His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 141

Chapter 141

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Chapter 141

Kade

She told me everything.

She stood with her back against the door and told it all, the whole of it, while Imogen knelt on the floor in front of me with her fingers on my throat and didn’t move, and I sat on the edge of the bed with my shirt off and listened.

The candle. The first dream, the night after the council, a candle on a stone shelf and a burned hand turning a dark blade, and a voice saying there you are. Waking with her palm burning. The smell of smoke in her hair, and Ivy in the doorway asking who had had a candle in the room. The other dreams after that. The river. The humming. The window she had opened to let the smell out, and the nights she had lain awake afterward listening to me breathe through a wall, so that she wouldn’t dream

again.

Then Sloane. A night in the woods with Imogen. Tessa on the lawn in her nightdress with her bare feet in the frost, standing under the window of the Luna’s rooms. Clean soles. Candle smoke on her fingers. And a corridor, the morning after the letter, and Sloane by the window saying I think something’s using her, and Abby saying I believe you, and the two of them agreeing to tell nobody. Not the council. Not Ryan.

Not me.

“I told her I’d tell you,” Abby said. “When it was more than a candle.” Her voice had gone very quiet. “I thought I was protecting you. You’d only just- You were barely out of that bed. And I knew what you thought of her, after the letter. I knew how it would sound.” She swallowed. “I was wrong. I should have told you the same day. I’m sorry.”

I didn’t say anything.

I couldn’t, for a moment. Knox was up. He had come up somewhere around stood under the window of the Luna’s rooms and he hadn’t lain down since, and I was holding him the way you hold a door shut in a gale. And under him, the other thing. Stirring. I could feel Imogen feel it, under her fingers,

at the side of my throat.

“Breathe, Alpha,” she said, without looking up.

I breathed.

“You knew,” I said to her.

“I knew the girl walked.” Imogen’s face didn’t change. “I saw what Sloane saw. I didn’t know about

the dreams until now.” She glanced up at Abby, very briefly. “I’d have liked to.”

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alone, ten nights, while I lay on the other side of the wall and called It kindness. I thought about her opening that window to let the smoke out, and telling no one, because there was no one she thought she could tell.

had done that. Not her. I had shut the door first.

“Come here,” I said.

She came. She sat down on the bed beside me, very carefully, as if she thought I might Trot want her there. I put my arm round her and pulled her in against my side, and she let out a breath that sounded like it had been in her since the corridor.

“I’m angry,” I said into her hair.

“I know.”

“Not with you. Not mostly.” I closed my eyes. “With me. With all of it.”

Imogen took her fingers away from my throat and sat back on her heels.

“Well,” she said. “That one’s not getting any darker, at least.” She looked at the two of us. “Now. Somebody had better decide what we’re going to do about that girl in the room at the end of the corridor, because in three days Garrick Shaw is going to decide it for us.”

******

We talked until noon.

There wasn’t much to talk about. That was the worst of it. We went round and round the same small room and every door in it was locked.

The council would sit in three days. Garrick would ask for the pardon to be revoked, and Ansel would help him, and there would be enough of them who had stood in the smoke and heard Tessa scream Moonsilver to give it to him. I knew the votes. I had sat at that table for eight years. And if the pardon went, there was nothing between Sloane and the old sentence for what she had done in the autumn. Hester Lowe had asked for it on the morning I woke from the field. Garrick had asked for it twice since.

“They won’t,” Abby said. “Kade. They wouldn’t. Not for this.”

“Not for this,” I agreed. “For the tunnel. For Jax. For the rogue she paid to take you over the border. For all of it, all over again, with this on top. That’s how they’ll put it.” I rubbed my face. “And Ansel will say that a pardon given to a traitor who then sets fire to the pack’s winter stores was a mistake this council has a duty to correct.”

“She didn’t set it.”

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“And they hear the Luna and the traitor meeting in corridors,” I said quietly. “They hear that you were afraid of that girl and told nobody. And then they hear Tessa again. The Moonsilver wolf made e. And this time it’s not a frightened girl talking nonsense in the smoke. It’s a frightened girl the Luna had been watching. In secret. For weeks.”I looked at her. “You know what they’ll do with that. You knew it this morning. That’s why you didn’t say it.”

She didn’t answer. Her hands had closed in her lap.

“It won’t save her,” Imogen said from the chair by the window. “It’ll only put you in the dock beside her. And then there’s two of you, and that thing in the mountains laughing.” She turned hering “That’s what this was for. All of it. You see that, don’t you? The girl at the window. The candle. Tonight. The words in her mouth.” She looked at Abby. “She doesn’t need a Blackwell anymore. She has you. Your name, in a girl’s mouth, in front of fifty people. She doesn’t need to come over the border. She only needs this pack to start being afraid of its own Luna.”

The room was very quiet.

Outside the window, far down behind the kitchens, a thin gray thread of smoke was still going up from the ruin of the storehouse into the cold white sky.

