His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 132

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Chapter 132

Rade knew before I did.

I felt him wake. Since the night I came back to his room, I had slept on his right side, the side away from the wound, with my hand on his chest, and I woke now the way I had every morning the week, to the change in his breathing under my palm. But this time it didn’t slow and settle. It caught and held, and his whole body went tight under my hand.

“Ryan,” he said quietly, to the dark. Not to me.

I sat up. It was still night outside, or nearly. The windows were gray at the edges.

“What’s happened?”

He didn’t answer at once. His eyes were open, fixed on nothing, the way they went when someone was speaking to him through the link. I watched his face change. I watched his jaw set.

Then he looked at me.

“Something came over the western line in the night,” he said. “For Sloane.”

***

He wouldn’t do it in the bedroom.

I argued. Daphne, who had come at the first sound of raised voices with her bag already in her hand, argued harder. Kade listened to both of us with great patience, and then told Daphne that if she wanted him to stay in bed, she would have to tie him to it, and that he would like to see her try.

So at seven o’clock he was in his father’s chair again, behind the green leather desk, with his shirt buttoned to the collar and his hands flat on the wood. He had got there on his own feet, with Liam’s shoulder under one arm and mine under the other, and it had taken a long time. His face was gray. He held it perfectly still.

I stood beside his chair. I didn’t sit.

Ryan was by the door, in yesterday’s coat. Liam stood at the window, where he always stood when he didn’t want anyone to look at his face. And Sloane sat in the chair across the desk, with Owen in the corridor behind her and her hands folded in her lap, in the same gray sweater she had worn in the training hall, with her hair tied back and her face very pale.

She didn’t look at Kade. She looked at the desk.

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I read it twice. The second time, my hands had gone cold, and I put them flat on the desk the way Kade did, so nobody would see.

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

Diana had pressed herself against the inside of my ribs. She wasn’t whining. She was very quiet, the way she had been at the reception, with the box in my hands.

“Tell her,” Kade said. To Liam.

Liam turned from the window and told me. The wolf at the western line, four nights running Ryan calling him out. The wolf getting up and coming to the line when it saw him, and stopping there, and dropping the package. The left forefoot, black to the joint.

“I didn’t know the wolf,” Liam said. “I knew the scent. It was the rogue who came for Blackwell the morning we put him out. The one with the truck.”

“His name is Teague,” Sloane said.

Everyone looked at her.

She didn’t look up from the desk.

“He’s been with Malachi longer than anyone,” she said. “Ten years. More. He doesn’t talk. He hardly says a word from one day to the next. He cooks, and he chops wood, and he sharpens knives, and he does whatever Malachi tells him to without asking why.” Her voice was low and even. “When the rest of them left, after the field, he’d have been the one who stayed. I’m sure of it. He’ll still be with him now. Up there, wherever they are.”

“The cabin,” Liam said.

“Probably.” She swallowed. “She’s been there. She says so. And she did something to Teague while

she was there.”

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Then Blackwell sent him,” Kade said. “Into my territory. With a letter.”

“To the line. Not over it.”

“To the line.” Kade’s voice didn’t change. He was looking at Sloane across the desk, and his face had gone flat and patient and very cold. “I put that man out of this valley a month ago. On pain of death. He came into my valley with an army to take my seat and put a blade in my side, and now he writes to

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Sloane didn’t answer.

mean it,” Kade said. “I’d like to know. Why would Malachi Blackwell help us? Why now? He spent twenty years wanting this chair. Thirteen of them with her. And all of a sudden he’s sendings wolf down the mountain on three legs to tell us to look after ourselves.” His hands hadn’t moved on the desk. “Forgive me if I don’t take that at face value.”

“You think it’s a trick,” Sloane said.

“I think it could be. I think a letter that sends half my patrols to the western line could be very useful to someone who wanted the eastern one empty. I think a letter that tells this pack to be afraid of everything that came out of that mountain could do a great deal of damage.” He paused. “And I think a letter addressed to you, and brought to this house in the middle of the night, is a very good way to make people look at you.”

Sloane’s hands tightened in her lap. Just slightly.

“Kade,” I said.

He didn’t look at me. “Let her answer.”

***

Then she lifted her head and looked at him, straight across the desk, for the first time since she

came into the room.

“It doesn’t matter why,” she said.

Kade’s eyebrows rose.

“I mean it. You can believe whatever you like about him. That he’s doing it for his own reasons. That he wants something. That he’s trying to buy his way back over that line.” Her voice was very steady. “I don’t think he is. But it doesn’t matter. He isn’t your ally. He never will be. I’m not asking you to trust him.” She drew a breath. “I’m telling you he’s done with Cressida. And that’s not the same thing.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” She looked down at her hands, and then up again. “You don’t know what she was to him. Thirteen years. She found him drunk and starving in a hunting shack and she gave him something to want, and then she spent thirteen years feeding it, and taking whatever she liked in return. Men. Money. Girls for her cells.” Her mouth twisted. “He thought he was using her. He wasn’t. And when he finally stopped doing what she wanted, she showed him exactly what he was to her.”

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way she needed him to. He kept putting it off. He kept finding reasons. He was-” She stopped. “He/ was reluctant. Because of me. Because Moonhaven was mine, and he knew it would cost him me ifhe

did it.”

Kade said nothing.

