His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 157

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Chapter 157

Sloane

Nwoke late, with my face stiff and my eyes sore, and lay for a while looking at the window.

The light coming through it was gray and flat. Not dawn. Later than that. I had slept through the hour before light, when he would have been waiting on the porch to take me up the switchbacks to the shelf. I wondered if he had waited. I wondered if he had stood out there in the cold and looked at my door and decided not to knock.

I didn’t want to think about last night. So I lay there and thought about it anyway.

You were mine. I didn’t share.

It was later. Much later.

And my own voice, so small I hardly recognized it. When?

I got up.

***

They were both in the main room.

I knew something was different before I had the door all the way open. The table had been cleared of everything except a lamp, though it was daytime, and a map spread out flat under it, weighted at the corners with a tin cup and the whetstone and two of Teague’s knives. Teague was at the shelves by the stove with a canvas pack open on the floor at his feet, putting things into it one-handed. Bread wrapped in cloth. A flask. A coil of rope. A box of matches, which he shook once to hear them rattle before he packed it.

Malachi was at the door, crouched on his heels, going through a second pack. He had his coat on. There were two pairs of snowshoes leaning against the wall beside him that I had never seen before, and a rifle in a canvas sleeve that I had never seen either.

Neither of them said anything when I came out.

Teague looked up. He looked at my face, for one second, and then he went back to the pack.

Malachi stood up.

“What’s going on?” I said.

He didn’t answer at once. He looked at me, the way he had looked at me across the stove the night

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I stared at him.

“To meet Kade,” he said. “If he’ll meet me.” He held my eyes. “You were right. It is that simple. was making it complicated because I didn’t want to do it.”

For a moment I couldn’t say anything.

I had pushed him. I had sat in that chair and pushed and pushed until he broke, and then had gone to my room and shut the door and cried into my pillow, and I had thought, lying there in the dark, that I had ruined it. That he would never speak to me again about anything that mattered. That had pushed him straight back behind his windows and his walls.

And he had got up in the morning and started packing.

He hadn’t come to my door to tell me. He hadn’t made a speech. He had just done it.

“When?” I said. And then, because I heard what I had said, and saw him hear it too, I felt my face go hot. “When are you going?”

“Today. Now, as soon as Teague’s finished.” He nodded at the second pack by the door. “The road’s clear as far as the crossroads. Teague will drive us down. From there it’s the logging road east, the way you came up. A few hours in the truck if the snow holds. Then on foot for the last of it.”

Us.

“We,” I said.

“You’re coming with me.”

I opened my mouth.

“I’m not leaving you here,” he said. Very quietly. “Not with her knowing exactly where this place is. Not alone.” He paused. “And not with Teague either, before you ask. He’s coming. He’s staying with

the truck.”

Teague, at the shelves, grunted without looking round.

I closed my mouth again.

I had been going to argue. I could feel the argument sitting in my throat, ready, the way it had been sitting there for days. You don’t get to decide for me. I’m not yours to leave somewhere or take

somewhere. All of it.

But he hadn’t said you’re staying. He had said you’re coming. With him. To the line. To stand beside

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“All right,” I said.

He called me over to the table.

The map was his. Old and soft at the fulds, much older than Liam’s, with the names of things written on it in a hand I didn’t know and corrections in pencil in a hand I did. The square, heavy, careful one. The one from the envelope. Sloane.

He put his finger on a place near the top. There was nothing there. Just contour lines, crowded close, and a tiny pencil mark like a cross.

“Here,” he said. “Us.”

I looked at it. Then I reached inside my coat on the hook and took out Liam’s map, folded small, and spread it open on the table beside his.

He looked at it. At the red lines of the roads they had searched, crossing and recrossing the whole western range like veins. At the black crosses, every cabin and hut and hunting lodge for fifty miles. At the long blank space at the top, where the red ran out.

He was quiet for a long time.

“They came close,” he said finally. He touched one of the red lines with his fingertip, near the bottom of the blank space. “That track there. That’s four miles below us. They turned back at the

river.”

“Liam said nobody could imagine living up here in winter.”

“Nobody can.” His mouth moved slightly. “That was the point.”

He traced the route down for me. The narrow road from the cabin, east, down through the trees to the crossroads. The trading post. Then south and east on the bigger road, through the pass, to the fork where I had stood in the dark with Liam’s map against a pine. Then down the logging road to the

line.

“Can you reach anyone?” he said. “In Moonhaven. Through the link.”

“Yes.” I looked at the map. At the long distance between the pencil cross and the line. “But not from here. It’s too far. I tried. The first night I was well enough to think, I lay in your bed and tried to reach Liam, and Cassandra, anyone. There was nothing. Like shouting down a well.” I swallowed. “The link doesn’t carry that far. Not through all these mountains. I’ll have to be close.”

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He nodded slowly. He looked at the map.

“They didn’t cut you off,” he said. “When they put you out.”

“They didn’t put me out.”

He looked up.

“There was no exile,” I said. “Nobody stood me on a road and read out my name. Nobody struck me from the pack.” I made myself say it plainly. “It was more like they smuggled me out. In the middle of the night. Liam drove me to the line in his truck with no lights on, and Cassandra packed me a bag, and Kade sat in my room in the dark and told me to go before the council could vote on whether to have me killed.” I laughed, a little, without much in it. “So I’m still pack. Technically. For whatever that’s worth. Until somebody notices I’m gone and does something about it.”

He was quiet.

“And they didn’t give you anything,” he said. “To reach them. A phone. Anything.”

Something in his voice made me look at him.

“No,” I said.

“Nothing?”

“It was the middle of the night, Malachi.” I heard my own voice sharpen. “It was decided that afternoon. I was supposed to be in that room for a year. Under guard. Under Cassandra’s roof, minding my manners, doing what the council told me to do. I wasn’t supposed to be running off up a mountain in the dark with a dead Alpha’s backpack and a map with a hole in the middle of it.” I put both my hands flat on the table. “Nobody planned it. Nobody gave me a phone, or a radio, or a secret code to tap on a pipe. I’m not Kade’s spy, if that’s what you’re asking. Nobody sent me up here to find out where you sleep.”

The cabin had gone very quiet. At the shelves, Teague had stopped packing.

Malachi looked at me across the table.

“That isn’t what I was asking,” he said.

“Isn’t it?”

“No.” He didn’t look away. “I was asking how we let him know we’re coming. So nobody on that line sees two rogues and a traitor walk out of the trees and puts a bullet in one of us before you can open your mouth.” He paused. “That was all.”

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