan from Ash Hollow and eventually back to destroy it.

The secret that had damned me in Aiden's eyes when it finally surfaced—the connection I'd hidden out of shame and fear—now it read the forest like a language only I could speak.

I led them around the trap line, picking a path through a rocky outcrop where wire couldn't be strung and pits couldn't be dug. Luca's dark wolf moved at my flank, and I caught the subtle shift of his posture—something that might have been acknowledgment, from a wolf who'd once regarded me with nothing but suspicion.

The second patrol nearly ended us.

We'd dropped into a shallow ravine, following the frozen trickle of a stream that would mask our tracks, when the scent of Ironclaw wolves bloomed sudden and overwhelming. Close. Too close. They were above us, on the ridge we'd just descended, and the wind had shifted without warning.

I pressed flat against the ravine wall, and the pack melted into the shadows around me. Eight wolves holding their breath, hearts pounding in the darkness, while heavy paws crunched through the frost overhead.

Voices drifted down—human, which meant they'd shifted to speak.

"—thought I heard something."

"You've been hearing things all night. There's nothing out here but your own nerves."

A pause. The scrape of boots against stone. I could feel Aiden coiled beside me, every muscle tensed for violence, and I pressed closer, a silent plea: Wait. Wait.

"Ronan wants the perimeter held until dawn. We should circle back."

"Fine. But if this is another false alarm, I'm putting you on latrine duty for a week."

Their footsteps retreated. The scent faded. And slowly, one breath at a time, the strike team uncurled from the shadows.

We moved faster after that, urgency warring with caution. The logging station couldn't be far now—I could feel it in the way the forest thinned, in the old scars of machinery carved into the landscape decades ago. But the direct route would be watched. Ronan would have positioned his guards along the obvious approaches, concentrated his strength where he expected an attack to come.

This way, I thought, and hoped Aiden could feel the intention through the bond as I veered sharply east. He'll expect the direct route.

Freya's wolf made a soft sound of question, but she followed. They all followed—through a dense thicket of young pines that scratched at our flanks, across a frozen creek bed that forced us to pick our way over ice-slicked stones, around the base of a hill rather than over its exposed crown.

The path made no tactical sense unless you understood the mind that had designed the defenses against it. Ronan thought in straight lines and overwhelming force. He planned for enemies who attacked the way he would—direct, brutal, unsubtle.

He'd never planned for me.

The trees opened without warning, and there it was.

The logging station crouched at the base of the ridge like something wounded and waiting to die. Rusted equipment hulked in the shadows around it—ancient trucks, a collapsed crane, the skeletal remains of a structure that might once have been a mill. And at the center, light flickered behind grimy windows. Shadows moved within.

I counted the guards by scent and sound. Eight, as Maren had reported. Two at the front entrance, visible in the faint glow spilling from inside. Two more circling the perimeter in a lazy patrol. The others stationed at points I could only guess at—but fewer than there should have been, their attention divided between watching for threats and listening for orders from within.

Ronan was in there. I couldn't see him, couldn't scent him through the overwhelming presence of his wolves, but I knew. The same way I'd known to avoid the tripwire, to circle away from the patrol, to take the path he'd never think to guard.

Aiden's wolf pressed against my side, and through the bond I felt the question: Ready?

I looked at the building where the man who'd destroyed my world sat directing the destruction of another. Five years of running. Five years of hiding. Five years of believing that the connection between us—his blood, his brother, his obsessive need to possess or destroy what Caleb had loved—made me something shameful.

But it had brought us here. Through the traps and patrols, past the guards who should have caught us, to the threshold of ending this.

Ready, I sent back.

One last battle. And then, finally, this would be over.