His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 150

Next Chapter Chapter 150

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

22

MON

2

|||

Mon, Nov

Chapter 150

Kaia

Nheard the car before I saw it.

I had been standing at the front window since half past nine, pretending to drink a cup of coffee, while Liam pretended not to watch me pretend from the kitchen doorway. When the sound an engine came up the lane, faint and then louder, I put the cup down on the sill so hard it sloppe

It was Tiernan’s car. The old green one, with Ravenwood mud up to the doors.

I had told Liam I would cry. I had been wrong. I didn’t cry when the car stopped, or when the door opened, or when my brother got out and stood in the lane with his hand still on the roof, looking up at the house as if he didn’t know whether he was allowed to come in.

He looked older. That was what did it. He looked older than he had at the reception a month ago. There were shadows under his eyes that went all the way down to his cheekbones.

I was out of the door before I knew I had moved. I was halfway down the path in my socks in the snow. And then he had his arms round me, both of them, so tight it hurt, and his face was pressed into the top of my head, and I could feel him shaking.

That was when I cried.

“I’m sorry,” he said into my hair. “Kai. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t.”

“I should have known. I sat outside your door for a month. I should have known.”

“Don’t.” I pulled back far enough to look at him. His face was wet. I had never seen my brother cry. Not when our father died. Not ever. “You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you. That was me. Not

you.”

He didn’t answer. He put his hand on the back of my head, the way he used to when I was small, and held it there, and looked at me as if he were trying to see what had been in my face for five years that

he had missed.

Then he looked past me, at the house.

Liam was standing in the doorway. He hadn’t come down the path. He had stayed exactly where he was, with one hand on the frame, and he was giving us room.

Tiernan let go of me. He walked up the path, and up the two steps, and stopped in front of Liam.

00

MON

2

O

22

|||

“I did.”

jernan’s jaw moved.

“So did I,” he said. “Five years ago. She never opened it for me.”

Liam took his hand. Neither of them said anything after that. I stood in the snow in my wet ocks and watched my brother and my mate shake hands in the doorway of a house in Moonhaven, and I had to look away.

***

He had brought the letter.

He laid it on the kitchen table between the coffee cups. Heavy cream paper, folded in three. The Greyhollow seal, a tree in black wax, broken neatly across the middle.

“It came back yesterday,” he said. “Four days after our answer went. He didn’t waste any time.”

“Read it,” I said.

He looked at me.

“I want to hear it,” I said. “In your voice. Not his.”

So he read it.

It was very polite. That was the first thing. Sebastian had always been very good at polite. Greyhollow acknowledged Ravenwood’s answer. Greyhollow regretted it, deeply. Greyhollow noted, with respect, that no reason had been given, and reminded Ravenwood, with equal respect, that between Alphas an answer without a reason was a closed door, and that a closed door between neighbors was a thing that neither pack could afford for long.

Tiernan’s voice was very flat.

Greyhollow understood that the lady was presently a guest of Moonhaven. Greyhollow would not trouble Ravenwood further on the matter. Greyhollow would, at its earliest convenience, call upon Moonhaven, to pay its respects to the Alpha and Luna, and to hear the lady’s answer from her own mouth, as was the old right of any suitor refused without cause.

“Is it?” Liam said quietly. “A right?”

“It was,” Tiernan said. “Fifty years ago. Nobody’s used it in my lifetime.” He turned the page over.

#00

MON

2

O

22

|||

Г

Mon,

Tiernan didn’t read it out. He turned the page round on the table and pushed it toward me.

Give my regards to the little wren.

I looked at it for a long time.

The kitchen had gone very quiet. I could hear the clock over the stove, and the tap dripping and Liam breathing beside me. Inside me, Wren had pressed herself flat against the floor of my chest ears back, the way she had in the dark under the boathouse.

He knew her name. Nobody outside my family knew her name. Nobody except the boy who had been my mate for three weeks, the summer I was eighteen, and had whispered it into my ear in the dark

“He wrote that for me,” I said. “Not for you. So I’d know it was him.”

“I know,” Tiernan said.

“It isn’t regards.”

