His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 149

Chapter 149

Liam

The new watch rota went up at the end of the week.

It went up the way it always did, on the board inside the door of the warriors’ hall, in Ryan’ square black capitals, two weeks at a time. I didn’t think anything of it. I was going past with a stack of the storehouse inventories under my arm, on my way to Kade’s office, and I glanced at it out of hab the way you glance at a clock.

Then I stopped, and went back, and looked at it properly.

Every night watch through to the new year. Every gate, every border run, every shift on the eastern road. Owen’s name, and Callum Fletcher’s, back on the roster with a little note beside it in Ryan’s hand, light duties till the 1st. Ryan’s own name, more often than anyone’s. Half the young warriors in the pack.

Not mine.

I had been on that rota every week since I was old enough to stand a watch. Twice a week, sometimes three times. The Beta takes his turn. That was how Kade’s father had done it, and how Kade did it, and how I did it.

I looked down the list again, slowly, to make sure.

At the bottom of the board, under the last line, in the same square capitals, there was a note.

BETA-EXCUSED NIGHT DUTIES (OTHER ARRANGEMENTS).

Behind me, somebody in the hall stopped talking.

I didn’t turn round. I stood in front of that board with the inventories under my arm and read the last line three times, and felt the back of my neck go hot.

Other arrangements.

He had found the exact words. Kade’s words, from the corridor, from the council room. The ones nobody could argue with. And he had put them on a board where every warrior in Moonhaven would walk past them twice a day until the new year.

I found him in the yard, by the woodpile, splitting logs for the hall stove. He had his sleeves rolled up and his coat off despite the cold, and he didn’t stop when he saw me coming. He set another log on the block and brought the axe down, clean, and the two halves fell away.

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“You’ve got other arrangements.” Down came the axe. “I’d hate to get in the way of them.”

“Ryan.”

He stopped, then. He straightened up with the axe in one hand and looked at me, and his face was perfectly calm, and that was the worst of it. I would rather he had shouted.

“I run the watch,” he said. “I put people on it I can account for. Where they are, what they doing, who they’re doing it for.” He held my eyes. “Right now I can’t account for you, Liam. You drove out of here at one in the morning with a prisoner in your truck and came back without her, and you sat across the table from me three hours before that and talked to me about the watch. A panse. “So you’re excused. With my compliments.”

There were things I could have said. All of them were true and none of them were sayable. I stood in the yard with the snow coming down very lightly between us and said none of them.

“That’s fair,” I said.

Something moved in his face. It might have been surprise. He looked at me for another moment, and then he turned back to the block and set another log on it, and I went back across the yard to Kade’s office with the inventories, and I didn’t tell Kade. He had enough.

***

Kaia knew the moment I came through the door.

She was at the kitchen table with her laptop open and a mug of tea gone cold beside it, and a list on a notepad in her small, tidy handwriting that I could see from the doorway was a list of things to say to her brother. She had been writing lists like that all week. Tiernan was coming in the morning.

She looked up and took one look at my face and shut the laptop.

“What happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Liam.”

I hung my coat up. I put the kettle on, because it was there. I told her. Not all of it. I couldn’t tell her all of it, and she knew that. She had been living in my house the night I drove out after midnight and came home before dawn, and she had been sitting at this table the next morning when the whole packhouse was talking about how the Alpha had moved the traitor somewhere safe, and she had looked at me across the toast and said nothing at all, and she had gone on saying nothing ever since.

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at the table. Then she pushed her chair back and stood up.

“Where does he live?”

turned round. “What?”

“Ryan. Where does he live?” She was already looking round for her boots. Her face had gone white, the way it did when she was very angry, and her eyes were enormous. “Because I would like go and explain to him exactly what he’s done.”

“Kaia-”

“He put it on a board.” Her voice shook. “He didn’t say it to your face, in private, Hike a man. He wrote it up where every boy in that hall can read it, so they’ll all walk past it, every day, and look at it, and think what did the Beta do. And you didn’t do anything. You did what your Alpha told you. And he knows that. He knows it. He’s angry at Kade and he can’t touch Kade, so he’s doing it to you instead, because you’ll stand there and let him.” She found one boot under the table and hauled it out. “In Ravenwood, if Tiernan’s Gamma did something like that to his Beta, Tiernan would have that board off the wall and over his head before dinner.”

“Kaia.”

“What?”

I was laughing. I hadn’t meant to. It had come up out of me from somewhere very deep down, and I couldn’t stop it, and I stood there by the kettle with my hand over my mouth.

She stared at me, with the boot in her hand.

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “I’m serious.”

“I know.” I took my hand away. “I know you are. I’m not laughing at you.”

“Then what?”

I didn’t know how to explain it. I tried anyway.

“I’ve been angry for Abby since she was ten,” I said. “At her teachers. At the other kids. At every boy who looked at her wrong. At Kade, for a while there.” I rubbed the back of my neck. “I don’t think anybody’s ever been angry for me. Not like that. Not with a boot in their hand.” I looked at her. “I

didn’t know what it felt like.”

She lowered the boot slowly.

“What does it feel like?” she said.

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She stood there for a moment longer, white-faced, breathing hard. Then she put the boot down on the table, very carefully, next to her list for Tiernan, and sat back down.

‘m still going to say something to him,” she said. “One day.”

“I know you are.”

“Not about Sloane. I don’t know anything about Sloane.” She looked at me steadily. “I don’t want to know anything about Sloane. I want to say something about the board.”

“That’s fair,” I said, for the second time that day, and the kettle began to whistle behind me

***

It was Friday, so we watched a film.

It had been Abby’s and mine, Friday nights, for years. Then Abby had moved into the packhouse, and for a while there had been no Friday nights at all, and then Kaia had come, and somewhere along the way, without either of us saying anything about it, they had started again. She had made me watch three of hers by now, all of them subtitled, and I had made her watch two of mine, all of them with explosions, and she had complained through both of them and asked to see the second one

again.

Tonight was one of mine. I don’t think either of us could have said what it was about. She sat at the other end of the couch with her knees drawn up and a blanket round her shoulders, and every so often I felt her look at me instead of the screen, and then away.

Tomorrow Tiernan would come up the road from Ravenwood, and sit at my kitchen table, and look at his sister for the first time since she had told him everything. I knew she was thinking about it. I

was thinking about it too.

Halfway through, something blew up on the screen, very loudly, and neither of us jumped.

“Liam,” she said.

I looked round.

She had unwound herself from the blanket. She was sitting up, at her end of the couch, with her hands in her lap and the light from the screen moving on her face, and she was looking at me with an expression I had never seen on her before. Very serious. Very frightened. Very determined, all at once.

“Don’t move,” she said.

I didn’t move.

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Then she leaned in and kissed me.

was very light. Barely anything. Her mouth on mine for a second, and then gone again, and she sat back on her heels and looked at me with her eyes wide.

I kept my hands where they were. One on the arm of the couch, one on my knee. I didn’t reach for her. I didn’t do anything at all. Inside me, Jasper had gone up on his feet so fast I felt dizzy,

him the way you hold your breath under water.

“Okay?” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine.