His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 127

Chapter 127

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Chapter 127

Nidn’t get up.

I heard Liam leave a little after six, the way I always did. His door, his feet on the stairs, careful on the fourth step. Then he didn’t leave. I heard him stop at the bottom of the stairs, and stand here for a long time, and then come back up, slowly, and stop outside my door.

He didn’t knock.

After a while, I heard something set down on the floor of the hallway. Then his feet again, going away. The front door, quiet, so as not to wake me.

I lay on my back and looked at the rabbit in the ceiling.

My mother’s dress was over the back of the chair where I had thrown it at one in the morning. Chloe’s pins were in a little pile on the nightstand. I had taken them out one by one, sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark, and every single one had felt like pulling a nail out of a board. My hair still smelled of the oranges in her spray. And under it, faint, of something else. Expensive cologne and cold air and a hand that hadn’t quite touched me.

Little wren.

I turned over and put my face in the pillow.

Wren didn’t say anything. She had been quiet all night. Not flat, like she had gone in the corridor. Just quiet, curled very small somewhere under my ribs with her nose tucked under her tail, the way a wolf lies when she’s been hurt and is waiting to see how badly.

I didn’t blame her.

***

At ten I got up long enough to open the door.

There was a tray on the floor. Toast gone cold, a boiled egg in a cup with a little knitted cover on it that must have been Abby’s once, a mug of tea with a saucer over it to keep the heat in. It had stopped keeping the heat in some hours ago.

And a note, folded once.

No rule about this. I checked. Ate yours.

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I didn’t give it permission to do.

I took the tray in. I ate the cold toast. I didn’t eat the egg. Then I got back into bed and lay there with the note on the pillow beside me, and didn’t think about anything at all, as hard as I could.

***

He came back at noon. He wasn’t alone.

I heard the truck in the drive and then two sets of feet on the porch, and two voices, low, and knew the second one before I heard what it was saying. I knew it the way you know your own front door

They came up the stairs together. Then Liam’s feet went past my door and into his own room, and the second set stopped outside mine.

A knock. Three short raps, the way he had knocked on my bedroom door since I was four and afraid

of the dark.

“Kai.”

I didn’t answer.

“I know you’re in there. I can hear you breathing.” A pause. “I’m leaving at two. I wanted to see you

first.”

I got up and opened the door.

Tiernan stood in the hall in his traveling clothes, his good suit gone, his coat over his arm. He looked tired. He looked, for a second, exactly like our father, the way he did sometimes when he forgot to hold his face in place.

He looked at me. At my nightshirt and my bare feet and my hair, still crimped from Chloe’s pins.

“Can I come in?”

I stepped back.

He came in and shut the door and stood in the middle of Abby’s old room, looking around. At the plants on the windowsill. At my mother’s dress over the chair. At the tray on the desk with the cold egg still in its knitted cover.

He sat down on the edge of the bed without being asked. I sat in the chair.

“You left early,” he said. “Last night.”

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Tiernan almost smiled. “He’s good at that.”

He’s good at everything,” I said. “It’s very irritating.”

This time he did smile. Then it went away again, and he looked at his hands for a moment, and knew whatever was coming next was the reason he had come upstairs.

“I saw Kade this morning,” he said. “In his office. He looks bad, Kai. Worse than I thought. But he’s still Kade.” He turned his coat over on his knee. “And I talked to some of the others before they left. Harlan. Corran. That northern Luna who frightens everybody.”

I waited.

“And Sebastian Thorne,” Tiernan said.

Every muscle in my body went still.

I kept my face exactly where it was. I had a great deal of practice.

“He asked after you,” Tiernan said. “He said you two knew each other. From years back. He was very warm about it.” He was watching me, the way he watched a border he didn’t trust. “He said he hoped you were well. That he’d been sorry not to have longer to talk.”

“We met at a gathering,” I said. “A long time ago. I barely remember.”

“That’s what I thought.” He turned the coat over again. “He also asked a lot of questions. About you. About Liam. About how long you were staying, and what the arrangement was.” His voice didn’t change. “I didn’t like how many questions he asked.”

“Then don’t answer them.”

“I didn’t.” He looked at me for a long moment. “Kai. Is there something I should know?”

Yes, I thought. Five years of it.

“No,” I said.

My brother looked at me. He didn’t believe me. I could see him not believing me. And I could see him decide, the way he had decided every time for five years, not to push. Because pushing had never once worked. Because I would only dig my heels in harder. Because he loved me, and didn’t know what else to do.

He let out a breath.

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“The one where you say whatever will make me leave the room fastest.” He leaned forward with his hows on his knees. “Do you want to come home?”

I stared at him.

“I mean it,” he said. “If you want to come home, say the word. You can be in the car at two Your plants can go in the back. I’ll square it with Liam, and with the deal, and with anyone else who has an opinion. Nobody will think less of you for it.” He held my eyes. “Last night, you looked like youd seen a ghost. I don’t know whose. But if this place is doing that to you, I’m not leaving you in it.”

For a moment, I couldn’t say anything at all.

I thought about Ravenwood. The packhouse on the hill. My room with the slanted ceiling and the window over the river. The training ring where Tiernan had taught me to throw a punch. The road out of the north gate that ran east for twelve miles through the pines and then forked, and the right fork went down to the crossroads, and the left fork went straight into Greyhollow.

Twelve miles. Five years. I had never once taken the left fork. I had always known exactly where it

was.

Moonhaven was half a day’s drive from Greyhollow, over the mountains. Further from him than I had been at any moment since I was eighteen.

And there was a tray on the desk, with a cold egg in a knitted cover that had been somebody’s little sister’s once. And a note on my pillow that said Ate yours.

“No,” I said.

Tiernan blinked.

“No,” I said again, more steadily. “I don’t want to go home. Not yet.”

“Kai-”

“I gave you my word. Three months. I’m keeping it.” I looked at the window, at the plants. “And I like it here. A little. I met a girl who talks more than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and she’s going to show me the falls. And the good bakery, apparently. Not the bad one.” I swallowed. “And Liam’s- Liam’s all right.”

My brother looked at me as if I had sprouted a second head.

“Five weeks ago,” he said slowly, “you told me you’d sooner sleep in a ditch than spend one night in

this house.”

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“You deserved the shoe.”

He laughed. It came out of him all at once, surprised and helpless, and he put a hand over his age. When he took it away, his eyes were a little bright.

“All right,” he said. “All right. You stay.” He stood up and put his coat over his arm. “But you call me. Every Sunday. And if anything happens, anything at all, if anybody asks you questions you don’t like, you call me that day. Not Sunday. That day.”

“I will.”

“Promise me.”

“I promise.”

He looked at me a moment longer. Then he bent down, the way he had when I was small, and kissed the top of my head.

“You smell like oranges,” he said.

“Chloe.”

“Who is Chloe?” He sounded genuinely bewildered. “Everybody keeps saying that name. She talked to me for twenty minutes last night about bakeries.”

I bit the inside of my cheek very hard.

“She’s nice,” I said. “You should be nice to her.”

He gave me a long, suspicious look. Then he went to the door, and stopped there with his hand on the frame, the way he always did.

“He’s a good man,” he said, without turning around. “Liam.”

“I know,” I said.

He looked back at me then, over his shoulder. I watched him hear it. I watched him understand that

I meant it, for the first time, and not know what to do with that either.

Then he nodded, once, and went downstairs.