His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 110

Chapter 110

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Chapter 110

Sloane

They came for me at two.

Cassandra had helped me dress. It had taken both of us, and most of my patience, and when it was done I was wearing a pair of her trousers with the left leg slit to the knee over the splint, and gray sweater that smelled of her cupboard. I had brushed my hair myself. I had left it down.

“You don’t have to look like anything,” Cassandra said, watching me in the mirror. “You only have to

tell them the truth.”

“I know.”

“Do you?”

I didn’t answer. She put my crutch in my hand and walked beside me down the hall, past the guard, and down two flights of stairs to the council chamber, and she didn’t let go of my elbow once.

I had sat at that table, in the chair at Kade’s left hand, for two years. I had sat there in a silk blouse with my hair pinned up and argued about patrol schedules and trade agreements and thought I was being groomed for something.

They had moved the chair. There was one at the foot of the table now, alone on the stone floor, facing the head.

Abby sat at the head.

She looked small in that chair, and very pale, with the three white strands bright against her dark hair. She didn’t look away when I came in. Edmund sat on her left and Cassandra went to the empty place on her right. The other elders lined both sides of the table, and every one of them watched me

cross the floor on the crutch.

Liam stood behind Abby’s chair with his hands clasped behind his back. He looked at me once, and then at the table, and stayed that way.

I lowered myself into the chair at the foot of the table and laid the crutch on the floor beside it.

“Sloane Sinclair,” Edmund said. “You know why you’re here.”

“Yes.”

“The council will ask you questions. Answer them honestly. Whatever you say will be weighed.”

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from and promised him the rest when it was done. I wanted her gone because I wanted Kade, and I thought if she disappeared, he would come back to me. Nobody made me do that. Nobody even suggested it. It was mine.”

he room was very quiet.

Garrick Shaw shifted his cane. He looked, of all things, surprised.

“Go on,” Edmund said.

“Jax turned on me. He took me too. I don’t remember much of how. A needle, and then a trick I made myself keep my eyes on Abby. “After that, I did what I was told so that I would stay alive. I lured her into the tunnel under the temple. I knew what was waiting at the end of it. I told myself I didn’t have a choice. Maybe I didn’t. But I did it.”

“Thank you,” Edmund said. He glanced along the table. “Rowan.”

The thin man at the end leaned forward. I knew him a little. Rowan Pike had never liked me. He had

never liked anyone much.

“When Jax took you,” he said, “where did he take you?”

“To the rogues. To Malachi.”

“Did he sell you to him?”

I hesitated.

I didn’t know. Jax hadn’t told me anything, and Malachi had never said. I remembered waking in chains, and Jax’s voice somewhere, and later, much later, Malachi’s hand closing around Jax’s throat.

“I don’t know what passed between them,” I said. “He didn’t keep his word to me. I know that.”

Rowan nodded, as if that was the answer he had expected.

“You were held,” he said. “In a room with the lock on the outside.”

“Yes.”

“With a collar on.”

“Yes.”

“For weeks.”

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These weren’t the questions I had rehearsed.

“The mark on your neck,” Rowan said. “Did he ask your permission before he put it there?”

My hand went to my hair before I could stop it.

“No,” I said.

“And the tunnel. Were you threatened?”

“I-“I stopped. “He told me what would happen if I didn’t bring her.”

Rowan wrote that down too.

I looked at Abby. Her face was very still. She was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read, and something about it was almost gentle, and that frightened me more than any of the rest.

I had come into this room to be judged. I had confessed the worst thing I had ever done in the first minute, plainly, so nobody could say I had hidden it. And they had thanked me, and moved on, and now they were asking me about locks and collars and threats, as though the thing I had done was a small thing that had happened before the real story began.

As though I were the one it had happened to.

Garrick cleared his throat.

“One more,” he said. “The leg.”

I looked at him.

“When you were brought out on the field,” Garrick said, “you could barely stand. We’re told you had a broken leg in that cabin, and that you’d had it some time.” He paused. “We’re told he broke it himself. The night you tried to run.”

The room went away.

For a moment there was nothing but the stone floor and the chair and my own pulse in my ears.

The slab. The corridor coming down. The sound my leg had made. Malachi’s hands on the stone, and the way his face had looked in the dust and the dark when he lifted it off me, as if it were the heaviest

thing he had ever carried.

We’re told he broke it himself.

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at all. He had been in that corridor. He had seen the slab. He knew exactly how my leg had been broken, and he was standing behind the Luna’s chair, saying nothing.

He knew. Abby knew. I could see it in her face.

And Malachi had stood in this room this morning, on this floor, and told them he had done.

He had told them he had locked me in. That he had collared me. That he had marked me without asking and threatened me into the tunnel. Most of it was true. He had chosen every true thing hat would make me smaller and him worse, and then he had added the one lie that would finish it and he had looked my oldest friend in the face and dared him to say otherwise.

