His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 108

Chapter 108

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Chapter 108

Abby

Rade woke up on the fourth morning, a little after dawn, while I was asleep with my head on the edge of his mattress.

I didn’t hear him. I felt him.

For three days the bond had been a thread so thin I had to hold my breath to find it. Now something moved along it, slow and heavy and confused, like a man surfacing from deep water. I lifted my head before I knew why.

His eyes were open.

“Abby,” he said. His voice was barely a voice at all.

I couldn’t answer. I put my hand on his face, and he turned his cheek into my palm, and through the bond came a feeling so full and so tired that it made my eyes sting. Relief. Mine or his, I couldn’t tell,

and it didn’t matter.

“You’re crying,” he said.

“I’m allowed.”

“You’ve been sleeping in a chair.”

I laughed. It hurt my chest. “You’ve been sleeping in a bed for three days. Don’t brag.”

He tried to smile. Then he tried to shift his weight on the pillow, his whole face went white, and his breath caught in a way I felt all the way down to my ribs.

“Don’t move.” I pressed my hand flat against his shoulder. “Daphne will kill both of us.”

He lay back and breathed through it. When the worst had passed, his eyes went to my hair.

I knew what he was looking at. Three white strands now instead of one, near my temple, where

anyone could see.

He didn’t say anything for a long time. Through the bond I felt something dark and heavy settle in him, closer to grief than to anger.

“You did that for me,” he said.

“You’d have done the same.”

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He closed his eyes. I felt him decide not to fight me on it yet. He was too tired to win.

Cressida?” he asked.

“Gone. North.”

“Malachi?”

I hesitated, and he felt that too.

“Tell me.”

So I told him. That his uncle was alive, in the cells under the training hall, with silver on his wrists and Daphne changing his bandages twice a day. That Liam had gone down there yesterday with Ryan, and come to find me in the clinic kitchen afterward, and told it all to me across a bowl of soup with his hands under the table. That Malachi had given them everything Liam asked for and asked for nothing back: a mill house on a river two days north, where Cressida kept her books, and a burned watchtower beyond it, where she went to ground when she was hurt. And the blade. That whatever was in Kade’s chest would hold on for as long as the blade stayed whole.

Kade listened to all of it with his eyes on the ceiling.

When I finished, he was quiet so long that I thought he had fallen asleep again.

“He had me,” he said finally. “On the field. Knox was down, and he was standing over us, and he just -“He stopped. “He looked at me like he knew me.”

“He did know you. Until you were six.”

“I don’t remember.”

“Your mom does.”

He swallowed. “The council will want him dead.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll be right.” His hand tightened on mine. “I should want it too.”

“Do you?”

He turned his head on the pillow and looked at me.

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She checked everything twice. Imogen arrived while Daphne was still listening to his heart and stood at the foot of the bed with her arms folded, watching the bandage under his ribs as it was changed.

I made myself look too.

The wound was still open. It wasn’t bleeding, and it wasn’t healing either. The edges were guy and smooth, as though the skin had forgotten what it was supposed to do, and the dark threads stil

reached out across his chest from it, faint and no longer spreading, but there.

“Well?” Kade said.

Daphne glanced at Imogen.

“It’s holding,” Imogen said. “That’s the good news.”

“And the bad news?”

She came around to the side of the bed and studied the wound with her head tilted, her rings clicking softly as she turned one of them on her finger.

“That blade was made for you,” she said. “Carved for months. Fed with something I’d rather not name in a room where people are trying to recover. What she put in you answers to her. I can keep it from spreading. I can’t make it let go.” She looked at him steadily. “If what Malachi told your Beta is true, nothing will, until that blade is broken.”

The room went very quiet.

“So I’m going to be like this,” Kade said.

“You’re going to be alive,” Daphne said firmly. “You’re going to sit up eventually. You’re going to walk, if you’re patient and you do what I tell you. But you’re not shifting, and you’re not leading anything, for weeks. Possibly longer.”

“I’m the Alpha.”

“You’re the Alpha in a hospital bed with a hole in you that won’t close.” Daphne didn’t soften it. “Moonhaven needs someone on their feet.”

Kade’s hand closed on the blanket. I felt his frustration through the bond, hot and helpless. He looked at the door, as if he could will himself through it.

Then he looked at me.

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“You’ve sat through enough of my meetings since the ceremony. You know the borders and the patrols. The pack knows you. They trust you.” His voice was weak, but it didn’t waver. “And you’re my

una.”

“I’m eighteen.”

“I was eighteen.”

“You were an Alpha’s son. The pack knew you’d be Alpha your whole life. I was the girl who worked at the clinic a month ago.”

“And now you’re the one they followed onto that field.” His fingers tightened around mine. “Speak for me. Until I can do it myself.”

I looked at Imogen. At Daphne. Neither of them helped.

“In your name,” I said finally.

“In my name.” He held my eyes. “All of it, Abby. Him too.”

***

The meeting was in his office that afternoon.

I sat in the chair behind his desk because Cassandra told me to, and because nobody else would sit in it. It was too big. The leather still smelled like cedar.

Liam stood by the window with his arms crossed. He looked as if he hadn’t slept. He had told me everything about the cells except what it had cost him. When I had come in, he had squeezed my shoulder on his way past and gone to stand where he could look out at the training hall roof.

