His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 117

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Liam

Chapter 117

Iwas after ten when I finally drove home.

I had been at the packhouse since six that morning. Patrol reports with Ryan. The western ne with Imogen, who had walked the same half mile of trees for the third time that week and come back with nothing but mud on her boots and a temper. Two hours in the Luna’s rooms going over the guest list for the Alphas’ visit with Abby, who read every name out loud and then looked at me and said what do I need to know about this one? as if I were a book she had left lying open on the desk.

Then the council. Then Kade.

That was the part I hadn’t learned how to do yet.

For eight years I had known exactly what I was for. I was Abby’s brother, which meant I was the one who signed the school forms and sat up through the nightmares and stood in the doorway of the clinic at eighteen with my arms folded, telling a Blackridge Alpha that nobody was taking my sister anywhere. I was Kade’s Beta, which meant I held the borders and stood at his right hand and said the things he needed to hear and didn’t want to.

It had been simple. Hard, but simple.

Now my sister sat at the head of the council table in a dress that made her look like our mother, and she didn’t need me to stand between her and anything. She needed me to tell her which elder hated which, and why, and what the eastern grazing dispute had been about in the first place. She needed an advisor. I didn’t know how to be one. I kept wanting to take things out of her hands and carry them myself, and every time I did, she gave me a look that was exactly Mom’s and took them back.

And Kade needed me to be him, a little. Not in the chair. Never in the chair. But in the doorway of his office, nodding at Ryan, signing off on patrol changes Kade would have signed off on, while he sat upstairs in an armchair by a window and threw cups at walls. I went up every evening and told him what I’d done in his name, and he listened with his jaw tight and his hand flat over the wound and said Good in a voice that meant he hated every word.

I was worried about both of them. I was worried in a way I didn’t have anywhere to put.

And then I drove home, and there was Kaia.

***

The kitchen light was on.

That was the first surprise. Most nights, by the time I got back, the house was dark and her door was

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She had a mug in front of her and her feet up on the other chair, and she was reading something, a paperback with a cracked spine, and she didn’t look up when I came in.

Jasper did. Jasper looked at her so hard I felt it in my teeth.

Mate.

Stop.

She’s right there. She waited up.

She didn’t wait up. She’s reading.

He didn’t believe me. Neither did I, entirely. That was the problem with Jasper. He had been like this for five weeks, every time she was in the same room. Pacing, pulling, pushing up against the inside of my skin like a dog at a fence. Every time she walked past me in the hallway, he lunged. Every time I smelled her on the stairs, he wanted to follow it up to her door and lie down outside it.

It was half the reason I left before light. It was half the reason I came home after she was asleep. I could hold Jasper back for a minute, an hour, a meal across a kitchen table. I didn’t know if I could hold him back for weeks. And I had promised her I wouldn’t push, and her list said No waiting looks, and when Jasper was this close to the surface, I didn’t trust what my face was doing.

I put my keys on the hook by the door.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi.” She turned a page.

I opened the fridge for something to do. The breakfast plate I had left that morning was in the drying rack, washed. The note wasn’t on the counter.

“There’s soup,” she said, still not looking up. “On the stove. I made too much.”

I turned around.

She didn’t look at me. Her face was perfectly smooth. But the corner of her mouth had moved, very slightly, the way it did when she thought she had won something.

Made too much. My own words, handed back to me.

“Thanks,” I said.

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“How’s your Alpha?” she asked.

“Better. Slowly.”

“And your sister?”

“Tired.”

She nodded, as if those were the answers she had expected. Then she closed the book over one finger

and looked at me for the first time since I came in.

“Do you do anything,” she said, “that isn’t for one of them?”

I put the spoon down.

“I’m asking,” Kaia said. “Seriously. I’ve lived here five weeks. You’re gone before it’s light and back after I’m asleep. You go to the packhouse for Kade. You go to the Luna’s rooms for Abby. You come back here and make breakfast for me.” She tilted her head. “When is it your turn?”

“I don’t need a turn.”

“Everyone needs a turn.”

“It’s my job.”

“Which one?” Her voice was very calm. That was what I would remember afterward. She wasn’t angry. She was looking at me the way you look at a lock you’ve almost worked out. “You were eighteen when your parents died. Tiernan told me. You raised your sister in this house for eight years. Everybody says it like it’s the most beautiful thing they’ve ever heard. Liam Hayes gave up his whole

life for her.”

