His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 122

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Chapter 122

Sloane

nade the tea in the little kettle Cassandra had brought up for me the first week, on the plate by the window, because I was still not trusted with the kitchens.

Kaia Finnegan sat in my chair while I did it, with her hands in her lap and her back very stright, in a pale green silk dress that cost more than anything I owned now. She hadn’t said a word since the top of the stairs. She was looking at the window, at the black glass and her own reflection in it, as she were waiting for something to come up out of the dark on the other side.

I knew that look. I had worn it for most of a month.

I put a cup in her hands. She took it without seeming to notice.

“Drink that,” I said. “It’s mostly honey. Cassandra swears by it.”

She drank some. Then a little more. After a while, her shoulders came down half an inch from

around her ears, and she looked at the cup properly for the first time, and then at me.

“Thank you,” she said. “For out there.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You didn’t have to.”

“I know.” I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed, carefully, with my left leg out in front of me. It ached tonight. It ached most nights, after stairs. “I was standing in that doorway for a good minute before I said anything. I wanted to see what he would do.”

She looked at me sharply.

“I grew up around men like that,” I said. “Alphas’ sons. My father used to sit me at dinner tables full of them when I was fifteen, so I’d know how to talk to them.” I shrugged. “You learn to spot the type. They’re charming in the hall and something else in the corridor. They never raise their voices. They don’t need to.”

Kaia didn’t say anything. Her fingers had tightened around the cup.

I didn’t ask.

I didn’t need to. I had watched her go flat against that wall with her hands spread on the stone like a woman pinned there by something nobody else could see. I had watched her flinch from his hand so hard she cracked her head on the wall. And I had heard what he called her. Little wren. Soft, fond, the

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on my wrists that didn’t show anymore.

I didn’t say any of that. It wasn’t mine to say.

“What did he mean?” she asked eventually. “Out there. When he called you-”

“A traitor.”

She winced. “Yes.”

I had wondered when someone would ask me that to my face. Nobody had, yet. They said it behind me, in corridors and kitchens and through closed windows. Nobody had ever just asked.

I looked at her. At the Ravenwood girl in her mother’s dress. Tiernan Finnegan’s sister. I didn’t know how much he had told her. I didn’t know how much he knew himself, beyond what the council had written down and Cassandra had sent out in her letters. And Abby and Cassandra had spent weeks making sure the version the packs heard was the one that let me stay.

I wasn’t going to undo that in my bedroom over a cup of honey.

“I did something stupid,” I said. “This autumn. I wanted Kade, and I wanted Abby gone, and I paid a rogue to take her across the border.”

Kaia’s eyes went wide.

“He took me instead,” I said. “Sold me to the Rogue King. I was his prisoner for weeks. In a room with the lock on the outside, with a collar on so my wolf couldn’t hear me. He made me do things.” I kept my voice very level. “He made me lure Abby into a tunnel, so they could take her too. And then he marked me, and dragged me onto the field the night of the battle, and at the end I rejected him in front of half the pack.” I lifted one shoulder. “The council pardoned me. They decided I’d been punished enough.”

It was the truth. It was the version the council had heard, and the version I had confirmed in that room with my hands in my lap and Liam’s face white behind the Luna’s chair.

It wasn’t the whole truth. It wasn’t the cabin, or the fever, or the gray blanket, or a man getting to his feet in a cell, though it cost him, because he had heard me coming down the stairs. It wasn’t the way Rhea still lay with her nose to the west every night, waiting.

Those were mine. I kept them.

Kaia was quiet for a long time.

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She stared at me.

Lstarted it,” I said. “Everything that happened to me after, I walked into it with my eyes open. hired that man. I wanted that girl gone. I knew what I was doing, and I did it anyway, and then the whole world fell on top of me, and I don’t get to be surprised about that.” I looked down at my hands. “And she forgave me. Abby. She sat at the head of the council table and pardoned me, and then she came and sat on that bed and asked me for advice. Cassandra took me in. Liam carried me the field. They’re still here. After everything I did to them, they’re still here.” My voice tightened, just tle. “That’s more kindness than I’ve earned. The cooks can call me whatever they like. I can live with it

Kaia looked at me as though she wanted to argue and didn’t know where to start.

“That’s very sensible,” she said finally.

“It’s very new.” I almost smiled. “Give it a month. I might be throwing things again.”

She laughed. It surprised her. It came out short and startled, and she put a hand over her mouth as

if she could catch it.

It was a good sound. I didn’t think she made it often.

***

We sat for a while. The music came up faintly through the floor from the hall, and the wind moved in the dead stalks of the kitchen garden below the window. Kaia finished her tea and held the empty

cup.

“Can I ask you something?” I said.

She looked at me warily. “That depends.”

“Liam.”

Something went across her face, too quick to catch.

“What about him?”

“Nothing in particular.” I leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve known him my whole life. Since before I could walk. So I’m biased. I want to say that first.” I looked at the ceiling. “But I wanted you to know a few things about him, from someone who isn’t his sister and isn’t his mother’s best friend. And isn’t trying to sell him to you.”

“You’re not?”

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like it was nothing.” I swallowed. “He was the only one who didn’t give up on me. And I had just tried) to have his sister kidnapped.”

Kaia was very still.

“When their parents died,” I said, “he was eighteen. He’d just buried them. He was still walking around half-asleep with it. And Abby’s uncle came down from Blackridge to take her, and Liam stood in the clinic doorway and said no. Just no. He didn’t know how to raise a ten-year-old girl didn’t know how to do anything. He learned all of it, the forms and the nightmares and the school plays while he was still crying at night where she couldn’t hear him.” I paused. “He never once let her see it.”

The music from below had stopped. Somewhere, people were clapping.

“He’s devoted,” I said. “When he loves someone, he loves them all the way down. And he’s protective. Sometimes too protective. He doesn’t know how to stand back and let people fall.” I shrugged. “But he isn’t like the man in that corridor. He isn’t anything like him.”

“I know he isn’t,” Kaia said quietly.

“Good.”