His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 131

Next Chapter Chapter 131

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

22

3

O

02

|||

O

Sloane

Mon, Nov

Chapter 131

he knock came at a quarter to three.

Not Imogen’s knock. This was a fist. Three blows, hard enough to rattle the latch, and then voice I knew through the door, low and flat.

“Sinclair. Get dressed.”

Owen.

I was already sitting up. I had been sitting up since the first blow, with my heart going/so hard I could feel it in my teeth and Rhea on her feet inside me, and for one long second I wasn’t in Cassandra’s spare room at all. I was in a cold room on a mountain with a lock on the outside, and a man’s boots were coming down the hall, and I didn’t know which man.

Then the pipes ticked, and the clock at the end of the corridor said its quarter hour, and I was here.

“What’s happened?” I said.

“Ryan wants you. Kade’s office.” A pause. “Now, he said.”

I got dressed in the dark. Trousers, sweater, the boots I had left by the bed. My hands had gone stupid and slow, and it took me three tries to do the laces. When I opened the door, Owen was standing in the corridor with his arms folded and his face very carefully empty, and behind him, at the door of her own room, Cassandra stood in her dressing gown with her hand on the frame.

“What is this?” she said.

“Pack business, ma’am.” Owen didn’t look at her either. “Ryan says go back to bed.”

Cassandra looked at me. I didn’t know what my face was doing. Whatever it was, she saw it, and her

mouth went thin.

“I’m coming down,” she said.

“He said-”

“I heard what he said, Owen.” She was already turning back into her room for her slippers. “I was standing right here.”

But Owen had my arm by then, not hard, just firmly, above the elbow, the way you hold someone you don’t intend to lose on a staircase, and we were halfway down the corridor before she came out

#00

MON

2

22

54 Mon, Nov 2

Every lamp. The overhead and the two on the desk and the one on the bookshelf in the corner, so hat the room was bright and hard-edged and wide awake at three in the morning, and there were no shadows anywhere for anyone to stand in. Kade’s chair was empty behind the desk. Ryan stood beside it with his coat still on and frost melting on the shoulders of it, and Liam stood by the window

Liam didn’t look at me when I came in.

That was the first thing. Of everything that happened in that room, that was the thing I wou remember. Liam, who had carried me off that field. Liam, who had walked out to the border with coat over his arm because I asked him to. He stood at the window with his arms crossed and his jaw set, looking out at the dark, and he didn’t look at me at all.

Owen let go of my arm and went out and shut the door.

“Sit down,” Ryan said.

I sat. The chair in front of the desk. The one where visiting Alphas sat, and elders with complaints.

Ryan didn’t sit. He came round the end of the desk and stood in front of me, and he looked at me the way he had never once looked at me in twenty years. Not past me. Straight at me.

“Have you been in contact with anyone outside this pack?” he said.

I stared at him. “What?”

“Since you came back. Since the verdict. Have you spoken to, sent anything to, received anything from, anyone outside our borders.” His voice didn’t change. “Rogues. Blackwell’s men. Anyone.”

“No.”

“You’ve been outside every night this week.”

“With Imogen. You know I have. You gave us the line yourself, you put a wolf on the hedge-”

“I know what I did.” He leaned down, with his hands on the arms of my chair. Not threatening. Close. “I’m asking what you did. When the old woman had her back turned. When you were down by the lake, or up at the ravine, or wherever she had you crawling about in the snow. Did you meet anyone? Did you leave anything? Has anyone been passing you messages?”

“No.” My voice was coming out wrong. Too high. I pushed it down. “No, Ryan. I swear to you. I haven’t spoken to anyone. I haven’t seen anyone. I go out with Imogen, and I carry the basket, and I come back, and I go up the stairs. That’s all. That’s all I do.”

MON

2

22

3

|||

O

54 Mon, Nov 2

off the training mats a hundred times. He was looking at me now as if he had never scen me before/ and wasn’t sure what he was seeing.

He had every reason.

“No,” I said. “No. I’m not. I wouldn’t. Ryan, I would sooner die.”

He held my eyes a moment longer. Then he straightened up and stepped back, and looked over at

the window.

“Liam,” he said.

Liam turned round.

He had something in his hand. He came across the room and put it on the desk in front of me, on the green leather, under the lamp, and stepped back again.

It was an envelope.

Small, plain, a little creased. There was a pile of brown paper beside it, folded and unfolded so many times it had gone soft, wet at the edges and dark with something that might have been spit. And on the front of the envelope, in pencil, in square, heavy letters, as if whoever wrote them had pressed down hard to make sure they came out right:

Sloane.

“A rogue brought it to the western line tonight,” Liam said. His voice was very quiet. “In his mouth. He waited four nights for it. He waited for me.” He looked at me then, finally, and I almost wished he hadn’t. “So, how are you going to explain this?”

I looked at the envelope.

I had never seen that handwriting in my life. I was sure of that. I looked at it as hard as I have ever looked at anything, at the S and the 1 and the long tail on the e, and none of it was anything I knew.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You don’t know.”

“I don’t know.” I made myself look up at him. “Liam, I don’t. I swear to the Goddess. I don’t know who it’s from, and I don’t know why, and I’ve never seen that writing before in my life.”

He didn’t say anything. His face didn’t move.

Ryan pushed the envelope an inch toward me across the leather.

MON

2

22

3

|||

O

Mon, Nov

My hands were shaking.

hadn’t known they could shake like that. I had held a sword steady with a broken rib. I had held my face steady in front of a council that wanted me dead. I picked up that small creased envelope and my fingers wouldn’t stay still on it, and I had to try twice to get my thumb under the flap.

There was one sheet inside. Folded in three. The same pencil, the same square, careful hand pressed so hard into the cheap paper that I could feel the letters from the back.

There was no name at the top. There was no name at the bottom either.

I read it out loud.

She came to the cabin. She brought three rifles and the man whose men took you from here.

She did not come for me. She said she doesn’t need a Blackwell anymore. I have thought about it every night since and it can only mean one thing. She has found another way into your pack. She would not have told me if it was not already too late to stop.

Before she came, someone stood under your window here. In the snow, for a long time. There was no scent. You know what that means better than anyone.

She has not stopped wanting the Luna. She will not stop.

Be careful who you trust. Be careful what came out of that mountain with you.

That was all.

***

For a moment, I couldn’t see the page.

Your window here. My window. The narrow one at the back of the cabin that he had screwed shut from the outside, the first week, and never opened again. I had lain under it every night for weeks, listening to him through the wall.

I had never seen his handwriting. In all those weeks, he had never once written anything down where I could see it. He hadn’t needed to. He was always there, in the next room, through the wall.

“Sloane.” Ryan’s voice. From very far away.

I put the letter down on the desk. I smoothed it flat with both hands, very carefully, as if it might come apart.

MON

22

2

O

|||

୮

154 Mon, Nov 2

“The window.” I didn’t look up. “Nobody else knows about the window. Nobody else would call it ine.” I swallowed. “I’ve never seen him write. I didn’t know what it would look like. But it’s him.”

Liam was quiet.

“The wolf,” I said. I made myself look at him. “The one who brought it. Who was he?”

Liam looked at me for a second before he answered. He was deciding something.

“I’d never seen the wolf,” he said. “I knew the scent. He was the one waiting for Blackwell on the far side of the line, the morning we put him out. With the truck.”

The breath went out of me.

“Teague,” I said.

Liam’s eyes narrowed slightly. “You know his name.”

“I lived with him for weeks.” My voice didn’t sound like mine. “He’s been with Malachi longer than

anyone.”

“And his front foot,” Liam said slowly. “The left one. There’s something wrong with it. It’s black, right up to the joint. He couldn’t put any weight on it at all.”

I closed my eyes.

She came to the cabin. She brought three rifles. And Teague, who never spoke, who had sat across the room from me with his knife and his whetstone for weeks and said perhaps forty words in all that time, had walked all the way down out of the mountains on three legs with that in his mouth. Because Malachi couldn’t. Because Malachi would die if he crossed that line, and Teague might only be shot.

She had done something to him. To make a point. To make sure Malachi understood.

“Explain it,” Ryan said. Not unkindly, now. But not kindly either. “All of it. I want to know what I’m looking at before I take this to the Luna.”

I opened my eyes.

***

I don’t know how long I talked. It felt like a long time.

I told them it was a warning. That was the first thing, and the plainest, and I said it three times,

MON

2

22

|||

r

54 Mon, Nov 2

or to you, Ryan, or to the council, the letter would go straight on the fire. You’d think it was a trick Another of Blackwell’s games. Of course you would.” I looked from one of them to the other. “He knows that. He’s not stupid. So he sent it to the one person here who’d know it was really from him,

nd who might be listened to, a little. Because I was there.”

“Were you?” Ryan said. “Listened to?”

“No,” I said. “Not much. Not yet.”

Liam made a small sound. I didn’t look at him.

“You have to understand what he was to her,” I said. “Not what he was to us. To her. He was her key. Thirteen years she spent on him. A Blackwell with a grudge, Nathaniel’s brother, the only man alive with the blood and the reason to want Kade’s chair. That was the whole plan. Every bit of it ran through him. The girls in the mountain, the temple, the field, all of it, so that one day Malachi Blackwell could walk into this pack with a claim the other Alphas couldn’t argue with.” I pressed my hands flat on the letter. “And he threw it away. On the field. For me. And now he’s no use to her at

all.”

“So she cuts him loose,” Ryan said. “Good.”

“She doesn’t cut anything loose. She comes up a mountain road with three rifles to tell him so.” I heard my voice crack and didn’t stop. “Why would she do that, Ryan? Why would she bother, if he’s nothing to her now? She went all that way to stand in front of him and say I don’t need you anymore. She wanted him to know. She wanted him sitting on the wrong side of that border knowing something was coming, and not able to do a single thing about it.” I looked at Liam. “And she did something to Teague so he’d understand she meant it.”

Liam’s jaw moved. He didn’t speak.

“She doesn’t need a Blackwell anymore,” I said, more quietly. “Think about that. She spent thirteen years building one way in. If she doesn’t need it, she has another. And she still wants Abby. She wanted her in the temple. She wanted her on the field. She sent her that box at the reception, with no scent on it, in front of every Alpha in the valley.” I swallowed. “That wasn’t a woman who’s given up. That was a woman telling us she can reach in here whenever she likes.”