His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 156

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Chapter 156

Malachi

Teague banked the stove.

He did it slowly, the way he did everything after dark, raking the coals together and laying he last of the logs over them so they would burn low until morning. When he had finished, he stood up and wiped his good hand on his trousers and looked at me, sitting in the chair across from the empty one

where she had been.

He didn’t say anything.

He looked at the small door at the back of the cabin. Then at me again. Then he picked up the lamp from the table and went into his own room and shut the door.

I sat in the dark with the stove ticking.

Her cup was on the hearth. The tea in it had gone cold an hour before she put it down. I picked it up. I don’t know why. I held it between my hands, the way she had held it, and looked at the line of firelight under her door.

There wasn’t one. She had put her lamp out.

***

I had slept in that chair every night since the storm.

I hadn’t decided to. The first night, I had told her to take my bed, and then sat down by the stove to watch the fire, and woken at dawn with a crick in my neck and the blanket Teague had thrown over me sliding off onto the floor. The next night she moved back into her own room, and my bed was empty again, and I still sat down in the chair. Every night since.

I knew why. I didn’t want to know why.

Tonight I got up and went to bed.

My room was at the back of the cabin, next to hers. The two rooms shared a wall. I had built it myself, the first summer, out of split pine, and I had never thought about it one way or the other until the weeks she lived behind it. Then I had thought about nothing else. Every creak of her bed. Every breath. Every time she tried to turn over in the night and the leg stopped her, and I heard her hiss through her teeth in the dark, and lay there on my side of the wall with my hands clenched, not

moving.

I lay down on my back on top of the blankets and looked at the ceiling.

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It hit me so hard I put my hand over my face.

She had slept here. Only one night, the night of the storm, in my shirt, in my bed, while I sat by the store and listened to her breathe. One night. And it was in everything. In the pillow under my head, faint and warm. In the blanket. In the air of the room itself, so that every breath I took had he in it.

It had gone, before. That was the thing. After Brask’s men took her, I had lain in this same ed and felt it go, one thing at a time. The pillow. The blanket. The chair by the window. I had lar here the night it finally went out of the pillow altogether and not slept until morning.

And now it was back.

Ash stood up inside me.

He had been restless all evening. Since the training shelf. Since the moment she came out from under the pines and stood on the edge of the snow in her coat with her hair full of it, and looked at me, and asked his name. He had been pacing ever since. Back and forth, back and forth, the length of my ribs, the way he had paced in the cell under Moonhaven when he could smell her upstairs and couldn’t get to her.

Now he went to the wall.

He stood with his whole body pressed up against the inside of me, on the side nearest her, the way a dog stands at a closed door when the person it loves is on the other side. He didn’t whine. He didn’t pull. He just stood there.

I know, I told him. I know.

***

She had cried.

I had heard it. Not much. Not loudly. Through the wall, in the first quarter of an hour after she shut her door, while Teague was stacking wood with exaggerated care and I sat in the chair and didn’t move. A small, choked, breaking sound, quickly stopped, as if she had put her hand over her mouth. Then nothing. Then, a long time after, the creak of her bed as she lay down.

She hadn’t cried in front of me in all the weeks she lived here. Not when I set her leg. Not with the fever. Not when the collar came off and the bond went through her like a blade. She had cried in the cell at Moonhaven, the night before they put me out, standing on one good leg with her crutch scraping the stone, and I had thought then that it was the worst sound I had ever heard.

It wasn’t. This was.

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She had told me I turned away. Every time. To a window. To the wall. And she was right. I had been doing it for twenty years. To my brother. To Cressida. To every man who ever looked at me and asked a question I didn’t want to answer.

I hadn’t known anyone had noticed.

When?

That was the last thing she had asked. Sitting there with the cold tea in her hands and her face white. When? And Teague had come through the door with half a winter’s wood on his back, and she had got up and gone, and I hadn’t answered.

I didn’t know if I could have.

I tried, now. Lying there in the dark with her scent in my pillow. I went back through it. Every day in that compound and on this mountain. Looking for the moment.

The first night, in the stone chamber, when Rhea came up through her onto the floor, and I touched her neck and felt the bond go through me like lightning and said this is a fucking joke. No. That wasn’t it. That was only Ash, knowing before I did.

The night in my rooms when she bit my lip open and I laughed. She had looked at me with blood on her mouth and hatred in her eyes and told me she would sooner die. I had wanted, very badly, to find

out what else she would do.

The night she sat on my lap and kissed me like a woman lying to save her own life, and was very good at it, and then for one moment, under my hands, wasn’t lying at all.

The night I came through the door and saw Jax’s hand in her hair.

The fever. Her hand closing on my sleeve in the dark, and not letting go.

The humming. Near the end. Through this wall. Something I didn’t know the tune of, very quietly, as if she didn’t know she was doing it. I had lain in this bed and not breathed, in case she heard me and stopped.

The field. Her on her knees in the frost, with Cressida’s curse in her heart, saying my full name for the first time, so that she could cut herself loose from me. Choosing it. Choosing to save me, the only way she had left, even if it tore her open to do it.

The cell. You don’t get to save me again and then not even look at me.

There wasn’t one moment. That was the answer. There wasn’t a single day I could point to and say

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been mine.

wanted to get up.

I wanted to get up and go out of this room and across six feet of floor and open her door. Not the way I used to open it, with a key, at the end of the day, to bring her a tray she didn’t want. wanted to go in and kneel down by her bed in the dark and put my arms found her, all of her, the way had in front of the stove the night of the storm. I wanted to tell her.

Later. Much later. The humming. The field. All of it. Every day.

You. It was you. It’s been you for longer than I knew.