His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 104

Chapter 104

Q1

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

146 Mon, Nov 2 M

Sloane

Chapter 104

Malachi didn’t fall the way I expected a man his size to fall.

By the time I got my breath back, he was on one knee in the frozen grass with a hand braced beside it, holding himself up by stubbornness alone. The thing Cressida had thrown at me had strehim instead, low on his right side beneath the ribs, and where it had burned through his shirt the sm didn’t look red. It looked gray. Thin dark lines were already spreading outward from the woup like ink dropped into water.

I was still on my knees where he had shoved me.

For a second, the rest of the fight went on without me. Snarling somewhere to my left. A man screaming. The flat crack of a branch breaking under something heavy. Above all of it, the full moon hung over Moonhaven so bright that the frost on the north field glittered like broken glass.

“Malachi.”

He lifted his head. His face was white around the mouth, but his eyes found me immediately.

“Are you hurt?”

I stared at him. “You’re asking me that?”

“Answer the question.”

“No.” My voice cracked. “No, I’m not hurt.”

He breathed out once, as if that settled something. Then he reached for

my

throat.

I flinched before I could stop myself. His hand paused. For one strange moment we both looked at it, hanging in the air between us, and I knew we were both remembering the last time he had reached for

me like that.

Then his fingers found the clasp of the collar Cressida had locked on me the day she took me.

His hands were slick with blood. It took him two tries:

The collar opened.

Rhea hit me so hard that I folded forward over my knees. Days of silence broke at once, and everything she had been holding poured through me: rage, terror, the moon singing in our blood. And underneath all of it, the bond.

MON

22

|||

O

sharp enough that I gasped and clapped a hand over it.

Malachi saw. His expression changed.

What is it?”

“I don’t know.” I pressed harder against the mark. The cold kept coming. “It’s cold. Malachit’s so cold.”

He looked down at his own side. The dark lines had crept farther across his skin, reaching up toward

his ribs.

Then he looked past me.

I turned.

Cressida stood thirty yards above us, inside what was left of her ring of stones at the top of the field,

her silver-streaked hair loose around her face, her burned hand curled against her chest. Her other hand was raised, fingers moving in a pattern I couldn’t follow. Her lips were moving too.

Old words. The same language she had used in the temple.

And every time her voice rose, the cold in my neck pulsed with it.

Across the field, someone else was speaking just as fast. Imogen stood near the corner of the training hall with her feet planted wide and both hands lifted, the silver rings on her fingers catching the moonlight. Whatever she was saying pushed against Cressida’s chant like two currents meeting in a river. I could almost feel the place where they collided, a pressure in the air that made my ears ache.

Imogen’s head turned toward us.

“The bond!” she shouted. “She’s riding the bond. Whatever she put in him, she’s pushing it into the

girl.”

The girl. Me.

I looked at Malachi.

He had understood before I did. I could see it in his face.

“Get away from me,” he said.

“What?”

“Go.” He shoved at my shoulder. It was the weakest I had ever felt him. “Get away from me, Sloane.”

MON

2

22

O

1846 Mon, Nov 2 UM

Cressida’s voice climbed. The cold spread from my neck into my collarbone, then lower, curling around my heart like a fist made of ice. My vision went gray at the edges. Rhea howled inside me, a

Sound I had never heard her make.

“I told you,” Cressida called across the field. She sounded almost pleasant. “I told you to let the mountain keep her.”

Malachi tried to stand. He made it halfway before his leg gave out and he caught himself on e

hand.

“Stop it,” he said to her. His voice was rough. “This is between you and me.”

“It was,” Cressida said. “Then you hesitated.”

Below her, halfway down the slope, I saw Knox.

Kade’s wolf was enormous, black as the space between the trees, and his coat was edged with silver where Diana’s light ran through him. Blood matted the fur along his shoulder. He stood twenty feet from the place where Malachi had faced him minutes ago, and he wasn’t looking at Cressida.

He was looking at his uncle.

Diana stood at his side. Her pearl-gray coat had turned almost white beneath the moon, and the light pouring off her was dimmer than it had been an hour ago. Her flanks heaved. Her legs were braced as if she didn’t trust them anymore.

Her eyes were on me.

Sloane.

The voice came through the pack link so clearly that I jerked.

Abby.

Abby had never once spoken to me through the link. I hadn’t even been sure it would still hold me after everything I had done.

Can you hear me?

Yes. My answer came out ragged. Yes, I hear you.

You only have half his name.

My heart stopped.

MON

22

2

|||

O

1846 Mon, Nov 2 UM

For a moment the word meant nothing. It was just a sound. Then it landed, and it was Kade’s name. Cassandra’s. Nathaniel’s, carved into the memorial stone in the town square with the rest of Moonhaven’s dead.

I looked at Malachi.

He was watching my face, and he knew. I didn’t have to say anything. He had been waiting for this moment for a long time, I realized. Long before he had marked me. Maybe since the first nighhe

heard me say mate.

“Blackwell,” I said. “Nathaniel’s brother. Kade is your-” I couldn’t finish it.

He didn’t look away. “My nephew.”

Down the slope, Knox made a sound low in his chest. Not a growl. Something worse.

I thought of everything I had let myself not ask in that cabin. The night Moonhaven burned eight years ago. The way Malachi’s face closed whenever I mentioned the packhouse, or Cassandra, or the stone in the square. The questions I had swallowed because I hadn’t wanted to know the answers while his hands were on me.

“You never told me.” My voice shook. “All those nights, and you kept it from me on purpose. Because without it, I couldn’t-” The cold squeezed my heart, and I bent forward, gasping. When I could speak again, it came out as a whisper. “Without it, I could never leave.”

His silence was the only answer he gave.

For weeks I would have given anything for that name, and now that I had it, I couldn’t make myself say the words. The man kneeling in front of me had just asked whether I was hurt while he bled into the frost, and Rhea pulled toward him even now.

But I had never known what I was to him. His mate, or his prisoner. If I stayed tied to him now, I would never find out. I would only ever be what he and the bond decided.

Rhea went still inside me. She understood before I said it. Grief rolled through her, so heavy that tears spilled down my face, and I let them.

Then I lifted my head and said it.

“I, Sloane Sinclair, reject you, Malachi Blackwell, as my mate.”

The words left me, and something tore.

DO

MION

2

22

|||

Г

Mon, No

Across the field, Cressida’s chant broke off.

No.” Her voice cut through the noise. “No, Malachi. Don’t you dare.”

He didn’t look at her.

He looked at me.

I understood then that it wasn’t finished. A rejection only worked if the other one acceptedt. He could refuse. He could kneel there with his blood soaking the frost and simply say nothing, and the bond would hold, and Cressida would keep her road straight into my heart.

He had always taken what he wanted.

He had told me in the temple, with the mountain coming down around us, that he would never let

me go.

“Malachi.” Cressida’s voice had changed. Not pleasant now. Not calm. “If you do this, you have nothing. Do you understand me? She is the only thing you have left that I can’t—”

“I know,” he said.

His gray eyes held mine. There was no satisfaction in them, nothing possessive, none of the cold control he wore like armor. He just looked tired. And very sure.

“I, Malachi Blackwell,” he said quietly, “accept your rejection.”

The bond snapped.