Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 95

POV: Adeline

He was faster than me.

The first blow caught my shoulder before I'd finished registering his movement—a strike that sent me staggering sideways, pain exploding through muscle and bone. I barely managed to twist away from the second, his claws raking the air where my throat had been a heartbeat before.

Stronger. Crueler. Five years of hunting had kept him sharp, and whatever softness might have existed in the boy who'd grown up alongside Caleb had been burned away long ago. What remained was pure predator, honed by violence and hatred into something terrifyingly efficient.

He drove me back across the room with a flurry of attacks that left no space for thought, no room for anything but desperate reaction. His fighting style was brutal and direct—overwhelming force applied without hesitation, designed to break opponents before they could mount a defense.

I blocked what I could. Dodged what I couldn't block. And still his fist connected with my ribs, driving the air from my lungs in a single explosive gasp.

The concrete floor hit my knees. Blood filled my mouth—I'd bitten my tongue on impact, or maybe he'd split my lip. Everything blurred at the edges, pain and adrenaline mixing into something that tasted like copper and desperation.

"This is what you came for?" Ronan's voice reached me through the ringing in my ears. He wasn't even breathing hard. "This is the great confrontation you've been building toward? Five years of running, and you still can't even stand against me."

His boot connected with my stomach. I curled around the impact, choking on bile, and felt something crack in the place where his first blow had landed.

But I didn't fall.

My hands found the floor. Pressed flat. Pushed.

I rose.

Blood dripped from my chin onto the concrete. My ribs screamed with every breath. Through the bond, I felt Aiden's terror—his fight outside growing more desperate as he sensed what was happening to me.

But I rose. And Ronan's eyes narrowed.

"Stubborn," he said. Almost admiring. "Caleb always said you were stubborn."

He came at me again, and this time I let myself see differently.

Not as prey fleeing a predator. Not as a victim trying to survive the next blow. I watched him the way Marcus had taught me, in those long-ago training sessions when I'd been Ash Hollow's youngest gamma candidate. Don't watch the hands, he'd said. Watch the shoulders. The hips. The weight shift that comes before every strike.

Ronan's shoulder dropped. I moved.

His fist cut through empty air, and for just a moment, surprise flickered across his face. I'd been in exactly that spot a heartbeat ago. Now I was two feet to his left, reading the recovery, tracking the way his weight redistributed as he turned to find me.

I wasn't trying to overpower him. I never had been.

I was learning him.

Another strike—I read the telegraph in his hip rotation and stepped inside his reach, too close for the blow to land with full force. His elbow caught my shoulder instead of my jaw, painful but not devastating. I used the momentum to spin away, putting distance between us before he could capitalize.

His breathing changed. Faster now. Frustrated.

"Stand still," he snarled. "Face me properly."

But I was already moving again, circling, forcing him to track me instead of dictating the engagement. Every step fed me information. The slight favoritism toward his right side—an old injury, maybe, or simply dominant-hand preference. The way his attacks grew wilder when I refused to engage directly. The tiny hesitations when I did something unexpected.

Gamma training. The art of reading wolves more powerful than yourself, of finding the fractures in their certainty. I'd spent three years learning to identify weakness before I'd ever needed to exploit it.

And Ronan's weakness was blazing like a beacon.

Obsession.

He'd spent five years hunting me. Five years building me into something mythic in his own mind—the symbol of his brother's weakness, the loose thread that kept his victory over Ash Hollow from feeling complete. I wasn't just an enemy to defeat. I was a need. A compulsion. The one thing he couldn't let go.

And that need was making him sloppy.

"You can't run forever." He advanced again, but slower now, trying to corner me against the wall. "You can't hide behind that Alpha who thinks he can protect you. Eventually, everyone who stands between us will fall, and it will just be you and me. The way it was always supposed to be."

There. The words themselves revealed it. The way it was always supposed to be. He needed this to be personal. Needed it to be about us, about the twisted connection between his brother's mate and his brother's killer. Every tactical consideration had narrowed to a single point.

Break me. Prove that love was weakness. Make me understand that he'd been right all along.

He was so focused on destroying what I represented that he'd stopped seeing me as a threat.

I let my shoulders slump. Let the exhaustion I'd been fighting show on my face. Took a staggering half-step backward, toward the corner where he wanted me.

"Please." The word came out broken, desperate. Not entirely an act—I was bleeding, bruised, running on fumes and the stubborn refusal to die that had carried me through five years of loss. "Please, just—"

His eyes lit with something hungry. There she is, that expression said. The frightened rabbit. The weakness that proves me right.

He reached for me.

Not a strike this time—a grab. He wanted to hold me, to feel me struggle in his grip, to savor the moment of final victory. The obsession demanded intimacy. It demanded that I break in his hands, not at a distance.

His arm extended. His weight shifted forward. And his flank—his left side, the one he'd been unconsciously protecting all fight—opened like a door.

I moved.

Not backward. Not away. Into the opening he'd created, inside his guard, where his reaching arm couldn't redirect in time. My blade—the one I'd drawn the moment he attacked, held low and hidden behind my body through every desperate dodge and calculated retreat—drove upward.

The angle was perfect. Between the ribs, angled toward the heart. The same thrust Marcus had made me practice a thousand times on training dummies until muscle memory could execute it without conscious thought.

Not the hands. Not the fists. The weapon they don't see.

Steel met flesh. Sank deep.

Ronan's eyes went wide.

His hands found my shoulders—not grabbing now, but grasping. Steadying himself against the impossible reality of the blade buried in his chest. His mouth opened, but only blood spilled out, dark and thick against his lips.

"You—" The word was a wet gurgle.

"I'm not weak," I said. My voice shook, but I held his gaze. Made him see me clearly, maybe for the first time. "I never was."

His grip tightened for one spasming moment. Then his eyes went distant, and the monster who had haunted my nightmares for five years crumpled at my feet.

I stood over his body, blade still in my hand, blood dripping from wounds I'd stopped feeling.

And breathed.