His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 120

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150 Mon, Nov 2

Chapter 120

Kaia

and then the Ashford boy fell off the boathouse roof, right into the lake, in his good suit, and Noah says he did it on purpose because he wanted Mira Pike to jump in after him, which she didn’t, obviously, because it was October. Hold still.”

I held still.

Chloe had been doing my hair for forty minutes. She had arrived on Liam’s doorstep at five with a bag full of pins and brushes and something in a spray can that smelled like oranges, announced that Liam had asked her to make sure I got to the packhouse in one piece, and walked straight/past me into the house before I could think of a reason to say no.

She had not stopped talking since.

I sat on the chair in front of the mirror in Abby’s old room with my hands folded in my lap and let her work. My braid was gone. She had brushed it out until it crackled and then started pinning it up in sections, twisting and tucking, with her tongue between her teeth and a mouthful of hairpins she somehow talked around. Every few minutes she stepped back and looked at the back of my head critically and said hmm, and then pulled something out and started again.

She’s nice, Wren said.

She’s loud.

She’s nice and loud.

I groaned. Not out loud. I was proud of that.

“There.” Chloe stepped back. “Don’t move your head. Actually, move your head. Slowly. Left. Okay, right. Okay.” She nodded to herself. “It’ll hold. Now the dress. Where’s the dress?”

I nodded at the wardrobe.

She opened it. She looked inside for a long moment.

“The green one?”

“The green one.”

Chloe took it out and held it up against the light from the window. It was pale sage, long and plain, with narrow straps and a low back, the kind of color that looks like nothing at all on the hanger. My mother had picked it out for me two summers ago, for the midsummer dance at Ravenwood, and I had

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“Sage.”

‘s very sage.” She looked at me doubtfully. “Are you sure? I could run home. I have a navy one that would-”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay,” she said, in the voice people use when they have decided to be supportive about a mistake. “Okay. Let’s see it.”

I went behind the wardrobe door and changed.

When I came out, Chloe was sitting on the end of the bed fiddling with a hairpin. She looked up.

She stopped fiddling.

For a moment she didn’t say anything at all, which I suspected had not happened to her in some

years.

“Oh,” she said.

I looked down at myself. The silk fell straight from the straps to the floor, cool against my skin. In the mirror behind her, with my hair up and my shoulders bare, the green had gone soft and silvery, and it made my eyes look almost the same color.

“I take it back,” Chloe said. “All of it. I take back mint. I take back the navy.” She stood up and walked once around me, slowly, the way you walk around a horse you’re thinking of buying. “Nobody can wear that color. Nobody. And you just put it on and it’s like it was waiting for you.”

I felt my face go warm.

“My mother chose it,” I said.

“Your mother,” Chloe said, “had excellent taste.”

***

She did my face, which took another twenty minutes, and talked the whole time.

She told me about the Ashford boy and the lake, and about Ryan shouting at a delivery driver until the man left his van in the road and walked into town, and about the clinic, where she worked three days a week now that Abby didn’t. She told me which of the warriors were sleeping with which of the kitchen girls, and which elders were feuding, and how Hester Lowe had made a grown man cry over a

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“Has Liam shown you anything?” Chloe asked. She was doing something to my eyelashes with a tiny rush. “Around Moonhaven, I mean. The lake. The town. The good bakery, not the bad one.”

“He’s been busy.”

o

“So that’s a no.” She sighed. “Of course it’s a no. Liam’s been busy since he was eighteen she sat back. “Right. After tonight, I’m showing you around. Properly. The lake, the bakery, the trail the falls, all of it. You can’t live here and only know Liam’s kitchen.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I want to.” She said it simply. Then, a little more quietly, “I could use the company, honestly”

I looked at her.

She was turning the little brush over in her fingers, not looking at me.

“Abby’s my best friend,” she said. “Since we were six. Me and her and Noah. We did everything together.” She shrugged. “And then she shifted and found her mate and became Luna, and now she’s -” She waved the brush vaguely toward the window, toward the packhouse. “Up there. All the time. In meetings, and dresses, and I’m not even sure she sleeps. I haven’t talked to her properly in two weeks. I’m hoping I get five minutes with her tonight.” She smiled, but it was a little crooked. “I’m not complaining. I’m so proud of her I could burst. But I miss her.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I didn’t say anything. Chloe didn’t seem to mind.

“Anyway,” she said, brightening. “Your brother’s coming tonight, right? Liam said.”

My stomach tightened. “Yes.”

“Don’t worry about him.” She waved the brush. “I’ll keep him busy. I’m very good at keeping people busy.”

I stared at her.

“You like him,” I said.

Chloe went pink to the roots of her hair.

“I didn’t say that.”

“You didn’t have to.”

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“Nice ones.” She gave me a look from under her lashes. “What’s he like? Really?”

opened my mouth. Then I closed it again, because I realized I didn’t know how to answer that about my own brother. Stubborn. Serious. Infuriating. The person who had taught me to throw a punch when I was fourteen and never once let me win.

“He makes terrible coffee,” I said finally.

Chloe looked thrilled.

***

The packhouse was lit up from end to end when we got there.

Every window glowed. There were lanterns strung along the path from the parking area to the main doors, and cars I didn’t recognize lined up along the drive, mountain plates and river plates and two long black ones with tinted windows. Music came faintly through the walls. Somewhere inside, a lot of people were talking at once.

Chloe squeezed my arm at the foot of the steps.

