His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 109

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47 Mon, Nov 2 UM

Chapter 109

Abby

The scouts reached the mill house a little after midnight. They had run it on four legs, the whole way north without stopping, and they called it in from the nearest road.

Ryan brought their report to the packhouse an hour before dawn, still in yesterday’s clothe and read it to me at the kitchen table while the kettle came to a boil. The mill house was there, exactly where Malachi had said: a gray stone building on a bend in the river, with a waterwheel that hadn’t turned in years. Nobody was inside. The hearth was cold. The shelves along one wall were empty, and in the grate, under the ash, they had found the corners of burned pages covered in the same markings Imogen had dug out of our north field.

“No scent,” Ryan said. “Not hers, not anyone’s. Same as the western line.” He folded the paper. “But someone emptied those shelves in a hurry, and not long ago.”

“So it’s true.”

“That part is.” He looked at me. “Doesn’t make the rest of him any better.”

He hesitated, which Ryan never did.

“Luna. Whatever you decide today, the patrols will hold to it. I’ll see to that.”

It was the closest thing to comfort I had ever heard him offer anyone. I didn’t know what to do with it, so I just said, “Thank you,” and poured the water before it boiled over.

***

The council chamber was under the packhouse, a long, low room with a stone floor and a table of dark wood that had been cut from a single tree before anyone in Moonhaven now living was born. Kade had told me once that the scratches along its edge were from his great-grandfather’s claws. I had laughed. I didn’t think he had been joking.

I had never sat at the head of it. I sat there now, with Cassandra on my right and Edmund on my left, and the other six elders along both sides. Garrick had his cane across his knees. Hester sat very straight, with her hands folded, in the same dark cardigan. Imogen had taken a chair against the wall with her arms crossed. Liam stood behind me. I couldn’t see him, but I could feel him there, the way I had felt him at my back my whole life.

Kade was in the clinic. Daphne had forbidden him to be moved, and he had argued with her until he went gray, and then he had let me go with his hand pressed against my cheek and a single word down the bond that wasn’t really a word at all. Yours.

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long table, facing me.

Nobody had brought a chair for him. Nobody was going to.

had never been this close to him.

On the field, he had been a shape in the dark. In my memory, he wasn’t even that. He was boots on the floorboards above my head, and voices, and my mother’s hand pressing my face down in the dust. I had thought, for eight years, that if I ever stood in a room with him, I would know him the way you know a smell.

He was just a man. Tall, tired, gray at the temples, with my mate’s shoulders and someone else’s eyes. Liam had told me that too, and I hadn’t believed him.

He looked at me, and then past me, at Liam. Then back.

“Luna,” he said.

Garrick’s cane shifted against the floor. Nobody spoke.

“You know why you’re here,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “This council is going to decide what happens to you. Before it does, I want it to hear you. You can answer or not. Either way, it’ll decide.”

“I’ll answer.”

山

“Eight years ago,” I said, “you came into Moonhaven with rogues at your back.”

“Yes.”

4

“You killed Nathaniel Blackwell in the square.”

Cassandra didn’t move beside me. I didn’t look at her.

“Yes,” Malachi said.

“And Adrian and Naomi Hayes.”

He was quiet a moment.

“I told your brother the truth,” he said. “I don’t know whose hand it was. I brought the men who did

1. I gave the orders that put them in that street. I’m not going to stand here and pretend that makes any difference.”

“You took girls.”

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“There were eleven of them in that mountain,” I said. “There was a girl named Tessa who still won’t sleep with the lights off.”

know.” He didn’t look away from me. “I’m not going to ask you to believe I’m sorry. You wouldn’t, and you shouldn’t. I’ll answer whatever you ask.”

Hester Lowe unfolded her hands.

“My husband’s name was Tom,” she said. Her voice was small and very clear. “My son was Michael. He was nineteen. They were on the east road that night, by the mill. Do you remember them

Malachi looked at her for a long time.

“No,” he said.

“No.”

“I didn’t learn their names.” He said it slowly, as if every word cost him something. “I should have. I didn’t think of them as having names. That’s the truth, and it’s worse than anything I could make up.’

