His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 118

Chapter 118

Arms up a little, Luna. There.”

I lifted my arms. The seamstress knelt at my feet with a mouthful of pins and a measuring pe around her neck, and worked her way along the hem in small, quick tucks, muttering to herself. Ivy stood beside the mirror holding a pincushion the size of a fist and watching every movement with the expression of someone memorizing a recipe.

The dress was lavender.

Cassandra had chosen the color, though she had pretended to let me choose it. She had laid four swatches on the desk in the Luna’s rooms and said whichever you like, of course, and then tapped the lavender twice with one finger when she thought I wasn’t looking. It was soft and pale, like the sky just before the light goes, and the bodice was fitted close, and the sleeves came down to my wrists in a fall of something so fine I could see my skin through it.

“It brings out your eyes,” Ivy had said, the first time I tried it on. Then she had gone pink and pretended she hadn’t said anything.

I looked at the girl in the mirror.

She looked very tired.

The dress didn’t hide that. Nothing did, these days. There were shadows under my eyes that Ivy had started covering with powder in the mornings without asking, and the three white strands at my temple caught the light from the window every time I moved my head. I had lost weight. Not much.

The seamstress had taken in the waist twice.

The Alphas would be here in four days.

Four days of lists. Rooms, beds, menus, patrol routes, seating plans that Cassandra and Hester Lowe had now argued about three times in the community hall while I stood between them nodding. Letters from packs I had never heard of, asking how many of their wolves they could bring. A letter from Greyhollow, in a hand so elegant it looked engraved, accepting the invitation on behalf of their new Alpha, with his compliments to the Luna on her recent elevation.

I had read that one twice and not been able to say why I didn’t like it.

And Kade.

I hadn’t been inside his rooms in nine days. I sent Ivy every evening, with tea or a book or the day’s reports, and every evening she came back and said He’s resting, Luna, in a careful voice that meant he

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Sometimes I slept. Sometimes I dropped into the dark like a stone into a well, and woke at dawn with no memory of anything at all, and it felt like a gift.

Other nights, I dreamed.

Not every night. Three times now, in nine days. Never the same dream twice, and never que clear. Once it was the candle again, and the cloth on the table, and the smell of crushed roots, but no blade and no hands, only the sense of someone sitting very still in the dark, listening. Once it was water. A river running fast and brown over stones, and a wheel turning in it, slow and creaking, and a cold that went all the way through me. The last time there was nothing to see at all. Only a voice, humming, very low, the same tuneless song, so close it might have been inside my own head.

I woke from that one with my hands shaking and the taste of smoke in my mouth.

I hadn’t told anyone. Not Kade. Not Imogen. I didn’t know how to say it without it sounding like I was falling apart, and I couldn’t afford to fall apart. Not with Garrick Shaw counting heirs and the whole valley about to walk through our door.

But I knew what it was. I thought I did. On the field, when I broke her ring of stones, I had pushed everything I had into that rock and felt the crack run back up the slope to her. I had felt her magic touch mine. For one second, in the middle of all that light, I had felt Cressida.

Maybe something had stayed open. Maybe that was what Imogen meant when she said the field had cost me more than three white hairs.

Maybe I was just exhausted, and frightened, and dreaming about the thing that frightened me most.

I didn’t know which would be worse.

“Luna?”

I blinked.

The seamstress was sitting back on her heels, looking up at me. Ivy was looking at me too. I had no idea how long I had been standing there with my arms still lifted, staring at nothing.

“The hem,” the seamstress said gently. “Is it right? Do you like it?”

I opened my mouth.

“It’s lovely,” someone said from the doorway.

I turned.

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conte anyway.

The seamstress’s mouth went thin. Ivy’s eyes went very wide.

‘s beautiful,” I said to the seamstress, and made myself smile at her. “Thank you. It’s perfect. Could you give us a moment?”

She hesitated. Then she gathered up her pins and her tape and went out, with a long look

Sloane

on her way past. Ivy followed, pincushion and all, and glanced back at me from the door as if to ask whether she should fetch somebody.

I shook my head slightly. She closed the door.

******

Sloane came into the room slowly. She looked at the dress, and then at me in it, and something in

her face eased a little.

“It suits you,” she said.

“It’s Cassandra’s idea.” I looked down at myself. “All of it is. The dresses. The hair. I keep putting them on and looking in the mirror and seeing someone else. Like I’m playing a part, and any minute someone’s going to notice I don’t know my lines.”