He had made himself into the monster in my story, so that there would be no room left in it for me

to be one.

My eyes were burning. I didn’t let them do anything else.

“Miss Sinclair,” Garrick said. “Is it true?”

I thought about saying no. I thought about telling them about the slab and the dust and his hands, and watching his whole careful lie come apart on the table in front of them.

It would have been the truth. It would have been the last thing he had left, and I would have taken it

from him.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s true.”

Liam closed his eyes.

***

They sent me back to Cassandra’s room to wait. I don’t know how long it was. The light moved across the floor. The guard outside the door didn’t speak.

I sat on the bed with my hands in my lap, and I shook.

I had wanted to be punished. I understood that now, sitting there. I had wanted someone to stand up in that room and say what I had done, out loud, and give it a weight, so that I could carry it. I had thought that was the least I owed. And he had taken that from me too. He had taken it and put it on

his own back with everything else, the way he had once carried me out of a mountain.

At sunset, they came for me again.

This time he was there.

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the hardest thing I had ever watched.

Abby stood up.

She didn’t make a speech. She put her hands flat on the table and spoke to the room in a voice that was steady and low and very tired.

you

“This council has heard Malachi Blackwell,” she said. “It has heard Sloane Sinclair. It’s head from our scouts, and from those who were there eight years ago. I’ve listened to every one of you, e looked along the table. At Garrick. At Hester, who sat with her face turned to the wall. “Some want his life. You have every right to want it. I want you to know I heard you.” She glanced a Cassandra. “And this council has been asked to remember that whatever it decides, it decides in Kade’s name, and Kade will have to carry it. I’ve remembered that too.”

Nobody spoke.

“The information he gave us was true. It may be the only reason my mate lives. That counts. It doesn’t buy back what he did. It buys him his life. Nothing more.” Her voice didn’t waver. “In Kade’s name, Malachi Blackwell is exiled from Moonhaven. He leaves at dawn by the western border, in daylight, with this council and the pack to witness it. His name is struck. If he ever crosses our border again, for any reason, any wolf of this pack may kill him, and they will answer to no one for it.”

Garrick’s hand closed hard on the head of his cane. Somebody down the table muttered something I

didn’t catch.

Malachi bowed his head. Just once.

I didn’t breathe.

Then Abby turned, and looked at me.

“Sloane Sinclair,” she said. “You came into this room this afternoon and told us what you did. Nobody had to drag it out of you. The council has weighed that, and weighed what was done to you after.” She paused. “You are pardoned.”

I stared at her.

I had heard the word. I didn’t understand it.

“You’ll give up your seat at this table,” Abby went on. “You’ll take no part in pack business for ad year, and for that year you’ll live under Cassandra Blackwell’s roof, and she will answer for you.” She held my eyes. “After that, we’ll see.”

Beside me, Cassandra’s hand tightened around mine.

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I looked at the man at the foot of the table.

was looking at the floor. His face showed nothing at all. But his hands, chained in front of him, had opened, the fingers slack, the way a man’s hands open when he has finally set something down.

He had done this. All of it. I knew that as surely as I had ever known anything.

And I hadn’t even been able to thank him.

****

Liam came for me after dark.

He didn’t say anything about the afternoon. Neither did I. He just stood in Cassandra’s doorway with his hands in his pockets until I got the crutch under my arm, and then he took my other arm over his shoulder, and we went.

The training hall. The door at the back. The stairs going down into the dark.

I don’t remember the stairs. I remember the cold at the bottom, and the lamp at the end of the corridor, and Liam stopping at the foot of the steps.

“I’ll be here,” he said. “Take the time you need.”

The guard opened the last door and stepped back.

He was standing.

Of course he was. He had heard the crutch on the stone the way he had always heard me coming, through walls, through snow. One hand was flat against the wall beside him, and he had gotten up for me, and it had cost him. I could see what it had cost him.

The door closed behind me.

“You should sit down,” I said.

“So should you.”

Neither of us moved.

He looked worse than he had on the field. The stubble along his jaw had grown out dark and rough, and the silver had rubbed his wrists raw. But his eyes were the same. Gray and very steady, and fixed

on a point somewhere over my left shoulder.

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“The slab, Malachi.” My voice cracked on his name. “You told them you broke my leg.”

He didn’t answer.

“You stood up there and made yourself into-” I couldn’t finish it. “Why?”

“Because they would believe it.” He said it quietly, to the wall. “They wanted a monster had one to give them. It was the only thing I had left that was worth anything to you.”

“You don’t get to decide what’s worth something to me.”

“I know.” His mouth moved, not quite a smile. “I did it anyway.”

I took a step toward him. The crutch scraped on the stone.

He turned his face away.

It was such a small thing. A turn of the head, and his eyes going to the narrow window high in the wall, where there was nothing to see but dark. It was the same thing he had done in the cabin a hundred times when I said something he didn’t want to answer.

It broke something in me that the field hadn’t.