Hester looked at him for a moment more. Then she folded her hands again and turned her face to the wall, and she didn’t look at him for the rest of the morning.

I asked about Cressida.

He told the council what he had told Liam, more slowly, in more detail. The mill house. The watchtower. The years she had spent carving the blade. When Ryan read out the scouts’ report, he only nodded, as if he had expected nothing else.

“She came into our territory last night,” I said. “She put a collar on our memorial stone, and none of

our wolves smelled her. How?”

Something changed in his face.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I never saw her make it. She didn’t tell me anything she didn’t have to.” He looked down at the chain between his wrists. “I should have wondered why.”

Imogen made a small, disgusted sound against the wall, and I couldn’t tell whether it was meant for him or for Cressida.

I had one more question. I had promised myself I wouldn’t ask it in front of the whole council. I asked it anyway.

“That night,” I said. “Did you know there was someone under the floor?”

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“No,” he said. “If I had, I don’t know what I would have done. I’d like to tell you I would have walked away. I don’t know that.”

was the worst answer he could have given me. It was also the only one I would have believed

Edmund turned his head toward the elder at the end of the table, a thin, sharp man named Rowan Pike who hadn’t said a word all morning.

“Rowan,” he said. “You had a question about the Sinclair girl.”

Rowan leaned forward. “She hired a rogue named Jax to take our Luna across the border. That’s known. She was found in your company on that mountain, and again on our field. She lured Abigail Hayes into the tunnel under the temple. We have that from Abigail herself.” He looked at Malachi. “Was she one of yours?”

Behind me, I felt Liam go very still.

Malachi didn’t answer at once. When he did, his voice had changed. It was lower, and harder, and there was something in it I hadn’t heard all morning. It took me a moment to recognize it as anger.

“She was mine,” he said. “Not the way you mean.”

“Then how?”

“Jax brought her to me with a sack over her head and her hands tied. She’d paid him, and he sold her anyway, because a pack girl is worth more than a pack girl’s money. I kept her.” He said it flatly. “In a room with the lock on the outside. With a collar on her throat so her wolf couldn’t hear her. For

weeks.”

Nobody moved.

“The tunnel,” Rowan said.

“I sent her into it.” Malachi didn’t look away from him. “I told her what would happen to her if she didn’t bring the girl. She believed me. She had reason to.”

“And the mark on her neck?”

“I put it there. I didn’t ask her.”

Cassandra’s hand had gone flat on the table beside mine. I didn’t look at her.

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Behind me, Liam made a sound so small that I don’t think anyone else heard it.

I knew why.

Liam had stood in that collapsed corridor under the temple, with Tiernan crouched beside him, and looked at a slab of stone longer than a man lying across the floor, and the blood that had soaked into the rock beneath it. She was pinned under this, Tiernan had said. Someone lifted it off her am had told me that story the night I woke up. He had told it to me twice.

The temple had broken Sloane’s leg. Not Malachi.

I looked at him. He was looking at Garrick, and his face was perfectly steady, and he was lying.

Then, for half a second, his eyes moved past me to my brother.

He knew. He knew Liam had been in that corridor. He knew Liam had seen the slab. And he looked at him the way you would look at a man holding a door you needed to stay shut.

Liam didn’t say anything.

I felt him not say it. It went through the pack link like a held breath.

“Whatever she did,” Malachi said to the room, “she did with my hand at the back of her neck. On the field, she was a prisoner. There was a collar on her when Cressida’s men brought her out. You saw it. All of you saw it.” He drew a breath, and I saw what it cost him against the bandage. “She’s paid already. More than anyone in this room knows. Whatever you decide for me, I’ll take it, and I won’t fight you. But she’s suffered enough at my hands. Let her go.”

“You’re in no position to bargain,” Garrick said.

“I’m not bargaining. I’m not asking for anything for myself.” Malachi looked back at me. “I’m telling you what’s true.”

Some of it was. I didn’t know how much.

Edmund looked down the table, at each of them in turn, and then at me.

“Is there anything else the Luna wants to ask?”

There was. I wanted to ask him why. I wanted to ask him why a man who had burned my town could stand in chains in front of the people who wanted him dead and lie, steadily and well, for a girl who had rejected him on a field four nights ago.