His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 106

Chapter 106

Nwoke up in the room Cassandra had given me when I was sixteen.

It took me a moment to recognize it. The quilt was different, and someone had moved the desk to the other wall, but the window still looked out over the kitchen garden, and the crack in the giling above the bed still ran in the shape of a river I used to trace when I couldn’t sleep.

Cassandra was in the chair by the window.

She had a book open on her knee, and she wasn’t reading it. When I moved, she closed it and came to sit on the edge of the bed, and laid the back of her hand against my forehead the way she had when I was sixteen and pretending not to be sick.

“There you are,” she said. “Properly, this time.”

My mouth was dry. “How long?”

“Two days. You were burning up for most of them.” She helped me sit and held a cup of water to my lips until I took it from her. “Daphne reset your leg the first night. She said whoever set it the first time did a decent job, and you undid most of it running.”

Whoever set it the first time.

I looked down at the leg, propped on two pillows under the blanket, and didn’t answer.

I remembered pieces. Daphne’s voice. Cold cloths. Someone holding my head so I could drink. And before any of that, frost, and Liam’s arms, and the whole world going white.

Outside the door, a chair creaked. Someone shifted their weight and was still again.

Cassandra saw me look.

“There’s a guard,” she said. “Ryan’s order. Abby agreed.” She didn’t make it gentler than it was. “Half this pack watched you stand next to Cressida on that field, Sloane. The other half has heard about it by now.”

“And you?”

“I watched Liam carry you down that hill.” She folded her hands in her lap. “I told him to bring you here and not to the cells, and I told Ryan that anyone who wanted to argue about it could argue with me.”

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“You were wearing it,” Cassandra said. “I didn’t think it was mine to throw away.”

Nooked at it for a long time.

Then I asked the question that was safer.

“Kade?”

“Alive.” Her voice was steady. Her hands were not. “He hasn’t woken. Daphne says his hear is strong. Imogen says what’s in the wound hasn’t moved since the night of the fight, and they both seem to think that’s good news.”

“And Abby?”

“Hasn’t left him.’

Of course she hadn’t.

Rhea was a small, quiet weight somewhere deep inside me. She hadn’t said a word since the field. Every so often I felt her shift, the way you feel someone turn over in a bed in another room, and then

nothing.

My fingers went to the side of my neck before I could stop them.

The mark was still there. It ached the way a burn aches after the fire is long out, a dull throb that came and went with my pulse, reaching for something that wasn’t there anymore.

Cassandra watched me do it and said nothing.

“My parents,” I said.

She was quiet a moment too long.

“I sent for them,” she said. “The first morning. I told them you were hurt, and where you were.” She looked at the window. “Your mother asked if you were going to live. I said yes.”

“And my father?”

“Your father said he had no daughter to come and see.”

I had known it for years, in the way you know where a loose board is in a house you grew up in. It

still went in like a blade under the ribs, clean and deep, and for a moment I couldn’t breathe around

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“And Malachi?”

er hand didn’t move in mine, but something in her did.

“In the cells under the training hall,” she said. “Chained. Daphne has been down twice to see to his side. She says whatever Cressida threw at him is slowing, and he told her to stop fussing. S paused. “He asked her if you were alive.”

I closed my eyes.

“I haven’t been down there,” Cassandra said quietly. “I don’t think I can.”

*****

She brought me tea and toast and made me eat both, and when I had finished, I set the cup down and made myself say it.

“Cassandra, I-”

“You don’t have to.”

“I need to.”

She waited.

“I helped take her. I hired Jax before I’d ever heard Malachi’s name. I lured Abby into that tunnel. Whatever happened to me after, I started it.” My throat tightened. “I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t expect anyone to.”

Cassandra was quiet for a long time.

“You also told Liam where she was,” she said finally. “And Abby says you told her to survive. She says it was the only thing that got her through those nights in the chamber.” She reached out and tucked my hair behind my ear, carefully, on the side without the mark. “I’m angry with you, Sloane. I’m going to be angry for a while. But I have known you since you were a little girl with scabs on both knees, and I am not leaving you alone in a room with a guard on the door and nobody on your side.”

She stood. At the door, she hesitated with her hand on the frame.

“Did he ever speak of Nathaniel?”

The question was so quiet I almost didn’t hear it.

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The guard changed at sunset. I heard the new one settle into the chair, and his voice, low, to someone in the hall.

“She’s a traitor. I don’t care whose room it is.

Then a voice I knew, flatter and quieter. “Move.”

The door opened, and Liam came in.

He looked terrible. There was a healing cut across his forehead and a bruise along his jaw that had gone yellow at the edges, and he moved the way people move when they haven’t slept properly in days. He shut the door on the guard and stood with his back against it, looking at me.

“You look awful,” I said.

“You should see the other guy.” He nodded at my leg. “Daphne says you’re not allowed to walk on

that for a week.”

“Daphne says a lot of things.”

He almost smiled. He came and sat in Cassandra’s chair, beside the coat, and didn’t look at it.

“You carried me,” I said.

“You fell.” He shrugged. “It was that or step over you.”

I had known Liam Hayes my whole life. When we were kids, he had dared me to jump off the boathouse roof, and when I broke my wrist, he had carried my backpack to school for a month without once admitting it was guilt. He hadn’t changed much.

“Thank you,” I said.

He looked at his hands.

He had brought the cold in with him, and something else under it. Juniper. Clean and sharp and female, and not anyone’s I knew. It was on his jacket and in his hair, the way a scent only gets when someone has been standing very close to you for a long time.

“Who is she?” I asked.

His head came up.

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“Kaia,” he said. “Tiernan’s sister.”

Tiernan’s sister.” I stared at him. “Your mate’ is a Ravenwood?”

“My mate is a menace.” But his mouth had gone crooked at one corner, and he didn’t seemable to straighten it. “She moved into my spare room and put a list of rules under my door. Numbered. She yells at the coffee maker. She told me she’d been fighting since she was fourteen, and I didn’t believe her, and then I watched her on that field.” He paused. “Afterward she called me an idiot for leaving my left side open. She was right.”

“She sounds terrible.”

“She is.” He looked at the window. “I haven’t marked her. We’re still figuring it out.”

I thought of the three of us on the boathouse roof the summer I was thirteen, Kade and Liam and me, with our legs hanging over the water and the sun going down. We had spent a whole evening arguing about our mates. Liam swore his would be a warrior. Kade said he didn’t care, as long as she could keep up. I had said nothing at all, because I had already decided it would be Kade, and I didn’t want either of them to laugh.

Kade had found Abby. Liam had found a girl who yelled at coffee makers. And I had found mine, too.

I had found him in the dark, and I had said the words, and he had let me go.