“I have to find Noah,” she said. “He’s probably hiding in the kitchens eating the canapés. Liam said he’d meet you by the hall doors.” She smiled at me. “You look amazing. Go knock him dead.”

Then she was gone, up the steps in a swirl of blue, and I was alone.

I went up slowly. Inside, the main corridor was full of people in their best clothes, Moonhaven wolves mostly, hovering near the walls with drinks in their hands, watching the hall doors. I found a spot near a pillar and stood with my back against it, and waited.

He didn’t make me wait long.

He came down the corridor from the direction of the offices, walking fast, the way he always walked when he was thinking about six things at once. He was wearing a dark suit, charcoal, with a white shirt and no tie, and his hair had been cut that afternoon, I could tell, because it was shorter at the sides than it had been yesterday. He looked like the Beta of a pack that intended to be taken seriously.

Then he saw me, and stopped walking.

I watched it happen. I watched the six things he was thinking about go out of his face all at once, and leave nothing behind but me.

Mate, Wren breathed.

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I was looking at him. That was the problem.

He came the rest of the way slowly. He stopped in front of me, and for a moment he didn’t say anything at all.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“You look-” He stopped. He seemed to think better of whatever he had been about to say, and tried again. “Chloe did a good job.”

“Chloe did my hair. The rest of it was already here.”

“I know.” His mouth moved. “That’s what I meant.”

I felt my face go warm for the second time that evening, and hated it.

He held out his arm.

I looked at it. Then I took it. His sleeve was warm under my hand, and I could feel the muscle in his forearm go very still when my fingers settled, as though he was concentrating on not moving.

“Don’t make it weird,” I said.

“I would never.”

“You’re making it weird right now.”

“I’m standing here.”

“Weirdly.”

He almost laughed. He turned it into a cough. Then, very seriously, without looking at me: “If you want, we could pretend. In front of your brother. That we’re madly in love. It might get him off your back for a night.”

I looked at him in horror.

“Absolutely not,” I said. “He’ll have us mated before dessert.”

“Fair point.”

“He’ll have the elders called. He’ll have a ceremony booked. He’ll start a list of names for our

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“Just walking,” Liam said. “Into a room. Together.”

That I can do.”

The hall was enormous.

I had seen it once before, the night of the Luna ceremony, but it had been crowded and loud and I had spent most of that evening trying very hard not to look at anyone. Now I looked. /Tall windows along both sides, black with night. Long tables against the walls, heaped with food. Candles everywhere. And at the far end, on a low dais, two carved chairs side by side.

One of them was empty.

The other was empty too. Abby wasn’t sitting in it. She was standing at the foot of the dais, alone, in a long lavender dress, with her hair pinned up and her hands folded in front of her. As each new group came through the doors and was announced, she stepped forward to meet them.

Alone. Not with Cassandra at her side, though Cassandra was close, ten feet behind her with Edmund. Not with Liam. Not with anyone.

I watched her greet the Alpha of a river pack, an older man with a beard like a hedge. She took his hand in both of hers and thanked him, quietly, for bringing his daughters home. He looked startled. Then he looked down at her hands, and something in his face loosened, and he bowed.

I looked at the empty chair beside the one she wasn’t sitting in.

“Is everything all right?” I asked Liam, very low.

“It’s fine.”

“The Alpha isn’t-”

“It was planned like this.” He didn’t look away from his sister. “He’ll see them tomorrow. One at a time, in his office. She’s announcing it as each one comes in.” A muscle moved in his jaw. “He can’t do

the stairs. He won’t be carried down them in front of this lot.”

I looked back at Abby.

She was smiling at the next Alpha. A tall, gray woman from somewhere north, with a Luna’s ring on her own hand. Abby said something, and the woman laughed. Neither of them looked at the empty

chairs.

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“She’s eighteen,” I said. “And she has to stand there alone and smile at every one of them while they decide whether her pack is dying.” I shook my head. “I’d rather fight a bear.”

would she,” Liam said. “She’s doing it anyway.”

The doors opened again.

“Alpha Sebastian Thorne,” the steward announced. “Of Greyhollow.”

The room didn’t go quiet. There was no reason for it to. He was just another Alpha, the youngest one in the room, tall and fair and easy in a dark suit that fit him perfectly, with two of his warriors at his back. He came down the aisle between the tables without hurrying, smiling at people he didn’t know, nodding at people who didn’t know him. Making himself welcome. He had always been very good at making himself welcome.

I stopped breathing.

It was the strangest thing. I didn’t decide to. My lungs simply stopped, mid-breath, and wouldn’t go on. My hand on Liam’s arm went cold. The noise of the hall went thin and far away, as if I were hearing it through water.

Wren went flat inside me. Not hiding. Not cowering. Flat, belly to the ground, ears back, every muscle locked, the way a wolf goes flat when something much bigger walks past her in the dark.

No, I thought. No, no, no.

Five years. Five years of being careful. Five years of knowing exactly where Greyhollow was on every map and never once crossing into it, of leaving rooms when anyone said his name, of telling myself that the world was big enough that I would never have to see his face again.

He had his father’s pack now. Of course he did. His father had died in the autumn. I had heard. I had heard and gone very carefully about my day and not let myself think about what it meant.

It meant this. It meant he was an Alpha, and Alphas got invited to things.

“Kaia?”

Liam’s voice, very close. His hand had come up over mine on his arm.

“Kaia. Are you all right?”

“Fine.” My voice came out perfectly normal. I had no idea how. “I’m fine. It’s warm in here.” I made myself take my hand off his arm. “Could you get me a drink? Anything. Water.”

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