His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 119

Chapter 119

Name home at seven.

Ryan had looked at me as if I had grown a second head when I told him I was leaving. “It’s seven,” he had said. “You don’t leave at seven.” I had told him the western patrol could live without me for one night, and that if anything caught fire, he knew where I lived. Then I had walked out of the packhouse before I could change my mind, and sat in the truck in the drive for five minutes with the engine running, thinking about what I was going to say.

I still didn’t know when I pulled up outside the house.

The kitchen light was on. The windows had steamed up from the inside.

I opened the front door and stopped.

The house smelled of onions and garlic and something roasting, rich and dark, with rosemary in it. There was music playing very low on the old radio on top of the fridge, something with a fiddle. The table was set. Two plates. Two glasses. A loaf of bread on the board, already cut.

Kaia was at the stove.

She had her sleeves pushed up past her elbows and her hair twisted up off her neck with a pencil through it, and she was stirring something in my mother’s old cast-iron pan, the one I hadn’t used since Abby moved out because I always burned things in it. She didn’t turn around.

“You’re early,” she said.

“I know.”

“I was going to have it ready.”

“It smells ready.”

“It’s not.” She tasted something off the spoon, frowned, and reached for the salt. “Five minutes. Wash your hands.”

I washed my hands.

Jasper had gone very quiet. Not the restless quiet of the last five weeks, pacing and pulling. Something else. He was sitting up, ears forward, the way a dog sits when someone it loves walks in carrying something it doesn’t understand.

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I know, Jasper.

It was lamb, with potatoes roasted in the fat and something green and bitter I didn’t recognize. It was the best thing anyone had cooked in that kitchen in years, and I said so, and she shrugged as if it didn’t matter, but the tips of her ears went pink….

We ate for a while without talking. The fiddle music ran on, low and scratchy. Outside, the wind picked up and pushed at the windows.

Then Kaia put her fork down.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

I looked up.

She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at her plate, with her hands flat on the table on either side of it, as if she was holding herself in her chair.

“For last night,” she said. “What I said. About your sister, and hiding, and-” She stopped. “It was cruel. I knew it was cruel while I was saying it. I picked every word so it would be. I wanted you to-” She stopped again. “It doesn’t matter what I wanted. It was a horrible thing to say to someone, and I said it in your own kitchen, and you thanked me for the soup.”

“It was good soup.”

“Liam.”

“Sorry.” I put my own fork down. “I’m listening.”

She looked at me then, finally. Her face was set and pale, and her eyes were very bright.

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “That’s all. I don’t have a better version.”

I sat with that for a moment.

I had been thinking about what to say all day. In the truck. In the patrol meeting. In the corridor outside Kade’s door, waiting for him to finish shouting at Daphne. I had turned Sloane’s words over and over until they had worn smooth. Ask her something. Then shut up and listen to the answer.

I hadn’t planned on her going first.

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hallin a strange pack, and some man you’d never met turned out to be your mate, and the next morning your brother packed your bags and drove you here and left you on my doorstep.” I looked at the table. “And I made up the spare room and bought new sheets and thought that was me being decent about it. I never once asked you what you wanted. I just assumed if I was careful enough that would be enough.”

She didn’t say anything.

“So I’m asking now,” I said. “What do you want, Kaia?”.

She stared at me.

“Because if you want to end it,” I said, “we can. Now. You don’t have to wait three months for it. Tiernan’s coming for the reception. You could go home with him after.” My voice didn’t waver, which surprised me, because Jasper had stood up inside me and was making a low, wordless sound I had never heard from him before. “I won’t make it hard for you. I’ll say whatever you need me to say to

him.”

“And if I don’t?”

“Then you stay. For as long as you want. And I don’t mind.” I made myself hold her eyes. “I don’t want to reject you. I want you to know that. I’m not going to be the one who says those words, because I don’t want to hurt you, and I don’t think I could do it without hurting you.” I took a breath. “On the steps, the night of the ceremony, I told you that you were my responsibility. I meant it. I still do. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I don’t think that’s what you want from anyone. And I don’t think it’s what you deserve.”

The fiddle music had stopped. The radio was playing something else now, very low, a woman

singing.

“I wasn’t ready,” I said. “For any of it. When Jasper woke up on those steps, I didn’t know what to do. I’ve spent eight years being ready for everything, and I wasn’t ready for you.” I looked down at my hands. “And you were right. Last night. You were cruel about it, but you weren’t wrong. I’m not used. to having anything for myself. I don’t know how to want things. I haven’t had to in a long time.”

Kaia was very still across the table.

“It was rude,” she said quietly. “What I said.”

“It was true.”

“It can be both.”

“It can.” I almost smiled. “It usually is.”

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I waited.

“On the steps. When it happened. I hadn’t- I didn’t think it would ever happen to me. I’d stopped thinking about it. And then I walked out into the cold and there you were, and Wren went out of her mind, and I couldn’t breathe.” She turned her glass slowly on the table. “And then everything happened so fast. Tiernan had a plan before I’d even slept. Three months. His house. I barely got to say anything before I was in the car with my plants in a crate and my whole life in two bags, riving to a pack where I don’t know anyone.” She looked up at me. “I don’t know anyone here, Lian. Nerone person. I know your name, and your sister’s, and the woman at the market who weighs the egg”

Something in my chest tightened.

“You could move to the packhouse,” I said. “If you want company. There are always people there. Abby would like you. Cassandra would adopt you inside a week, she does it to everyone. Even Sloane -“I stopped. “She’s been on her own a lot, lately. She wouldn’t mind someone to talk to.”

“I don’t want to move to the packhouse.”

“Okay.”

“I’m fine on my own. I like being on my own.” She said it firmly. Then her mouth twisted. “Most of

the time.”

“And the rest of the time?”

She was quiet for a moment.

“The rest of the time I feel stuck,” she said. “Here. In this house. Waiting for something to happen and not knowing what.” She turned the glass again. “We were supposed to get to know each other. That was the whole point of the three months. That’s what Tiernan said. And I’ve seen you, what, an hour a week? You leave before I wake up. You come back after I’m asleep. I know more about your

plants than I know about you.”

“They’re your plants.”

“You know what I mean.” She almost smiled. “It would be better if I saw you more. That’s all. Not a lot. Just-more.”

I looked at her across the table.

At the pencil in her hair, and the flush on her cheeks from the stove, and the way she was holding her glass with both hands as if it might get away from her.

“So,” I said carefully. “You’re not rejecting me.”

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“Not tonight,” she said. “We still have time.”

Jasper lay down inside me, all at once, as if his legs had given out. I felt him put his head on his pays and let out a long, shaking breath.

I didn’t trust my voice for a second.

“The reception,” I said, when I did. “In three days. Will you come? With me?”