His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 107

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Chapter 107

Liam

he cells were under the training hall, down a flight of stone steps I had taken a hundred times and never once thought about.

I thought about them now. Twenty-two steps, then a landing where the air turned cold and smelled of damp stone, then a second flight, narrower, and the corridor with its row of iron doors and single lamp hanging at the end of it. When I was twelve, Kade and I had dared each other to down here in the dark for an hour. We had lasted ten minutes.

Ryan came down behind me. Neither of us had said much since breakfast. He had stitches along his jaw and a look on his face I knew from border fights, the one that meant he was ready for things to go

wrong.

The guard at the end of the corridor straightened when he saw us. “He’s awake. Daphne changed the dressing an hour ago.”

“Has he said anything?”

“Asked for water. Asked if the girl was alive.”

I didn’t have to ask which girl.

“Open it,” I said.

***

They had given him the last cell, the one with a cot and a window no wider than my hand, high up near the ceiling. Gray daylight came through it and lay across the floor in a thin stripe.

Malachi sat on the edge of the cot.

I had seen him on the field three nights ago, on his knees in the frost with a ring of our wolves around him, and in the dark I had only seen the shape of him. Now I could see his face. He was older than I had expected, with lines at the corners of his eyes and gray coming in at his temples. A bandage was wound around his ribs, and above and below it were the dark threads Cressida had put into him, fainter now, the color of old bruises. Silver cuffs held both his wrists, chained to a ring in the wall, long enough to let him reach the water jug and not much else.

He looked up when the door opened.

His eyes passed over Ryan. They stopped on me, and something in his face changed.

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eyes”

“Don’t.” It came out low. “Don’t you talk about my father.”

didn’t look away. “All right.”

Ryan shut the door behind us and leaned against it. I stayed where I was, three steps inside the cell, close enough to reach him and far enough that I wouldn’t.

I had come down here with questions about Cressida. I had gone over them in bed most of the night, the way I used to go over patrol rotations: where, how many, how long. They were the only questions that mattered. Kade was lying in a clinic bed with something in his chest that wouldn’t let go and my sister was sitting beside him going gray at the temples.

What came out of my mouth instead was, “Did you kill him?”

Malachi was quiet for a long time.

“I was there,” he said finally. “I brought the men. I gave the orders. Whose hand it was at the end won’t change what you need it to change.”

“It matters to me.”

“I know.” His voice didn’t rise. “I’m sorry I can’t give you an answer that helps.”

My hands had curled into fists. I made them open.

“My sister was ten,” I said. “My mother hid her under the floor. She lay there in the dark and listened to your men shouting about taking the girls.”

He closed his eyes.

“I know,” he said. “I gave that order too.”

The silence after that was so heavy I could hear the lamp hissing out in the corridor. I could hear my own heart. Jasper had gone completely silent inside me, the way he did before a fight, and for one long moment I didn’t know whether I was going to turn around and walk out or cross those three steps and put my hands around his throat.

Ryan didn’t move from the door. He didn’t say my name. He was waiting to see which one it would be, and he wasn’t going to stop me either way.

I stayed where I was.

“Cressida,” I said. My voice came out rough. “Where did she go?”

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watchtower with a cellar under it. That’s where she goes when she’s hurt.” He paused. “She’s hurt.”

Ryan pushed away from the door. “And we’re supposed to take your word for that?”

Teague drove her to both. You won’t find him to ask.” Malachi’s eyes moved back to me. “You don’t have to take my word for anything. Send someone north and look.”

“And the blade,” I said. “The thing she put in Kade.”

“She carved it for months.” He shifted on the cot, and the chains slid against the stone. “Whatever is in that wound answers to her through it. It won’t let go while the blade is whole. She keeps on her. She always has.” He looked at me steadily. “Break it, and what’s in him dies with it.”

I stared at him.

Kade could live. That was what he was telling me. My Alpha, my oldest friend, my sister’s mate. Kade could wake up and stay awake, and the man telling me how was the one who had walked into Moonhaven eight years ago and left my parents dead in the street.

“Why are you telling us this?” Ryan asked.

“Because she isn’t finished,” Malachi said. “And I am.” He looked back at me. “She’ll heal, and she’ll start again. She still wants your sister.”

“What do you want for it?”

I had come down here ready for that. Ready to bargain, ready to be lied to, ready to hate whatever price he named. It would have been easier if he had named one.

He didn’t answer right away. Through the narrow window, the gray light had shifted a little across

the floor.

“Nothing you can give me,” he said. Then, more quietly, “Take care of her.”

For a second I thought he meant Abby. Then I saw his face, and I understood.

“Sloane,” I said.

He didn’t answer. He didn’t have to.

“She’s not yours to worry about anymore,” I said. “She made sure of that.”

“Yes,” Malachi said. “She did.” And he looked down at the chains on his wrists as if that were the end of the conversation, and for him, I think it was.

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“You believe him?”

Yes.”

“So do I.” He rubbed a hand over his jaw and winced when he caught the stitches. “That’s what I

hate about it.”

“Send scouts north. Today. The best you have. Don’t go near the mill house, just tell me if stre

there.”

“That’s Abby’s call now,” Ryan said. “Or Kade’s, if he wakes up.”

He was right. A week ago, I wouldn’t have had to think about it. I would have given the order and told Kade afterward, and Kade would have nodded and asked how many. Now there was a council meeting tomorrow, and an eighteen-year-old in a borrowed sweater sitting by a hospital bed, and every decision that mattered was going to go through her.

“Then I’ll ask her,” I said.

***

Abby was in the clinic kitchen, which meant Daphne had finally won an argument.

It was a narrow room at the back with a kettle, a table and two chairs, and my sister was sitting in one of them with a bowl of soup in front of her that she was mostly stirring. She had Kade’s sweater on again. The three white strands at her temple caught the light from the window, and she looked up when I came in as though she had been expecting bad news for so long that she no longer flinched at

“Eat that,” I said.

“Daphne already said it.”

“Then it’s twice.”

211

I sat down across from her and told her everything. The mill house. The watchtower. The blade, and what breaking it would do. I told it the way I would have given a patrol report, flat and in order, because it was the only way I could get through it. I didn’t tell her what I had asked him first, or what he had answered. She didn’t ask why my hands were under the table.

When I finished, she had stopped stirring.

“Kade can live,” she said.

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