His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 143

Chapter 143

Abby

Nouldn’t sleep.

I lay beside Kade for an hour with my eyes open, listening to the clock at the end of the comidor count off the quarters, and then I gave up and got out of bed as quietly as I could and went sit by the window with a blanket round my shoulders.

There was nothing out there. The lawn, gray under the snow. The black line of the trees beyond it. A few stars. Somewhere past all of that, tonight, Sloane was leaving. I didn’t know the hour or the road. Kade had said it was better if I didn’t, and I hadn’t asked.

I didn’t go to say goodbye to her.

Kade had asked me not to. If anyone saw the Luna at that door on the last night, he said, then whatever happened afterward, they would remember that the Luna had been there. He was right. I knew he was right. I had stayed away all evening, and eaten supper across the table from him without tasting it, and gone to bed, and now I sat at the window and thought about all the things I would have said to her, if I had gone.

That I believed her. I had told her that once, in the corridor, but I wanted to say it again. That I was sorry about the room, and the guard on the door, and the fifty people in the garden, and the council, and every hard thing I had said to her in the autumn, even the ones she had deserved. That she had been my sister long before she was anything else, and some part of me had never stopped thinking of her that way, even when I tried.

I hadn’t said any of it. Now she was somewhere out there in the dark with a pack on her back, and I didn’t even know which way she was facing.

Behind me, the bed creaked.

I heard Kade’s hand move across the sheet, to my side of it, and stop when it found the place cold.

Then he sat up.

“Abby?”

“I’m here.”

He got up. He came across the room in the dark, barefoot, and stood behind my chair, and put his arms round me over the blanket, and rested his chin on the top of my head. He was very warm. For a while neither of us said anything.

“It’s done,” he said at last, quietly. “Whatever happens now, it’s done. Nobody’s going to stop her.”

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I didn’t know if he believed it. I didn’t think he knew either. I leaned my head back against his chest And let him say it anyway.

We were still there, by the window, when the door opened.

Liam came in with the cold on him. His cheeks were raw, and there was frost on the shoulders of his coat. He shut the door and stood against it and looked at us both.

“She’s over the line,” he said. “She walked over it and kept going. She didn’t look back till the bend.”

Kade let out a long breath against my hair.

I got up. The blanket fell off my shoulders and I left it there on the floor. I went to my brother and put my arms round him, coat and frost and all, and he held on to me.

“She said something,” he said, over my head. “For you. She said, Tell Abby I’m glad it was her. With Kade.” He paused. “And then she said, I mean it. Tell her I said so.”

I couldn’t answer him.

I stood in the middle of the room with my face in Liam’s cold coat and thought about Sloane in the autumn. The tunnel. The rogue. Everything she had done because the bond chose me and not her. And now she was walking up a mountain in the dark, with nothing left, and the last thing she had wanted me to know was that she was glad.

Liam didn’t ask me to say anything. After a while he let me go, and touched my hair, and went to

bed.

I lay down beside Kade, and curled into his side, and somewhere toward four o’clock I slept.

***

Kade woke before it was light.

I felt him do it. He came up out of sleep all at once, the way he did when Knox woke him, and lay still on his back with his head turned slightly, listening. I couldn’t hear anything. I could only see his face in the gray from the window, and watch it change..

“Owen,” he said.

He was already out of bed. I found my robe on the chair and pulled it on and tied it as I went, and

followed him barefoot down the cold corridor and the stairs.

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Past Owen, I could see the room. The bed made. The blanket folded at the foot of it. Her boots gone frem beside the door.

“Alpha.” Ryan reached us. His eyes went to the empty room, and back to Kade. “Owen came on at six and found the door unlocked and nobody on it. Liam had the night. Liam’s not here, and his truck was out after midnight.” He was already turning toward the stairs. “I’ve got wolves at the back door. If she went on foot, with that leg, we’ll be on her by noon.”

“Nobody goes after her,” Kade said.

Ryan stopped.

“She didn’t escape,” Kade said. “She was moved. Last night, on my order. Liam took her.”

He said it evenly, at an ordinary pitch, so the two warriors behind Ryan would hear every word of it

I kept my face exactly where it was. I don’t know how.

Moved.

Ran would have been a traitor who broke her guard and fled before the council could sit. Ran was Garrick on his feet asking for trackers, and Ryan sending them, and wolves on her trail by noon, and a woman on foot somewhere up ahead of them with a bad leg and no idea anyone was coming. Moved meant nobody could go after her at all, because nobody was supposed to know where she was.

And it wasn’t true. Kade was standing in his mother’s corridor in front of his own Gamma, and lying

to him.

“After that garden,” Kade went on, “I wasn’t going to leave her in this house with fifty people who’d spent the night shouting for her blood. She’s somewhere safer until this is settled. I won’t say where. The fewer people who know, the safer she is.”

Ryan looked at him as if he hadn’t heard it properly.

“Liam took her,” he said slowly. “I talked to Liam at ten o’clock last night about the watch, and he didn’t say a word to me.” He shook his head. “You moved a prisoner out of this house in the middle of the night, Alpha, and nobody told the man who runs your watch? I had to hear it from a boy on the morning watch.”

“No,” Kade said. “Nobody told you.”

“Why?”

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He stopped. Something crossed his face. It wasn’t anger. It looked more like a man who has put his

foot down on a stair that isn’t there.

hen he turned and looked straight at me.

“Luna,” he said. “Did you know?”

I had known Ryan most of my life. I looked at him and made my face do what I told it.

“Yes,” I said. “I agreed with it.”

It was true. That was the only way I could get it out.

Ryan searched my face. I don’t know what he found there. Then he looked away, at the made bed behind Owen, and his mouth set hard.

“I’ll stand them down,” he said. “Alpha.”

He went back down the corridor, and the two warriors went after him. Neither of them looked at me

as they passed.

***

Kade didn’t say anything until we were back in his rooms with the door shut.

Then he sat down on the end of the bed and put his face in his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said through them. “I couldn’t tell you last night. If you’d known, you’d have lain awake till six practicing how to look surprised. And you’d have looked exactly like someone who

knew.”

I stood in front of him in my robe, with my feet still numb from the corridor floor.

“You’ve never lied to them,” I said. “Not once. Not since you took the chair.”

“I know.”

“You just lied to Ryan.”