His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 135

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Liam

Chapter 135

Owen was on Sloane’s door.

He had been on it, on and off, for over a week. Kade had never said she could come out, and Ryan hadn’t asked him, and so the order had sat there, the way orders do in a packhouse when everyone is too busy to remember them. She went out at night with Imogen, inside the line, with a wolf at the hedge. She came back. Owen sat on a hard chair outside Cassandra’s spare room and read the same paperback he had been reading since the reception.

He stood up when he saw me.

“Beta.”

“Take a walk, Owen.”

He looked at the door. Then at me. “Ryan said-”

“Ryan says a lot of things. Get yourself some breakfast. I’ll be twenty minutes.”

He went, with the book under his arm, looking back once from the end of the corridor.

I stood outside the door for a while before I knocked. I had told Kade I would do this. I had told myself, walking up from the council room, that it was easy. Ask her a question. Get an answer. Go.

I knocked.

“It’s open.”

***

She was sitting by the window.

The same chair, the same window, the same view of the lake. She had a book open on her knee that she wasn’t reading, and her leg up on a stool, and a cup of tea gone cold on the sill beside her. When she saw it was me, she put the book down. She didn’t get up.

“Liam,” she said.

“Can I come in?”

“You’re in.”

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“How do you know that?”

Owen told me. Owen tells me everything. He thinks I’m going to put it in a letter to the Rogue King.” Her mouth moved slightly. “The whole packhouse is talking about it. The linen girls are saying he walked in like his father.” She looked out at the lake. “Is it true?”

“It’s true.”

She closed her eyes for a second.

“Good,” she said quietly. “That’s good.”

I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know what to do with any of it. The last time I had been in a room with her, I had stood at a window with my back to her while Ryan asked her if she was a spy, and I had put an envelope in front of her and said how are you going to explain this, in a voice I didn’t like remembering.

“Sloane,” I said. “That night. In the office.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I wasn’t-”

“You were right not to look at me.” She said it plainly, without any edge. “I’d have done the same. A rogue comes out of the dark with a letter in his mouth and my name on it. What else were you supposed to think?”

“I could have asked you. Instead of-” I stopped.

“You did ask me. You asked me how I was going to explain it.” She almost smiled. “It was a reasonable question. I didn’t have an answer.” She looked at me. “You didn’t come up here to apologize, Liam. You never apologize. You just start being nice to people again and hope they don’t notice.”

That was true. I hated that it was true.

“Kade wants to talk to Malachi,” I said.

She went very quiet.

I watched it go through her. The surprise first, and then something else under it, something that moved across her face so fast that if I hadn’t known her my whole life I would have missed it. Then it was gone, and she was just Sloane, sitting by a window with her hands folded on a book.

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to find him. Or Teague. Either of them.”

She looked down at her hands.

don’t know,” she said.

“Sloane-”

“I’m not lying to you. I wish I were. It would be easier.” She lifted her head. “I don’t know where the cabin is, Liam. I never did.”

I waited.

“After the temple came down,” she said slowly, “I don’t remember much. I remember the floor going. I remember my leg. I remember him, carrying me, somewhere in the dark, and then a truck, and lying in the back of it under a blanket with the floor of it jolting through every bone I had. I had a fever by then. I don’t know how long we drove. Hours. It was night when we started and night when we stopped.” She swallowed. “When I woke up properly, I was in a bed in a room with a window I

couldn’t open. And that’s where I stayed.”

“You never went outside?”

“Once or twice. Onto the porch. I couldn’t walk, Liam. Not for weeks. Not without the stick, and then not far.” She looked at the leg on the stool. “I know what the clearing looked like. Trees on three sides and a stream behind. The road comes up to it from the east and stops there. You can see a long way down. That’s all. I never saw where the road went. I never saw it in daylight from anywhere but that porch.” She shook her head. “Then Cressida’s men came and took me out of it in the dark, with a sack over my head. And after that, it was the field.”

I stood there and thought about that. Weeks, in one room. A window she couldn’t open. A man on

the other side of the wall.

“That’s half the mountains,” I said finally. “A clearing with a stream.”

