His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 136

56 Mon Nov 20

Kaia

Chapter 136

‘s Tuesday,” I said. “He calls on Sundays.”

I said it to nobody. Liam was right there, and I was still close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, and my hand was still curled in the front of his shirt, and I let go of it as if it had burned me. I wiped my hands on my jeans. I picked up the phone. I went out into the hall, and I pulled the cher door half shut behind me, and I didn’t look back at him, because if I had looked back at him would have put the phone down.

I should have put the phone down.

“Tiernan? What’s wrong? It’s not-‘

“Nothing’s wrong.” My brother’s voice, steady and careful. Too careful. The voice he used on the council at home when he was about to say something they wouldn’t like. “Everyone’s fine. Nobody’s hurt. I’m sorry, Kai, I know it’s not Sunday. I didn’t want to leave this till Sunday.”

“Leave what?”

He didn’t answer straight away.

I stood at the foot of the stairs with my floury hand on the newel post and listened to him not answer. I could hear Ravenwood behind him. The particular quiet of his office at night, the old clock on the wall, the wind in the pines outside the window. I could see him, as clearly as if I were there, sitting at our father’s desk with the lamp on and his free hand pressed flat against his forehead, the way he sat when he had been putting something off.

“I had a visitor this afternoon,” he said. “Sebastian Thorne.”

The hall tilted.

It didn’t really. I know it didn’t. But I put my other hand out and found the wall, and held on to it.

“He came formally,” Tiernan said. “Not just dropping in on his way somewhere. He sent word yesterday that he was coming, and he came with two of his council, in the big car, in a suit.” A pause.

“He asked to see me alone. So I saw him alone.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

“He asked for you, Kai.”

****

MON

2

O

22

156 Mon, Nov 2

make the words stay where they were. They kept sliding off, and coming back in the wrong order, and) sliding off again.

Sebastian had asked for my hand. As his Luna. Greyhollow’s Luna. He had been very correct about it. He had brought a letter from his council, setting out the terms. An alliance between the two packs, sealed by marriage. Shared patrols along the twelve miles of border. Open passes through the mountains for Ravenwood, all year round, even in the snow. A share in the timber rights on the

eastern slope.

“It’s a good offer,” Tiernan said quietly. “I’m not going to pretend it isn’t. It’s more than good. It’s the kind of offer a pack our size gets once.”

“Tiernan-”

“Let me finish. Please. I told him you’d found your mate. In Moonhaven. I told him straight out, the first thing, before he’d even sat down properly.” His voice changed slightly. “He already knew. He said he’d met him. At the reception. He said he seemed like a decent sort of man.”

Something cold went down my back.

“And then he asked me whether you’d accepted him.”

I closed my eyes.

“I didn’t answer that,” Tiernan said. “It isn’t his business. But he didn’t need me to. He said he’d heard there was an arrangement. Three months. He said he’d seen you at the reception, and you weren’t marked.” A pause. “He said a bond that hasn’t been accepted isn’t a bond. It’s a question. And that if you decided the answer was no, when the three months were up, he wanted to be the first to know. He said he’d wait.”

He’d wait.

“He was very respectful about it,” Tiernan said. “I’ll give him that. He didn’t push. He didn’t say a word against Liam. He said he knew it was sudden, and that you might need time, and that he’d known you since you were a girl and he’d always-” He stopped. “He said you were close, once. Before. He said he’d always hoped.”

I made a sound. I don’t know what it was.

“Kai?”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’d ask you.” He let out a long breath. “That’s all. I didn’t say yes. I didn’t say anything. I said I’d ask you, and I’d give him your answer. I owe him that much. He came to my house with his council

O

MON

2

22

|||

1856 Mon, Nov 2

“Kai-

“No. No.” It came out louder. My voice was doing something I couldn’t stop. “I don’t care. I don’t cake what he said, I don’t care what he offered, I don’t care what it means for the passes, or the timber, or the border, or any of it. No. Tell him no.”

“I will. If that’s what you want. But I need you to think about it first. Properly. Not like this” His voice was so patient. So kind. I wanted to scream. “You’ve barely spoken to Liam in all these weeks, Kai. You told me so yourself. You told me you were only staying because you promised. If you going to say no to him at the end of this anyway-”

“I am not thinking about it, Tiernan.” My voice broke right down the middle. “There’s nothing to think about. I would sooner die. Do you hear me? I would sooner die.”