“I didn’t give anything up.”

“No, I don’t think you did.” She set the book down on the table. “I think you didn’t have one to give. I think you hid in her. It was easier than having a life of your own, because a life of your own would have meant somebody could take it from you again. So you made her the whole thing, and you never had to want anything for yourself.” She held my eyes. “And now she doesn’t need you. And you’ve got a houseful of somebody else’s plants and nowhere to put your hands. So you’re hiding in Kade. And

you’re trying to hide in me.”

The kitchen was very quiet.

Jasper had gone completely still.

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I took my bowl to the sink and rinsed it and put it in the rack beside the breakfast plate. Then I took y keys off the hook again.

“Thanks for the soup,” I said.

I didn’t look back to see her face. Behind me, I heard the book open again. I didn’t hearage turn.

*******

I drove back to the packhouse because I didn’t know where else to go.

I didn’t go in. I parked behind the kitchens and sat in the truck with the engine ticking and my hands on the wheel, and I breathed until Jasper stopped trying to turn me around and go back.

He hadn’t been angry with her. That was what got me. He had been hurt, the way a dog is hurt when you shout at it, and under that, he still wanted her. He wanted her more, if anything, because now she had looked at us properly and seen something, and that was more than anyone had done in a very

long time.

I got out and walked round to the kitchen garden.

There was a bench there, under the wall, where the cooks went to smoke when Cassandra wasn’t looking. Someone was sitting on it.

It took me a moment to recognize her.

Sloane was wearing a gray coat buttoned to the chin and a scarf of Cassandra’s, and she had her hands pushed deep into her pockets. Her hair was down. In the light from the kitchen windows I could see the line of her throat above the scarf, where the mark had been. There was almost nothing there now. A faint pale crescent, like a scar from years ago, that you would only notice if you knew where to

look.

She was walking without the crutch. I had seen her do it twice that week, slowly, with a slight hitch

on the left side. Daphne had said she was healing faster than anyone had any right to. Proper rest, proper food, a leg set properly the second time. And Cassandra, who had sat up with her every night for the first week and threatened to tie her to the bed if she tried to walk on it before Daphne said so.

She looked better. Her face had filled out a little. The shadows under her eyes were gone.

She didn’t look happy.

“You’re out late,” I said.

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Through the kitchen windows, we could hear two of the cooks finishing up. Water running. Plates. Low voices.

walking around like she owns the place again.”

“Cassandra’s pet.”

“They should’ve sent her off with him. Rogue King’s leftovers.”

Someone laughed. Then the window closed, and the voices were gone.

Sloane didn’t move. She didn’t even blink. She sat with her hands in her pockets and looked at the

dead bean poles as if she hadn’t heard a word.

“Sloane-”

“Don’t.” She said it lightly. “It’s better than last week. Last week they did it in the hall, where I

could see their faces.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“It would have been easier for everyone,” she said, after a while, “if I had just left. Gone with him, or gone anywhere. Disappeared. They wouldn’t have to look at me. Cassandra wouldn’t have to answer for me at every council meeting. Abby wouldn’t have to pretend she doesn’t hear what they say about me in the corridors.” She shrugged. “But I can’t. I gave my word. A year.”

I looked at her profile in the kitchen light.

Gone with him. I heard it. I chose, I think, not to hear the rest.

“Hey,” I said. “You don’t have to think like that. Not anymore.”

She glanced at me.

“You’re free of it,” I said. “That bond. Whatever he did to you, whatever it did to you, it’s gone. You said the words. You don’t have to carry it.” I nudged her shoulder, the way I used to when we were kids and she had lost a race and was pretending not to care. “And you never know. The Goddess gives second chances sometimes. You could find someone. Someone decent.”

Sloane looked at me for a long moment.

I couldn’t read her face. I had known her my whole life, and I couldn’t read it.

Then she looked away again.

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“So,” she said eventually. “Kaia.”

I let out a breath. “How do you know it’s Kaia?”

She

“Because you look like someone just told you the truth about yourself and you didn’t like pulled her coat tighter. “And because the only other person who can do that to you is Abby, and she’s asleep.”

I put my elbows on my knees and looked at the ground between my boots.