“So she took me.” Sloane’s voice didn’t rise. “She sent Brask’s men to the cabin while he was out,

and they took me out of my bed with a broken leg, and carried me down the mountain to her Not to hurt me. Not then. To hold me. So that he would do what he was told.” She swallowed. “And he did. He brought his men down onto that field because she had me, and she had a collar on my throm, and she was going to use me in her circle, and he knew it.”

I hadn’t known that. I had known she was taken. I hadn’t known why. I looked at Liam, and saw he

hadn’t known either.

“She used both of us,” Sloane said. “She used everyone. That’s all anybody ever was to her. Something to use. And now she’s done with him. He’s no good to her anymore, he threw it all away on that field, so she went up that mountain to make sure he knew it.” She looked at Kade. “And she told him she doesn’t need a Blackwell anymore. That’s not a woman who’s given up, Kade. That’s a woman who has another way in.”

The room was very quiet.

“I know what he did,” she said, more quietly. “I know what I did. I know none of it can be forgiven, and I’m not asking you to forgive any of it. But this is your chance to protect her.” She didn’t look at me. Everyone in the room knew who she meant. “Don’t throw it on the fire because of whose hand it’s

1. Please.”

Kade didn’t answer her. He looked at Ryan.

“Double the watch on the western line,” he said. “And the eastern. And the lake. Nobody goes out alone after dark, not the old woman, not anyone. The letter goes to Imogen this morning, before anyone else sees it. The council hears about it when I say so and not before.” His eyes came back to Sloane. “And you go back to your room.”

Sloane didn’t move.

“Owen will take you,” Kade said. “You’ll stay there until I send for you.’

“Kade,” I said.

“Thank you, Sloane.” He didn’t look at me. “That’s all.”

She stood. Slowly, carefully, with one hand on the arm of the chair, because her leg had gone stiff from sitting. She didn’t look at any of us. She inclined her head to Kade, very slightly, the exact depth

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“A rogue brought it to us.” Kade’s voice was very even. “She read it out.”

She told us about the cabin. About why she was taken. She could have kept all of that to herself.”

“She could.”

“Then why are you sending her away like she did something wrong?”

He looked at me then. Finally. And I saw it, under the cold. I saw how tired he was, and how much the walk down the corridor had cost him, and how much the letter had frightened him. She has not stopped wanting the Luna. He had read that line, too. Of course he had.

“Because I don’t know yet whether she did,” he said quietly. “And until I do, I’m not going to have her standing in this room telling me what to think about the man who put a blade in me.”

I looked at him a moment longer.

Then I went after her.

*****

She had only got as far as the corner.

Owen was a few steps ahead of her, slowing down every few yards, because she was walking slowly with her hand on the wall, and he was too well brought up to walk off and leave her. When he heard me coming, he turned. When he saw who it was, he stopped.

“Luna.”

“Wait at the top of the stairs, Owen,” I said. “Please.”

He hesitated. He looked at Sloane. Then he looked at me, and whatever he saw in my face, he went,

and stood at the top of the back stairs with his back to us and his arms folded.

Sloane had stopped by the window at the corner, where the corridor turned toward Cassandra’s rooms. The window looked out over the lawn and the lake, and the sun had just come up behind the far hills, so that everything outside was pale gold and very cold.

“You shouldn’t have come after me,” she said, without turning round. “He’s not wrong.”

“He’s frightened.”

“That too.” She was quiet for a moment. “I would be. In his place.”

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“Abby,” Sloane said. “There’s something I didn’t say in there.”

I waited.

“I couldn’t. Not there. Not tonight, with that letter on the desk and Ryan asking me if I was spy.’ She was still looking out of the window. “But I’m going to say it to you, and you can do what you like with it. Throw it away, if you want. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“Tell me.”

She told me.

The night in the woods with Imogen, two nights ago. The birches below the packhouse A girl in a white nightdress walking up out of the trees, barefoot, in the frost, with her hair loose down her back and her eyes open and nothing in them. Walking up across the lawn, past the terrace, round the corner of the Alpha wing. Stopping under a window on the second floor, with the curtains drawn and a lamp behind them.

“Your window,” Sloane said.

My hands had gone cold again.

“She stood there,” Sloane said. “I don’t know how long. When I said her name, she woke up. She didn’t know where she was. She didn’t remember getting out of bed.” She paused. “It was Tessa.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“Her feet were clean,” Sloane said. “She’d walked up from the lake through the mud, barefoot, and there wasn’t a mark on them. And when I took her hand to put my coat on her, her fingers smelled of a candle. One that had been burning a long time and had just been put out.” She turned her head and looked at me at last. “There are no candles in the girls’ room. Daphne won’t allow them.”

The corridor was very quiet.

Somewhere far below us, a door banged, and someone laughed in the kitchens. It sounded a thousand miles away.

“I’m not saying she’s lying,” Sloane said. “I want you to understand that. I don’t think she knows. I watched her face when she woke up, and nobody can do that on purpose. I think she was as frightened as I was.” Her voice dropped. “I think something’s using her. And I think it walked her to your

window.”

Be careful what came out of that mountain with you.

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in the valley that was missing them.

I had told myself it meant they came from somewhere far away. Beyond the mountains. Somewhere obody here had heard of.

I thought of a candle.

A single candle on a stone shelf, burning low, with the wax run down in long yellow ropes burned hand turning a dark blade in its light. There you are. And waking in the gray light with my pai burning and the smell of candle smoke in my hair, and Ivy coming in with the dresses and sniffing the air and saying, puzzled, Did someone have a candle in here last night?

I had opened the window. I had let the cold in until the smell was gone. I had told no one.