Silence on the line.

“Why?” my brother said.

It was very quiet. It was the question he had been not asking for five years.

“Kai. Tell me why. Give me one reason. Something I can say to him that isn’t my sister would sooner die, because I can’t say that to an Alpha in my own house and expect him to shake my hand on the way out.” He took a breath. “What did he do?”

I opened my mouth.

And I was eighteen again, in the dark, with my back against a boathouse wall and a hand over my mouth, and Wren screaming, and the lake slapping against the pilings under the boards, and his voice in my ear. Come on, little wren. Don’t be like that. You know you want to.

“Because I said so!” I didn’t know I was shouting until I heard it. “Because I- You don’t- You don’t know anything, you don’t know anything-”

I took the phone away from my ear.

I looked at it. At his name on the screen. My brother, who had taught me to throw a punch, who had sat outside my door every night for a month when I was eighteen and wouldn’t come out, and never once asked me why. Who would have gone to Greyhollow that same night and killed Sebastian Thorne with his bare hands, and started a war over twelve miles of pines that our pack couldn’t win, if I had told him.

I threw it.

***

MON

22

2

|||

O

as if anyone might.

Then I was on the bed.

nder the blanket. All the way under, with my knees pulled up and my face pressed into the pow and the blanket over my head, the way I used to hide when I was small and there was thunder. It was dark under there, and hot, and it smelled of me, and of Abby’s old soap, and very faintly of flour.

I couldn’t breathe.

I could. I knew I could. I could hear myself doing it, short and fast and ragged, as if I had been running for miles. But it didn’t go anywhere. It caught somewhere under my breastbone and stuck there, and every breath was shorter than the last, and my hands had started to tingle, and my heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth.

Wren was howling.

She had been howling since the hall. Since his name. A long, high, terrible sound inside me that went on and on and didn’t stop for breath, because she didn’t need to breathe, she only needed to make that sound. I hadn’t heard her make it in five years. I had thought I never would again.

He’d wait.

I pressed my face harder into the pillow.

That was the thing. That was the thing that had come up out of the phone and taken hold of my throat. Not the offer. Not the passes, or the timber, or the alliance. Not even his voice on the end of my brother’s line, saying close, once, saying always hoped.

It was that he had found the door.

Five years. Five years of keeping away from him. Of never taking the left fork. Of saying no to every gathering, every wedding, every midsummer that Greyhollow might come to, until my mother stopped asking. Of building a life that had a wall all the way round it, and him on the other side, and me safe. And then Tiernan had found me a mate. A good man, in a pack half a day’s drive over the mountains, as far from Greyhollow as I had ever been. And I had come here, furious, determined to make him reject me, so that I could go home and never have to think about any of it again.

And Sebastian had stood in my brother’s office and said, if she decides the answer is no, I want to be the first to know.

If I rejected Liam, I was free.

Free for him.

MON

22

2

|||

<

is toe Liliam-

enough day under the blanket with my heart trying to come out throught hyugh my

thisishit

Vabbit inte

ejen him world have to accept him. Accept the bond. The thing in my chest that had hadame, wo oward a sistagger’s porch in the middle of the night. The same thing that had once aid on oward a boy wirith a nice smile and a bet with his friends, and told me, the whole time, lesat day, that he was sino and was his and nothing in the world was safer.

wrong. It hadbeesoo wrong.

I would never fetteticleborse for me again.

ibs, Wren howlett and didieled.

got of

against

I heard

“Liam,”

was very quiet.

Light. The knock he had used the morning after the reception, standing in the doorway lder against the frame.

wer.

My voic

“I’m hi

“That w

“I know.

“Sebasti

“He asked

ming in,” Liam said, through the door.

shift. The creak of the floorboard on the talaiding the one in the middle that always n a soft sound against the door, low down addithe faint thump of something settling. He

On the floor of the landing, with his bacicaggainst my door.

>ing to sit here,” he said. “That’s all. You doloit harved o say anything. You don’t have to r. I just-” He stopped. “I didn’t want you to be on yoyono own. If that’s all right.”

the blanket and didn’t move.

ay anything else.

w how long he sat there. A long time. Long enough fotonything to start, very slowly, down. Long enough for the light under the edge of the blaakaketdolchange, as the lamp in from orange to the bluer light of the moon through tlie abadiding window Long enough top howling, at last, and start to whine instead. Long, thinpexdxhassted sounds, like a dog

e cold.