His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 112

Chapter 112

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Chapter 112

Ndidn’t go and watch.

I had promised myself that much, lying awake in the dark with my leg on two pillows, and kept the promise. When the trucks started up behind the training hall an hour before dawn, I was already in the wheelchair by the window, and I stayed there. The window looked out over the kitchen garden and the back of the packhouse and nothing else. There was no border in it, no road. Only frost one dead bean poles, and the sky going gray and then pale, and a long time later, the sound of one truck coming back.

One. Not two.

I sat there until the light reached the floor. Then I sat there some more, because there was nowhere else I needed to be. I had no seat at any table. I had no patrol. I had a pardon, a year under Cassandra’s roof, and a window.

Rhea had lifted her head last night, at the top of the cell stairs. This morning she had put it down again. I could feel her somewhere deep, lying very still with her nose toward the west, the way a dog

lies by a door.

Someone knocked.

I didn’t answer. The door opened anyway, which meant it wasn’t Cassandra, who always waited.

It was Abby.

For a second I didn’t recognize her.

She was wearing a charcoal dress with a high collar and long, narrow sleeves, the kind of dress that had been cut for someone who expected to be looked at. It was very obviously Cassandra’s. Her hair was pinned up off her neck, smooth and severe, with the three white strands left showing at her temple as if on purpose. There was a gray wool coat over all of it, and her boots were wet to the ankle, and her cheeks were red from the cold.

I had seen Abby Hayes in a hundred ways. In jeans and oversized sweaters with the cuffs pulled over her hands, in a clinic smock with her sleeves pushed up. I had never seen her look like this. She looked older. She looked like someone who had stood at the border at dawn in front of the council and half the pack and pronounced a sentence, and then walked straight here without stopping anywhere to

think about it.

She shut the door behind her and stood with her back against it.

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“I thought you’d want to know.”

I did want to know. I hadn’t known how much until she said it, and then I had to look very hard at he bean poles for a while.

“Thank you,” I said, when I could. “Luna.”

She flinched. It was small, but I saw it.

“Don’t,” she said. “Not you.”

“It’s what you are.’

“Not from you.”

“Yesterday you sat at the head of the council table and decided whether I went free. I’m the last person in this house who gets to forget what you are.” I turned the wheelchair a little, so I could see her properly. “Sit down. You look like you’re about to fall over.”

She didn’t argue. That told me more than anything else about how tired she was. She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, with her hands in her lap and her wet boots on Cassandra’s rug, and for a while neither of us said anything at all.

The window ticked in the cold.

***

“How long did it take?” I asked eventually. “After Kade.”

Abby looked up.

I hadn’t planned to ask it. It was out before I could decide whether I had the right.

“To stop hurting,” I said. “After he rejected you.”

with

She was quiet for a moment. I thought she wasn’t going to answer, and I would have understood. I had been the reason he thought he needed to do it at all.

“It didn’t,” she said finally. “Not really. It just stopped being sharp.” She looked down at her hands. “Everyone thinks a rejection cuts the bond. It doesn’t cut what you want. I felt hollow, like somebody had scooped out the middle of me, and I still wanted him. Every time he walked into a room, I felt it. Diana never let me forget it for a minute. She paced. She howled. She’d wake me at three in the morning, pulling toward the packhouse so hard I had to sit on my hands.”

She stopped. Her eyes came up to mine, and I knew exactly where her mind had gone before she said

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his hand at her waist, and the look on her face when she saw me in the doorway. I had hated her for that look. I had thought it was guilt.

“I should have stopped him,” Abby said. “I knew it while it was happening. He wasn’t mine. He’d sad the words himself. And I couldn’t.” She shook her head slowly. “It wasn’t that I didn’t know better. I just wanted him so much that knowing better didn’t matter.”

I looked at her for a long time.

For months, I had told myself she had taken him from me. That she had smiled her little clit smile and let him come to her and done nothing to stop it. I had told myself that in the dark, on the western road, in a room with a lock on the outside.

I understood now. I understood exactly what had been in her face in that doorway, because I had felt it every morning since the field. Not guilt. Hunger, for something you had already told yourself you

couldn’t have.

“I thought you were a thief,” I said quietly.

“I know.”

“You weren’t.” I looked down at my hands. “You were just doing what I’m doing now.”

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to.

I looked at the window again. The frost on the glass had started to melt from the corners.

“I thought I’d feel better,” I said.

Abby waited.

