Mate Me in Moonlight

Chapter 32

POV: Adeline

I woke to the sound of his breathing.

Not the slow rhythm I had grown accustomed to over these weeks of falling asleep beside him—the steady rise and fall that had become its own kind of lullaby, a metronome I didn't realize I needed until I had it. This was different. Shallow. Caught somewhere between exhale and gasp, as if his lungs had forgotten how to complete the motion.

The bed was still. Too still.

I turned my head on the pillow, and in the thin moonlight filtering through the curtains, I saw him.

Aiden lay on his back, every muscle locked tight. His hands were fisted in the sheets, knuckles pale with strain. His jaw was clenched so hard I could see the tendons standing out along his neck. But it was his face that made my chest constrict—the way his features had twisted into something between anguish and fury, his eyes moving rapidly beneath closed lids, trapped in whatever darkness held him.

A nightmare. Gripping him with claws I couldn't see.

My first instinct was to shake him. To grab his shoulder and pull him back to the surface the way I wished someone had done for me all those nights I woke screaming with the smell of smoke still thick in my throat.

But I knew better.

I had learned, in those first terrible months after Ash Hollow, that sudden touch during a nightmare didn't rescue—it ambushed. The body couldn't tell the difference between a hand meant to save and a hand meant to harm. It only knew it was being seized while already under attack.

So I moved slowly instead.

I shifted closer across the small distance between us, close enough to feel the heat radiating off his skin, close enough to smell the sharp edge of fear beneath his familiar scent of pine and woodsmoke. My hand found his chest, pressing flat against the space above his heart.

The beat beneath my palm was frantic. A wild, desperate rhythm that spoke of running and fighting and losing.

"I'm here," I said softly. "Aiden. Come back."

He didn't respond. His breath hitched, caught on something unseen.

I pressed harder, letting my weight anchor the touch. "You're in Willow Ridge. You're in your room. I'm here. Come back to me."

For a long moment, nothing changed. His heart hammered against my hand like a caged thing throwing itself at bars. His body remained rigid, locked in whatever battle his mind was fighting.

Then—slowly, like a man surfacing from deep water—his breathing shifted.

The tension didn't break all at once. It ebbed in stages, his fingers unclenching from the sheets one by one, his jaw loosening by degrees. His eyes opened, and for a heartbeat they were wild, unfocused, seeing something that wasn't the ceiling above us.

"Aiden," I said again.

His gaze found me.

The wildness didn't vanish immediately. It receded like a tide pulling back from shore, leaving behind something raw and exposed in its wake. He stared at me as if he wasn't entirely certain I was real, as if he needed a moment to convince himself that this was the waking world and not another layer of the dream.

I kept my hand on his chest. His heart was still racing, but the rhythm had begun to slow.

"You have them too," I said quietly. It wasn't a question.

He was silent for a long moment. Then he exhaled—a sound that seemed to carry years of weight with it—and turned his head to look at the ceiling.

"Every night I don't exhaust myself."

The confession was bare. Stripped of the careful composure he wore like armor during the day, the steady Alpha authority that made wolves follow him without question. In the darkness of this room, with his heart still pounding beneath my palm, he was just a man who couldn't outrun his own mind.

I understood that more than I could say.

"What do you see?" I asked.

The silence stretched. I thought he wouldn't answer—that he would rebuild his walls and change the subject, turn the conversation back to me the way he so often did. But something in the quality of the quiet told me he was deciding. Weighing whether to let me into the places he kept locked.

"My father," he said finally.

The words fell into the space between us like stones into still water.

"I see him standing over me. The way he used to. And I see myself—but I'm not always sure which one I am." His voice had dropped lower, rougher, scraped raw by something older than this single nightmare. "I rebuilt this pack to be everything he wasn't. Every decision I make, every law I set, every wolf I protect—I built it as proof that his blood doesn't have to mean his legacy."

He paused. I felt the moment he almost stopped, almost sealed the wound back up.

But he didn't.

"Some nights I wake up and feel his hands on my face. Carving." His fingers twitched against the sheets. "And I don't know if I'm the knife or the wound."

The words hung in the air, terrible and honest and more vulnerable than anything he had ever given me.

I thought of the scars I had traced with my eyes a dozen times—the pale line bisecting his eyebrow, the longer one running from temple to jaw. I had wondered about them. Had imagined violence, battle, the expected dangers of an Alpha's life. I had not imagined a father's hands. A child who had no one to wake him from the nightmare because the nightmare slept in the next room.

All this time, I had seen his strength and assumed it came from somewhere clean. From discipline, from training, from the natural authority that some wolves simply carried. I had not understood that his steadiness was built on fractured ground—that every gentle word he spoke to his pack was a deliberate choice against the voice that had raised him.

He had remade himself. Bone by bone. Scar by scar.

And still, in sleep, the old architecture found him.

Something cracked open in my chest.

I didn't speak. Words felt too small for what he had just offered me, too clumsy to hold the weight of it without dropping something essential.

Instead, I shifted closer.

I moved across the last inches of distance between us and tucked my head beneath his chin, pressing my forehead to the hollow of his throat where his pulse still beat too fast. My arm slid across his chest, my body curling against his side.

For a single breath, he went still.

Then his arms wrapped around me.

Not gentle. Not careful. Desperate and tight, pulling me against him as if I were the only solid thing in a world that had gone liquid and treacherous. His hands pressed flat against my back, fingers spread wide, holding on with a ferocity that spoke of years spent holding himself together alone.

I felt his breath shudder against my hair.

I held him the way he had held me—through my nightmares, through my panic, through all the moments when the past clawed its way into the present and tried to drag me under. I wrapped my arms around him and let my weight be an anchor, let my heartbeat be the rhythm he could follow back to solid ground.

His grip didn't loosen. If anything, it tightened. I felt the tremor that ran through him—not fear now, but release. The exhale of a man who had carried something alone for so long that sharing it felt like setting down a stone he'd forgotten he was holding.

And somewhere in the silence, with his scars pressed against my cheek and his arms locked around me like I was something he couldn't afford to lose, something between us sealed.

Not a declaration. Not a promise spoken aloud.

Something quieter. Something that didn't need words.

The understanding that we were both made of broken pieces—and that perhaps, held together, we made something closer to whole.

I closed my eyes against his throat and listened to his heartbeat slow, and I let myself believe, just for this moment, that I was allowed to stay.