His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 115

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Chapter 115

Kaia

“Tiernan said. “How’s it going?”

I was lying on my back on the bed in Liam’s spare room with my feet up on the wall and the phone wedged between my ear and the pillow, looking at the ceiling. There was a water stain in the corner shaped like a rabbit. I had been looking at it for five weeks. I knew it better than I knew most people.

“How is what going?”

“Kaia.”

“The weather’s nice. The plants are thriving. One of the ferns has a new leaf.” I tilted my head. “Is

that what you called about?”

On the other end of the line, my brother breathed out through his nose. I knew exactly what his face was doing. He made that face at council meetings when someone’s cousin wanted to dispute a boundary stone for the fourth time in a year.

“I called,” he said, “to ask how you are. And how things are with Liam. And whether you’ve changed

your mind.”

I rolled my eyes so hard it nearly hurt.

“I heard that,” Tiernan said.

“You can’t hear eye rolling.”

“I’ve known you for twenty-three years. I can hear it.” A pause. Somewhere behind him, a door closed, and the noise of the Ravenwood packhouse dropped away. He had gone somewhere private. That was never a good sign. “Kai. I’m serious.”

“I know you’re serious. You’re always serious. It’s your best quality and your worst one.”

“He’s a good man.”

I closed my eyes.

“He is,” Tiernan said. “I wouldn’t have sent you there if I didn’t think so. I’ve fought beside him. I’ve watched him with his sister. I’ve watched him on that field. He’s steady and he’s fair and he doesn’t lie to make things easier for himself. You know how rare that is?”

“I know.”

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Every muscle in my back went tight against the mattress.

Whatever that boy did. As if it had been one thing. As if it had been a broken date, or a dance with someone else, or a letter that never came. As if I had cried for a week and then gone sour for two years because I was eighteen and dramatic.

That was what I had let him believe. I had worked hard at it. It had been the whole point

I didn’t get to be angry with him for believing it.

“It’s not about him,” I said.

“Then what is it about?”

“It’s about me not wanting a mate. I told you that before you shipped me off. I told you the night of the ceremony. I’ve told you every week since.” I opened my eyes and looked at the rabbit. “Five weeks, Tiernan. That was the deal. Three months, and then I decide. Eight weeks left.”

“Fifty-three days.”

“You’re counting?”

“So are you.” He was quiet for a moment. “I know you, Kai. You’re not giving it a chance. You’re waiting it out.”

I didn’t answer that.

“Just,” he said, and stopped. I heard him rub his face. “Behave. Please. Be decent to him. That’s all

I’m asking. You gave me your word.”

“I am decent.”

“Kaia.”

“I’m very decent. I’m the most decent houseguest in the history of Moonhaven. I pay for my own food. I knock.” I swung my feet down off the wall. “I have to go.”

“Kai-”

“Love you. Bye.”

I hung up before he could say anything else and dropped the phone on the quilt.

Then I lay back down, put both hands over my face, and groaned into them.

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Don’t.

He’s right, and you know he’s right. My wolf stretched, slow and pleased with herself, the way she always did when she thought she’d won something. Liam isn’t that bad.

I groaned again.

The worst part was that I did know. I had known for weeks. I lay there with my hands over my face and listened to the house tick around me, empty and quiet, and I made myself look at it property, the way you make yourself look at a wound.

Liam Hayes was handsome. That wasn’t an opinion. It was a fact, like the color of the sky. He was tall and broad through the shoulders the way warriors got after years on patrol, with brown hair he never bothered to cut en time and his sister’s blue-gray eyes, which went very soft when he looked at her and very hard when he looked at a map. His nose had been broken at least once and set slightly crooked, and somehow that made it worse. You would have to be blind not to notice him. Or have no

taste at all.

I had taste. That was the problem.

And he did everything right. He said the right things, the few times he said anything. Most of the time he didn’t speak at all, because the fifth rule on my list said no waiting looks and he had decided, apparently, that the safest way to not look at me like he was waiting was to not look at me much at all. Or talk to me. Or stand in the same room as me for longer than it took to say good morning.

He followed my rules.

All of them. Every single one.

I hadn’t expected that. When I wrote that list at Abby’s old desk with Tiernan’s car still warm in the driveway, I had expected him to break half of it in the first week. I had been counting on it. Men like him, decent, responsible, used to being listened to, always thought rules were for other people. I had expected him to knock once and then stop knocking. To leave groceries in the fridge after I told him not to and pretend he hadn’t. To say the word mate at least once in a weak moment, so I could look at him coldly across the kitchen and point at the list.

He never did.

He knocked. Even on the bathroom door when it was open and I was obviously not in there. He let me buy my own food, though I had caught him once at the market staring at my basket with the expression of a man watching someone pay too much for eggs. He never asked where I was going. He never said the word.

He was so careful with me it made my teeth ache.

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I knew the story. Everyone in three packs knew the story. His parents killed in the street when he was eighteen. A ten-year-old girl hidden under the floorboards. Liam at eighteen, standing in the

linic, telling a Blackridge Alpha that nobody was taking his sister anywhere. Eight years of school forms and nightmares and patrols and never once, as far as anyone could tell, doing a single thing for himself.

She had been everything. For eight years, Abby had been the whole shape of his life.

And then she grew up, and found her mate, and moved into the packhouse. And he had come home to a house that was suddenly much too quiet, and packed her old things into three boxes with her name on them, and bought new sheets for a stranger.

I didn’t know if there was room left in him for anyone else. I didn’t know if there ever had been. Maybe he didn’t know how to care for someone except the way he had cared for her, carefully, from a respectful distance, making sure she had breakfast.

I didn’t want there to be room. That was the point.

Isn’t it? Wren murmured.

I took my hands off my face and glared at the rabbit.

***

The plan had been simple.

Make it unbearable. Not loud, not dramatic, not childish. Just unbearable. Be cold. Be correct. Keep every rule to the letter and turn his own house into a place where he had to knock on every door and ask permission to breathe. Make him feel like a guest in his own kitchen. Give him nothing. And sooner or later, a man like that, a man who had spent eight years being needed, would get tired of being shut out, and say the words, and send me home.

His idea, his rejection, his fault. My word to Tiernan kept. Wren unable to argue.

It was a good plan.

There was only one problem with it.

He was never here.

I hadn’t thought about that. I hadn’t thought about what it meant to live with the Beta of a pack whose Alpha was lying in bed with a curse in his chest. Liam left before it was light. Every morning I heard his door, and then his feet on the stairs, careful on the fourth step, which creaked, and then the kitchen, and then the front door, quiet, so as not to wake me. Most nights he came back after I had

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