Ryan stood by the door. Daphne and Imogen sat on the couch. Cassandra sat beside the desk, close

to me.

Across from me sat three of the elders.

Edmund Marsh was in the middle. He was in his sixties, broad and gray, with a face like weathered timber. He had sat on Nathaniel’s council for twenty years and on Kade’s ever since, and when he spoke at pack meetings, people stopped talking to listen. On his left was Garrick Shaw, who had run the northern patrols when my father was Beta and still walked the boundary every morning at seventy. On his right, Hester Lowe, small and upright in a dark cardigan, who had buried her husband and her eldest son eight years ago in the same week I lost my parents.

Edmund wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at Liam.

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“Somebody has to.”

Somebody is.”

Edmund’s eyes moved to me at last, unkind in no way I could point to, only certain.

“With respect, Luna. A Luna doesn’t hold the title. She can’t. That’s not my rule. That’s the oddest

rule this pack has.”

“I’m not asking to hold it.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. Under the desk, my hands were shaking, and I pressed them flat against my knees. “I’m asking to hold it for him. Kade asked me this morning to speak for him until he can stand. That’s all this is.”

Cassandra cleared her throat.

“The winter Kade was twelve,” she said, “Nathaniel was gored by an elk on a hunt and couldn’t walk for six weeks. I spoke for him. I sat in this office and signed his letters and gave his orders to his patrols. Do you remember that, Edmund?”

Edmund’s mouth thinned. “I remember.”

“Did anyone call it a crime?”

“You’d been Luna for years by then.” He glanced at me. “She’s been Luna for weeks.”

“She has also brought this pack back from a mountain and helped break a witch’s ring of stones on a field where your own grandson was fighting,” Cassandra said. “I’d say she’s had a busy few weeks.”

Something moved in Edmund’s face.

He looked at me again. Really looked, this time. At the white strands in my hair. At the shadows under my eyes. At my mother’s necklace, the white-gold crescent sitting crooked against my collarbone the way it had ever since the equinox.

“You’re Adrian’s girl,” he said.

“Yes.”

“He’d have argued with me too.” He let out a long breath through his nose. “In Kade’s name, then.

Until the Alpha is on his feet.”

“In Kade’s name,” I said.

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Nobody moved.

You

know what he did, Luna. Better than anyone in this room.” His voice was slow and rough, and

he didn’t raise it. “The law has one answer for it. It had the same answer when my father sat on this council, and his father before him.”

“He knelt,” Cassandra said quietly. “On the field. He didn’t lift a hand to anyone after.”

“After.” Hester Lowe spoke for the first time. She didn’t look at Cassandra. She looked at the widow, at Liam’s back. “I don’t care what he did after. I buried Tom and Michael after.”

Liam didn’t turn around.

“There’s the other thing, too,” Garrick said, “and somebody’s going to say it, so it may as well be me.” He turned his cane a quarter turn on the floorboards. “He’s a Blackwell. Nathaniel’s brother. He challenged for that chair once already, and by blood, he has a claim to it still. Our Alpha is lying in the clinic with a hole in him nobody can close. He has no son. As long as that man breathes, there’s a second Blackwell in this world, and every rogue with a grudge knows where to find him.”

Heat climbed my face. I kept my eyes on him.

No son. As if Kade were already a name on the memorial stone, and I were nothing but the place a son should have come from.

“Garrick.” Edmund didn’t raise his voice either. “That’s enough.”

“It’s the truth.”

“It’s a truth. It isn’t the only one in the room.”

“Then here’s another.” Hester folded her hands in her lap. “The Sinclair girl is sleeping in the packhouse with a guard on her door. She hired the man who took our Luna. She stood beside that

witch on our field. Are we going to pretend she was only visiting?”

Cassandra’s back straightened. “She was a prisoner on that field, Hester. There was a collar on her

throat.”

“She put herself in reach of it.”

“And if it comes to it,” Cassandra said, very evenly, “she lives under my roof, and I answer for her.”

The two women looked at each other across the desk. Neither of them looked away first. In the end,

it was Edmund who turned to me.

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Liam had turned around at last. His face told me nothing. It was the first time in my life I hadn’t

been able to read it.

I thought of my brother’s hands hidden under that kitchen table. I thought of Sloane in the temple, telling me to survive. Of the man on his knees in the frost while our wolves closed around him. None of it fit together. Everyone in this room wanted it to be simple, and it wasn’t.

“I mean to hear them,” I said.

Garrick made a sound in his throat. “Hear them say what?”

“Whatever they have to say. In front of this council, not in a cell with two people listening.” Imade myself hold his eyes. “Malachi first. Tomorrow morning. Then Sloane. The scouts should be back by then, and we’ll know if anything he told Liam is true. Then I’ll decide. In Kade’s name.”

“And if he lies to you?”

“Then you’ll all be there to hear it.”

Hester stood first. She smoothed her cardigan and looked at me for a long moment, and there was nothing in her face I could hold on to.

“Your mother was my friend,” she said, and left.

Garrick followed her. Edmund went last. At the door he stopped, nodded once to Cassandra and once to me, and shut it quietly behind him.

Everyone in the room seemed to breathe out at the same time.

Liam looked at me from the window.