“Then she has to go,” I said.

They both looked at me.

“Sloane.” I made myself say it plainly. “She can’t stand in front of that council. Not in three days. Not ever. If she stands there, they’ll take the pardon, and then I either let them do what they’ve wanted to do since the autumn, or I overrule my own council in my first week back in that chair to save the traitor who burned the winter stores.” I looked at the window. “And if I do that, the whole valley will know by Sunday that the Alpha of Moonhaven can’t hold his own table. And who he did it for. And what that girl said in the smoke.”

“So she runs,” Imogen said.

“So she goes.” I held Abby’s eyes. “Before the council sits. And nobody stops her.

Abby’s face had gone very white.

“They’ll say she ran because she was guilty,” she said.

“They will.”

“They’ll say it forever.”

“Yes.” I didn’t look away. “And she’ll be alive somewhere to hear them say it. And so will you.’

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I didn’t answer that. I didn’t need to. I saw her understand.

I went to Sloane’s room a little after eleven that night.

Owen was on the door. He got to his feet when he saw me coming down the corridor and stood very straight, and I saw him take in my face and decide not to ask.

“Get some sleep, Owen,” I said. “I’ll sit with her a while.”

“Alpha, the orders-”

“Were mine.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You did well last night. You told the truth in that room this morning when it would have been easier not to. I won’t forget it.” I nodded down the corridor.

“Go.”

He went.

I knocked once and opened the door.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark. Not lying down. Sitting, fully dressed, with her boots on and her hands in her lap, the way you sit in a room when you’re waiting for someone to come and tell you what’s going to happen to you. The lamp was off. The only light was the gray glow of the snow outside the window.

She looked up. When she saw who it was, she stood.

“Alpha.”

“Sit down, Sloane.”

She sat. I closed the door behind me and stood with my back against it.

She looked bad. Worse than in my office that night. There were bandages on both her knees, under her trousers. I could see the bulk of them. Her hands had cuts across the palms, and a burn on the back of one wrist, red and shiny, the size of a coin. And her face had the look I remembered from the morning after the field, when Liam had carried her into the clinic. Gray, and very still, and somewhere a long way off.

“Abby told me,” I said.

She didn’t move.

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“Yes.” I didn’t pretend otherwise. “I would.”

looked down at her hands.

“I believe you,” I said. “For what it’s worth. About the candle. About the girl. About all of it

Her hands closed slowly in her lap.

“It isn’t worth very much,” she said. “Is it. Not in that room.”

“No.”

She nodded, as if I had confirmed something she had worked out a long time ago, sitting in the dark.

“They’ll take the pardon,” she said.

“Yes.”

“And then Hester gets what she asked for. In the autumn.” She said it calmly. Almost lightly. “I’ve been sitting here doing the sums. I was always better at council sums than you.”

“You were always better at most things than me,” I said. “Until you weren’t.”

Her mouth moved. It wasn’t a smile. It was something that remembered being one.

I came away from the door. There was a chair by the window, and I took it and turned it round and sat down facing her, with my forearms on my knees, the way we used to sit when we were young, planning things we weren’t supposed to do.

“I’m not going to let them,” I said.

She looked up.

“There isn’t a way to do it in the room,” I said. “I’ve looked. Abby’s looked. Imogen’s looked. Every way I could clear you puts Abby in front of that council beside you, with that girl’s words round her neck. I can’t do that.” I held her eyes. “So you won’t be in the room.”

She didn’t say anything. She was very still.

“Tomorrow night,” I said. “Late. Liam will be on your door, not Owen. My mother will have a pack ready for you. Warm clothes. Food for three days. Liam will take you out the back way and drive you to the western line, and you’ll walk over it, and nobody will be there to stop you.” I paused. “By the time the council sits, you’ll be a day gone into the mountains, and there’ll be nothing left for them to vote

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“They’ll say I ran because I did it.” Her voice was very low. “They’ll say it to Abby. Every day. For the rest of her life. Your friend the traitor burned the stores and ran.”

“They’ll say it about you,” I said. “To her, they’ll say poor Luna, she trusted the wrong person. And she’ll let them.” I held her eyes. “It’s the only way they don’t say anything worse.”

Sloane didn’t answer for a while.

“You’re exiling me,” she said finally.

“No.” I shook my head. “Exile is what I did to him. With the council behind me and the whole pack along the road watching. This is the opposite. I’m letting you go, and I’m not telling anyone.” I paused. “You can say no. If you’d rather stand in that room and take your chances, I’ll stand beside you. I mean that. But I think you know how it ends.”

She didn’t answer at once.

“And after?” she said. “Where am I supposed to go, Kade? I can’t go home. I don’t have a home. My father wouldn’t walk down two flights of stairs to see me in the clinic. There’s no pack in the valley that would take Sloane Sinclair after this, and I can’t-” She stopped.

I waited.

She looked out of the window. At the snow, and the dark line of the trees beyond the lawn. Toward