Sloane came and stood beside me at the mirror.

For a moment, we just looked. Her in gray, with her hair scraped back and her face too thin. Me in lavender, with the white strands at my temple and the crescent at my throat.

“It is you,” she said. “That’s the point. They’re not dressing you up. They’re catching up.” She reached out and straightened the fall of one sleeve, the way she would have fixed her own. “And at least these were made for you. The first week, Cassandra had you in her old dresses. Everyone in the hall knew them. You looked like her ghost.”

“I didn’t mind.”

“I know you didn’t.”

“They stopped looking at me,” I said. “When I wore hers. They looked at the dress, and they thought of her, and they stopped looking for what was wrong with me.” I tried to smile. “I’ll take that.”

Sloane didn’t smile back. But she didn’t argue either.

We sat down on the edge of the window seat. The lavender skirt spread out across the cushions, and

I held it carefully off the floor so the pins wouldn’t catch.

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“I keep going over it in my head. All of it. Who sits where, and who gets the rooms facing the lake, and whether the Stonecrest Luna still can’t abide lilies on the table or whether that was Harlan’s

other.” I pressed my hands flat against my knees. “It matters. I know it matters. If they go home and sax Moonhaven is falling apart, then it will be. And the girls. Four of them still don’t know where they belong. If even one of those Alphas looks at Tessa or one of the others and recognizes something, a face, a name–”

“Then it’s worth it,” Sloane said.

“But I have to do it without Kade.” It came out smaller than I meant it to. “I’ve never done anything, like this. I still don’t understand half of what the elders talk about in council. I sit there and god and write things down so I can look them up afterward. And now I’m supposed to stand in the hall with every Alpha in the valley and be the face of all of it, and I’m terrified I’ll say something wrong. Or do something wrong. Or just stand there with my mouth open while somebody important waits for me to answer a question I don’t understand.”

Sloane listened to all of it.

When I had finished, she was quiet for a moment.

“You’re not doing it alone,” she said. “Liam will be in that hall. Cassandra will be at your elbow the whole night. Edmund knows every Alpha who’s coming and half their grandfathers.” She paused. “And for what it’s worth, nobody is going to ask you a question you don’t understand.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they’re Alphas.” She said it with great contempt. “They’re arrogant, Abby. Most of them aren’t remotely interested in what a woman has to say about anything. They’ll talk to Liam. They’ll talk to Edmund. They’ll talk past you and over you, and they’ll expect you to smile.” She shrugged. “All you have to do that night is be beautiful and be polite. You’re already both. Keep them fed. Keep their glasses full. Let every one of them feel like he’s the most respected man in the room. That’s all

most of them want.”

I stared at her. “That’s all?”

“That’s all they’ll see.” Her mouth moved. “What you do with what you hear while you’re smiling at them is another matter.”

I looked down at the lavender in my lap.

“I wish Kade were going to be there,” I said.

Sloane didn’t say anything for a moment.

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Sloane went still.

Not for nine days. He sends messages back with Ivy that he’s resting.” I swallowed. “We argued. Before. He sent me to sleep in here, and I went, and since then he’s been-” I didn’t know the word. “Shut. He hates this. All of it. The reception. The Alphas walking through his pack while he can’t even get down the stairs. He told Liam it was a mistake to invite them. He told Cassandra I should have waited.”

“Should you have?”

“No.” It came out steadier than anything else I had said. “The rumors are getting worse every week. If we hide, they’ll think the rumors are true. And the girls can’t wait. Some of them have mothers out

there.”

Sloane nodded slowly.

“Then you’re right,” she said. “And he knows you’re right, which is why he won’t see you.” She looked out of the window. “But Kade isn’t wrong to be worried. I don’t think they’re coming to thank

you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean they’ll bring their gifts and eat our food and say how sorry they were to hear about the Alpha.” Her voice had gone flat and careful. “And they’ll be counting. Every one of them. How many warriors on the wall. How far the Alpha can walk. Whether the Luna knows what she’s doing. Whether Moonhaven is still worth fearing.” She turned back to me. “Some of them are coming to gloat. Some of them are coming to look for a soft place to push. Watch them, Abby. All of them. Moonhaven has never been this weak, and every one of those men knows it.’

The room was very quiet.

“Thank you,” I said finally.

“Don’t thank me.”