“I know that too.”

Liam’s hand found mine under the table. I held on to it.

“That isn’t all,” Tiernan said. He folded the letter up again, slowly, along its creases. “The day after our answer went, a Greyhollow patrol walked our side of the border for three miles before anyone stopped them. They said they’d lost the line in the snow.” He put the letter down. “The day after that, the passes closed to our trucks. The road through the eastern slope. The one Mother gets the medicines on. Greyhollow says there’s been a rockfall.”

“Has there?”

“There may have been.” Tiernan looked at me. “He can do a great many things, Kai, without ever doing anything I can call by its name.’

***

Kade received us in his office at noon.

He didn’t stand up when we came in. I had noticed that at the reception too, that he received every Alpha in the valley sitting down, and I had thought it was pride. Now, close to, I wasn’t so sure. He was very pale under the windows. He had one hand resting flat on the desk in front of him, and the other lying in his lap, and he didn’t move either of them much.

Abby stood at his right shoulder. She looked tired too. There was silver at her temple, two streaks of

MON

2

22

|||

12:00 Moh, Nov 2

then to witness it, and these two volunteered.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “Loudly.”

The old man didn’t smile.

Tiernan told it. All of it that he could tell. The offer. The answer. The letter. The patrol in the snow. The rockfall. He didn’t tell them why. He didn’t look at me while he talked, and I loved him for it.

Then he asked.

He asked it formally, standing in front of Kade’s desk with his hands at his sides, in the old words, the ones our father had taught him and I had heard him use only once before. That Moonhaven take Kaia Finnegan of Ravenwood under its protection for as long as she remained within its borders. That no one take her out of them against her will. And that, if Greyhollow moved against Ravenwood over this matter, Moonhaven stand with Ravenwood.

He stopped. The room was quiet.

Kade didn’t answer at once. I saw Abby’s hand move, very slightly, toward his shoulder, and stop. I saw her look down at him. I didn’t understand the look. There was something in it that wasn’t about

me at all.

“Alpha,” the old man said. Garrick. His voice was dry and very even. “Before you answer. May I?”

“Go on.”

“We have lost half our winter stores. We have a pack that is frightened and does not know what to think of its own house. We have, if I understand this morning’s business, a new Alpha in Greyhollow with twice Ravenwood’s numbers and a grievance, who will take whatever we say in this room today as Moonhaven choosing a side.” He didn’t look at me. “I ask only whether this is the winter to be choosing one.”

“Thorne is new,” the woman in the cardigan said quietly. “And proud. And young. Those are the dangerous ones.”

I felt my face go hot.

They were right. That was the worst of it. Everything the old man had said was right. I had come here to keep a promise I hadn’t wanted to make. I had brought nothing with me but a suitcase and a problem. And now my problem was sitting in this office, between a pack that had already lost too much this winter and a man who knew my wolf’s name.

I opened my mouth. I don’t know what I would have said. That I would go home. That I would go anywhere.

MON

2

22

r

Mon, Nov 2

“You’re right,” he said. “It isn’t the winter for it.” He turned his head and looked at Tiernan. “Moonhaven is choosing one anyway.”

old man’s mouth tightened.

“Tiernan Finnegan,” Kade said. He said it in the same old words. Slowly, so that the woman n the cardigan could write them down. “Moonhaven takes your sister under its protection, for as long as she remains within its borders. No one will take her out of them against her will. Not while hold this chair. And if Greyhollow moves against Ravenwood over this matter, Moonhaven stands with Ravenwood.” He paused. “That was my word to you through my Beta. Now it’s my word in front of my council. Hester, write it down.”

Hester wrote it down.

Tiernan let out a breath I don’t think he knew he had been holding. He stepped forward and put out his hand across the desk, and Kade took it, still sitting.

I saw Abby close her eyes. Just for a second.

***

Tiernan left at three. He had to be back over the mountains before dark, and the light went early

now.

I walked him down to the car. Liam stayed in the house. He had made an excuse about the dishes, and Tiernan had watched him make it and said nothing, and I had seen him decide something about Liam in that moment that he didn’t say out loud either.