“I know.”

“There must be something. A sound. A smell. Something you saw out of that window-‘

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“Pines,” she said. “Snow. A woodpile.” Her voice had gone very flat. “Him, splitting wood. Every morning. That’s what I saw out of that window, Liam. Every morning for weeks.”

I didn’t say anything.

She looked away, out at the lake. After a moment, she let out a long breath.

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“Teague found you. He waited four nights at that line, in the same place, until you came.” She looked back at me. “Malachi sent him there once. He’ll send him again. He’ll want to know if it was read. He’ll want to know if anyone believed him.”

“So we wait for a rogue to come back.”

“You leave something.” Her voice was steady. “At the line. Where Teague put the letter down. Something he’ll know is an answer, so that when he comes back to see if it’s still lying there, he finds yours instead.” She paused. “Write it plainly. Malachi doesn’t like being handled. Say where and when. Don’t say please, and don’t threaten him. He’ll come or he won’t.”

I looked at her. At her face, turned toward the window, very calm, very tired.

“You know him,” I said.

“A little.” She didn’t look at me. “Better than I wanted to.”

I went to the door. With my hand on the latch, I stopped.

“Do you want me to put anything in it?” I said. “From you.”

She was quiet for so long that I thought she hadn’t heard.

“No,” she said at last. “Nothing from me.”

I nodded and went out.

Owen was coming back up the corridor with a piece of toast in one hand and his book in the other. He took one look at my face and didn’t say anything at all.

****

I got home late.

It was my night. That was the rule. I had made Kaia a solemn promise over the wreckage of the garlic bread that the next time would be better, and she had raised an eyebrow and said we’ll see, in a voice that made it clear she had already seen.

When I came in, she was in the kitchen.

She had flour on her hands. Flour on the counter, flour on the floor, a long smudge of it across her forehead where she had pushed her hair back. There was a bowl in front of her, and a lump of something pale in the bowl, and she was attacking it with the heels of both hands as if it had personally insulted her.

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have some, if you behave.”

“I thought you didn’t cook on my night.”

There’s no rule about bread.” She glanced up. “I checked.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. After the day I had had, the council room and Ansel’s face and Sloane by her window saying every morning for weeks, it came up out of me like something let loos and I stood in the kitchen doorway laughing, and Kaia looked at me with her floury hands on her has if had lost my mind.

“What?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” I came into the kitchen and took my coat off. “Show me.”

“Show you what?”

“How to do that.”

She looked at me for a moment. Then she stepped sideways, very slightly, and made room at the

counter.

It turned out I was bad at bread too. I pushed when I should have folded and folded when I should have pushed, and she stood beside me and watched and made small disapproving noises, and then finally put her hands over mine on the dough and showed me. Push, with the heel of the hand. Fold it over. Turn it. Push.

“Like that,” she said. “You’re not strangling it. It’s not one of your rogues.”

“How do you know how I deal with rogues?”

“Chloe.” She pushed my hands down into the dough. “Chloe told me everything. She thinks you’re very brave and very stupid.”

“That’s fair.”

“I know. That’s why I believed her.”

Her hands were warm over mine, and floury, and her shoulder was against my arm. She smelled of rain on stone, and juniper, and yeast. Jasper had gone very still inside me. Not the restless stillness of the last six weeks. Another kind, which I didn’t have a name for.

We pushed, and folded, and turned.

At some point, I stopped paying attention to the bread. I don’t know when. At some point, she

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She had flour on her cheek. Just a little, high up, under the scar through her eyebrow. Without thinking about it, I took one hand out from under hers and brushed it away with my thumb.

She didn’t move.

She looked up at me. Her eyes were gray-green and very wide, and her lips had parted slightly, and she wasn’t breathing. I could feel her not breathing, through the bond, through the inch of between us. Wren had come up so close to the surface that I could almost hear her.

No waiting looks. I knew the list by heart.

I wasn’t waiting.

I bent my head. Slowly. Slowly enough that she could stop me, if she wanted, at any point, by doing nothing at all. She didn’t stop me. She tipped her face up. Her floúry hand closed on the front of my