“After I said the words. I thought that was what they were for. You cut the thing, and then you’re free, and it hurts, but it’s a clean hurt. It heals.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “I am free. I know I am. There’s nothing on the other end of it. I can feel exactly where it used to be, and it’s empty, and that should be a relief.”

“It isn’t.”

“I keep listening for a door.” I pressed my hand flat against the arm of the wheelchair. “Every morning. For a lock turning, and a basin on a chair, and someone telling me to eat. I hated every one of those mornings. And I lie in this bed in a house I half grew up in, with people who love me, or used to, and I listen for them.”

I hadn’t meant to say any of that. It was the most I had said to anyone since the field.

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I almost laughed.

“I don’t know what to call it.” I watched a drop of melted frost run down the glass. “He locked me in a room for weeks. He put a collar on me. He put his teeth in my neck without asking, and he didn’t tell me his name, so I could never take it back.” I swallowed. “He also sat up with me the night the fever came, and he never once mentioned it afterward. He set my leg in the dark with his hands shaking. He stood in that council room yesterday and told every elder in this pack he’d broke it himself, so they’d let me go.’

Abby’s face changed.

“You knew,” I said. “About the slab.”

“The second he said it.” Her voice was quiet. “Liam told me that story twice when I woke up. I was sitting right there when Malachi looked at him.”

“And neither of you said anything.”

“No.”

“I didn’t either. When Garrick asked me. I sat in that chair and said yes, and I could see in your face that you knew I was lying, and you let me.”

“He was lying for you,” Abby said. “I wasn’t going to be the one to take it away from him.”

Neither of us said anything for a while.

“So I don’t know what to call any of it,” I said finally. “I don’t think there’s a word for it that I’m allowed to say out loud in this house.”

“You can say it to me.”

I didn’t. But I didn’t say no, either, and I think she understood that too.

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She stayed longer than I expected her to.

At some point she unbuttoned the gray coat and let it fall back off her shoulders, and at some point after that she started talking, the way people do when they have been holding something in for days and finally sit down somewhere quiet.

The elders met twice a week now, she said. Garrick Shaw had already asked, in front of everyone, what would happen to the succession if Kade didn’t recover. Hester Lowe hadn’t spoken to her since

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three times. I still don’t know what I agreed to.”

“Probably nothing,” I said. “The eastern boundary has been arguing about grazing rights since efore either of us was born. Nobody has ever won.”

She almost smiled.

“Kade was right,” she said. “That’s the worst part. He told me I could do it, that the pack would follow me, and they do. Mostly. I can do it.” She looked down at her hands. “I just wish I’d had more time. A year. A month. Some time to learn how before I had to.”

“Nobody gets that,” I said. “Kade didn’t. He was eighteen, with his father in the ground and half the pack watching to see if he’d fall over.”

“I know.”

“And he didn’t have Liam then. Not the way you do. He didn’t have Cassandra standing behind his chair.” I turned the wheelchair toward her. “You have both of them. Liam would walk into a fire for you and complain about it the whole way. Cassandra has been running this pack from the second chair for twenty-seven years. Let them carry some of it.”

“I do.”

“You don’t. You carry it, and then you let them watch you carry it, and that isn’t the same thing.”

She looked at me for a long moment.

“You sound like you know what you’re talking about,” she said.

“I spent ten years being trained to sit where you’re sitting.” I said it lightly. It didn’t come out light. “My father made sure of it. I know every elder at that table, and their wives, and which of their grandchildren is sleeping with whose. I know which visiting Alphas will try to shake your hand too long, and which ones will bring their own wine because they think ours is poisoned.” I shrugged. “It

was going to be my life.”

Abby didn’t say anything.

“I can’t help you,” I said. “You know that. Not where anyone can see. The traitor in Cassandra’s spare room whispering in the Luna’s ear? Garrick would have it all over the pack by supper. They’d say I was still trying to take Kade from you, one way or another. It would cost you more than anything I could tell you is worth.”

“Then whisper quietly,” Abby said.

I stared at her.

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She frowned. “Why what?”

Why any of it.” I gestured at the room, the wheelchair, the window, all of it. “You asked them to hear me before they judged me. You made sure I got to see him. You came here straight from the border to tell me about a coat. And now you want my help.” I heard my voice tighten and couldn’t stop it. “I hired a man to drag you across the border, Abby. I walked you into the dark. Why are you being kind to me?”

She was quiet for a moment. She looked down at her hands, and then up at me, and her face was very open in a way I didn’t know how to look at.

“Because you were the closest thing I ever had to a sister,” she said. “Before any of it.”