His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 116

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Chapter 116

Malachi

Her stick was still on the floor beside my bed.

I had seen it the first night, when Teague brought me back up the mountain and half carried me through the door, and I hadn’t picked it up. I had stepped over it on my way to the bed and kan down and slept for most of two days, and when I woke, it was still there, and I stepped over it again.

Two weeks now. I stepped over it every morning.

Teague had looked at it once, on the third day, and then at me, and then gone out to split wood without saying anything. He hadn’t touched it either.

***

The cabin had been quiet before her.

I had chosen it for that. A clearing high on the mountain where the road gave out, a stream behind it, a long view of nothing in every direction. In the years before Cressida found me, I had lived in a dozen places like it, and the quiet had been the only thing I asked of any of them.

It was a different kind of quiet now. It had a shape. It was the shape of someone who wasn’t in the

next room.

I noticed it most in the mornings. I woke before light, the way I always had, and lay listening, and some part of me was still waiting for the sounds that used to come through the wall. The creak of the bed when she turned over. The sharp, impatient breath when she tried to sit up too fast and the leg reminded her. Once, near the end, humming. Very quietly, as if she didn’t know she was doing it. I had lain on my side of the wall and listened to her hum something I didn’t know, and not breathed, in case she heard me and stopped.

Now there was nothing on the other side of the wall but an empty room with a lock on the outside.

I hadn’t been in there since.

*****

Her boots were by the stove.

They had been drying there the morning Cressida’s men took her, and nobody had moved them. Good boots, pack-made, worn soft at the heel. One of the laces had broken and she had knotted it, badly, in two places.

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way heat does, and not come back.

It had gone from everything, one thing at a time. The pillow on my bed. The chair by the window where she had sat with her leg up on a stool and watched the snow. The blanket. The gray wool blanket I had put over her the night of the fever, which she had kept, and slept under every night

after, and left in a heap on the floor when they carried her out.

I had folded it. That was all. I had picked it up and folded it and put it on the end of my ber and for the first few nights, if I turned my head on the pillow, I could still find her in it. Roses and bergamot, faint, under the woodsmoke.

Then one night I couldn’t.

I lay there for a long time after that.

***

She was better now.

I told myself that every day, and most days I believed it. She was in Moonhaven, in a warm room with a soft bed, with Cassandra to look after her and a healer who knew what she was doing with a broken leg. She was among people who had known her all her life. She had a name again, and a pack, and no lock on her door.

She was free of me. That had been the whole point.

I had been unfair to her. I knew that. I had known it for a long time before I let myself say it. I had kept her in a room because I couldn’t think of anything else to do with her. I had marked her because my wolf wanted it and I had stopped knowing how to tell him no. I had kept the rest of my name behind my teeth for weeks, so she couldn’t take back what I had taken, and called it keeping her safe.

None of that had been for her.

The only thing I had ever done for her was the last thing. The words on the field. The lie in the council room. The look I gave Adrian’s son so he would keep his mouth shut.

She deserved someone who started with that. Not someone who got there at the end, on his knees, with everything else already gone.

I hoped she found him.

I meant it. That was the strange part. I lay awake and meant it, and it was the worst thing I had ever

felt.

***

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“In a minute.”

looked at me a while longer. Then he skinned the rabbit himself, which meant he thought was in a bad way, and put it in the pot, and sat down across the table with his whetstone and his wife and started on the edge, slowly, the way he did when he wanted to be in the same room with someone without having to talk to them.

He had been with me eleven years. He had come to me at nineteen, a half-starved wolf with fresh scar down the side of his neck and nowhere left that would take him, and he had stayed through everything. Through Cressida. Through the mountain. Through the field. When I said one word to him across a hundred yards of moonlight and frost, he had turned and run for the trees because I told him to, and he had waited six days on the far side of the border with his truck in a ditch and almost nothing to eat, because I hadn’t told him not to.

He was all I had left. One wolf, and a knife, and a pot of rabbit.

There had been more. Eight men I trusted, on the field. Three were dead. Two had gone east the night after, and one north, and the last two had stayed until the fourth day and then, very politely, asked if I minded. I had told them I didn’t. I hadn’t. I had nothing left to pay them with, and nothing

left to ask them to do.

The scrape of the whetstone went on.

“What do we do?” Teague said.

I looked up.

He didn’t look at me. He was looking at the edge of the knife, turning it in the light from the window. It was the longest sentence he had said to me in a week.

I didn’t answer.

The truth was, I didn’t know.

For twenty years I had known exactly what I wanted. I had wanted it the night my brother put me on the ground in front of the whole pack, and every night of the exile after that, and every night Cressida sat across a fire from me and fed it. Moonhaven. My brother’s chair. Adrian Hayes out of the place that should have been mine. The look on Nathaniel’s face when he understood. I had built my whole

life around it, the way you build a house around a fire.

The fire was out.

Nathaniel was dead. Adrian was dead. The chair belonged to a boy I couldn’t bring myself to kill,

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fight I could find work. I could find a cabin like this one, and a streaff, and a long view of nothing.

I didn’t want to.

sat at the table and turned that over, and it was true. I didn’t want to start again. I was thirty-eight years old, and I was tired in a way that sleep didn’t touch, and the thought of building one more life out of nothing made me want to lie down in the snow.

And there was Cressida.

She would come. Sooner or later. She had come for me once before, in a hunting shack in these same mountains, when I had nothing and wanted nothing, and she had sat down across from me without being asked and given me something to want. I knew exactly how she would do it. I knew how good

she was at it.

I wouldn’t be that again. Whatever else happened to me, I would not sit in a room and let her put her hands on my grief and turn it into something she could use.

“I don’t know,” I said.