His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 155

Chapter 155

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Sloane

Chapter 155

Teague made stew.

He made stew most nights. Venison, usually, from the strips hanging in the lean-to behind the woodshed, with potatoes from the pit under the kitchen floor and onions and whatever else could find, and a crust of bread on the side, torn rather than cut. He cooked it one-handed, with the bad hand tucked against his chest and the pot handle braced against the edge of the stove, and he never once let anyone help him.

Tonight he had put something else in it. Something dark and sharp and green that I couldn’t name. I ate two bowls and wiped the second one clean with the bread.

“Teague,” I said, when we were clearing the table. “That was the best thing I’ve eaten in months.”

He was at the basin with his sleeves pushed up. He didn’t turn round. But his ears went faintly pink) above the gray in his beard, and he scrubbed the pot harder.

Malachi was stacking the bowls. I saw the corner of his mouth move.

I took the bread board to the shelf by the stove, and that was when I saw the wood box.

It was nearly empty. Three logs and a scatter of bark at the bottom. Teague had fed the stove hard all evening, the way he did when the cold came down off the peaks after dark, and the iron was ticking with heat, and it wouldn’t last the night on three logs.

“We’re low,” I said. I put the board down. “I’ll get some in.”

I was already reaching for my coat on the hook by the door.

“No,” Malachi said.

I turned round.

He had put the bowls down. He was standing by the table, looking at me. “It’s dark. It’s well below freezing. You were half dead in a snowdrift a week ago.”

“I was half dead in a snowdrift a week ago,” I agreed. “I’m not now. I ran up your mountain yesterday morning and back down it. I can carry an armful of wood thirty yards.”

“Teague will do it.”

“Teague needs help.”

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Teague put down the pot.

He dried his good hand on the cloth over his shoulder, unhurried. Then he crossed the room and stood in front of me, between me and the door, and looked down at me. He was a full head taller than I was, and broad as the door frame, and he smelled of woodsmoke and stew.

He put his good hand on my shoulder and turned me round, quite gently, the way you’d tu a child who has wandered into the wrong room. He walked me three steps to the chair by the stove. He pressed down. I sat.

“Stay,” he said.

He took his own coat off the hook, and the canvas sling for carrying wood, and went out. The doo shut behind him. A gust of cold came across the floor and was gone.

I stared at the door.

“Sit,” Malachi said.

“I am sitting.”

“Then stay sitting.”

I turned my head and glared at him. He had gone to the stove and was doing something with the kettle, with his back to me.

“You don’t get to boss me around,” I said. “Either of you. I’m not a guest. I’m not an invalid. I’m not your-” I stopped. “We’re in this together. That was the point. That was the whole point of me

staying.”

He didn’t answer. He poured water into the pot. He waited. He poured tea into a cup, and turned

round, and held it out to me.

“Are you done?” he said.

I looked at the cup.

Then I huffed, loudly, and took it.

***

He sat down in the other chair, across the stove from me. The one he slept in. He leaned back with his own cup between his hands and his legs stretched out toward the fire, and looked at me over the rim of it.

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“It is,” he said, “if you want to live here.”

Something in me went cold and hard and sharp, all at once.

“Of course,” I said. “Of course it is. And if I don’t do as I’m told, what then? You lock me inmy room again?”

The fire cracked.

Malachi put his cup down on the hearth. Slowly. He looked at it for a moment, sitting there on the

stone. Then he let out a long breath and looked back up at me.

“That isn’t what I meant,” he said quietly.

I didn’t say anything.

“You don’t have to earn your place here, Sloane.” His voice was very even. “You don’t have to carry wood, or dig out the wire, or prove anything to me or to Teague. You’re here. That’s all. You don’t have to be useful to stay.” He paused. “I don’t want you out there in the dark on a leg that broke in two places, in cold that can kill a healthy wolf in an hour, because you think if you sit still for one evening I’ll decide you’re a burden. That’s all it is. I don’t want you sick. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

I held the cup and didn’t drink it.

I wanted to be angry. I had been angry. It was easier. And he had taken it away from me in four sentences, sitting there with his legs out to the fire and his cup on the hearth, and now there was nothing left in my hands but the tea.

So I picked up the next thing instead.

“And what about you?” I said.

He looked at me.

“You tell me to sit still. Stay inside. Don’t get sick.” I put the cup down on the arm of the chair. “What are you doing, Malachi? Apart from chopping wood and shoveling snow and sharpening every knife in this cabin twice?” I leaned forward. “Is that the plan? We sit up here and eat Teague’s stew and run on the mountain in the mornings, and pretend this is some quiet little life, and wait for her to come up that road again with her rifles?”

His face didn’t change. But I saw his hands, on the arms of the chair. They had gone still.

“You said you’d think about it,” I said. “What Kade asked. You said that a week ago. The night I

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“It isn’t that simple.”

is exactly that simple. He wants to talk. At the line. In daylight. You pick the day. Either you go or you don’t.”

“You don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Then explain it to me.”

He got up.

He went to the window, the small one by the door, and stood looking out at the dark with his back to me. I could see his reflection in the glass, faint, against the black. His jaw was set.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

“It matters to me.”

“Sloane-”

“You turn away,” I said. “Every time. Every single time I ask you something you don’t want to answer, you go to a window and look at nothing. You did it in this cabin a hundred times. You did it in that cell.” My voice cracked, and I let it. “I’m tired of talking to the back of your head, Malachi. If you won’t go to Kade, then tell me why. To my face.”

He stood there for a long time.

Then he turned round.

“Because he’ll look at me,” he said. “Kade. He’ll stand on his side of that line and look at me the way you’re looking at me now. And I’ll have to stand there and take it.” His voice was low and rough. “I had him by the throat on that field, Sloane. My brother’s son. I brought the woman who put a blade in him, and I knelt in the frost and watched him go down. And now I’m supposed to walk down the mountain and stand in front of him in daylight and tell him what I know about a woman I followed for thirteen years, as if I’m some- as if I have any right to be useful to him.” He shook his head. “I haven’t worked out how to do that yet. That’s all. That’s the truth.”

I sat very still.

I had expected anything but that. Stubbornness. Pride. It’s none of your business. I hadn’t expected him to tell me.

“You did the same to me,” I said quietly.

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the window. You do everything except look at me and talk about it.”

“About what?”

All of it.”

400

He didn’t go back to the window.

That was the first thing. He stood where he was, by the table, with his hands at his sides, and he didn’t turn away. And after a moment he came back and sat down in the chair across from me and leaned forward with his forearms on his knees, the way he had on the porch steps, and waited.

I had thought about this for weeks. In Cassandra’s spare room, at night. In the cell, before the hearing. Walking up the logging road in the dark. All the things I would say to him if I ever saw him again. I had a list. I had them in order.

None of them came out in order.

“You locked me in,” I said. “Here. In that room. For weeks. You put screws in the window from the outside so I couldn’t open it, and a lock on the door so I couldn’t open that either, and every night you turned the key and went to bed in the next room as if it were nothing.” My voice was shaking. “I could hear you through the wall. Every night. Breathing. And I lay there with my leg in a splint and couldn’t get up to the window to see if it was snowing.”

He didn’t look away.

“I know,” he said.

“And before that. At the compound. You put a collar on my throat.” My hand had gone up to it, without my meaning it to. To the place where it had been. The skin was smooth there now. “You stood behind me and told me to close my eyes. Like it was a present. And it burned, and I couldn’t feel Rhea, and you held my hands down while I tried to tear it off.”

“I know.”

“Why?”

He was silent for a moment.

“Because I didn’t trust you,” he said. “Because you were Moonhaven, and you had Moonhaven’s Alpha on the other end of your mind-link, and Cressida said a she-wolf with a bond to me and a wolf in her chest was a door left open. Because Jax said you’d try to run, and he was right.” His voice was very flat. “And because I was angry. At the bond. At you, for being what it gave me. At fate, for

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“And then you took it off,” I said. “Twice. And the second time you said you’d never put it back. And you didn’t.”

“Why not?”

He looked up at me.

“I couldn’t,” he said simply. “After Jax. After I came through that door and saw his hand in your hair.” He stopped. “I couldn’t put it back on you. I tried to make myself, a few times. When you lied to me. When you ran. It was hanging there in the room the whole time. I’d look at it and I couldn’t.”

The fire ticked in the stove.

I picked up my cup again, because my hands needed something to do. The tea had gone cold. I held

it anyway.

“There’s something I’ve never understood,” I said.