His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 162

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Chapter 162

Sloane

We got back after dark.

Teague had come down the logging road for us in the truck at three, the way they had arranged it, and been waiting at the bottom with the engine running and the heater roaring. He hadn’t asked how it went. He had looked at Malachi’s face, and then at mine, and grunted, and put the truck in gear. The whole long climb back up the mountain, nobody said anything. I sat in the middle with knees against the gearstick and watched the headlights push up through the trees, and fell asleep somewhere past the trading post with my head against Malachi’s shoulder, and woke up when the engine stopped.

Now the stove was going. Teague had made a stew out of whatever was left, and we had eaten it without tasting it, and he had washed the bowls one-handed and gone to bed early, which he never did. The cabin was very quiet. Only the fire, and the wind outside, and the small sounds of Malachi at the table, cleaning his boots.

I sat on the rug in front of the stove with my back against the chair and my knees drawn up, and

couldn’t stop thinking.

Moved.

Kade had stood in his mother’s corridor at dawn, in front of Ryan and half the night watch, and lied for me. And Abby had stood beside him and agreed. And Cassandra had known, and said nothing, and let Ryan go away from her door not believing her. All of them. For me. All this time, they had been holding a lie up over my head like a roof, and I hadn’t known.

Moonhaven is going to be your home again. If you want it.

I didn’t know if I wanted it. That was the strange thing. I had sat on that wall in the sun with Abby holding my hand, and she had said it, and I had laughed and cried and held on to her, and I had meant every bit of it. And the whole way back up the mountain, I had tried to picture it. My old room. The training yard. The kitchen at the packhouse in the mornings. Cassandra.

It was all there. I could see every bit of it. I just couldn’t see myself in it anymore.

www

I looked round the cabin instead. The lamp on the table. The coats on their hooks by the door. The woodbox, full. His map, folded on the shelf. Teague’s boots, drying by the stove beside mine.

I didn’t know what that meant either.

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He had finished it ten minutes ago. He was going over the same seam with the same rag, slowly, the way he did things when he didn’t want to stop doing them.

I watched his hands.

They had been at his sides all morning. Open, where everyone could see them. In the snown front of the hut, when Ryan came at me. In the corner under the eaves, when the room was so full of people who hated him that I could hardly breathe for it. They had stayed at his sides when Liam looked at them as if they were still red. They had stayed at his sides when Ryan stood by the wall and said keep

her.

That was the part I couldn’t stop thinking about.

“You didn’t say anything,” I said.

His hands stopped on the boot.

“When Ryan said they should keep me,” I said. “As a guarantee. You didn’t say a word.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“It wasn’t mine to say.”

“You wanted to.”

He didn’t answer straight away. He put the boot down on the table, very carefully, beside the other one. Then he sat back in the chair and looked at me across the cabin.

“Yes,” he said.

“What would you have said?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

He looked at me for a while. The lamp was behind him, and I couldn’t see his eyes properly. Only the line of his jaw, and the gray at his temple, and the way his hands had closed on his knees.

UN

“I would have told him I’d go north alone,” he said at last. Very low. “And come back, and tell them everything I found, and go north again, and come back again, for as long as they wanted. For nothing. If they let you go wherever you liked.” He stopped. “I would have offered them whatever they asked for, Sloane. Anything. I could feel it in my mouth.”

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do it again. Not even to get you free.”

The fire cracked in the stove.

sat on the rug and didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. Something had come up into my throat and stayed there.

“So I stood there,” he said, “and kept my mouth shut, and let you say it yourself.” He look down at his hands. “You said it better than I would have.”

I got up.

I don’t know when I decided to. I don’t think I did, exactly. I only know that one moment I was sitting on the rug in front of the stove, and the next I was standing, and my leg ached the way it always did when I got up too fast in the cold, and I didn’t care.

He watched me cross the cabin. He didn’t move.

I stopped beside his chair. He was sitting, and I was standing, and for once I was the one looking down. I had never seen him from here. I could see the gray coming in at the crown of his head, and the place where his hair curled at the back of his neck, and a small old scar along the edge of his ear I

hadn’t known about.

He looked up at me.

He didn’t ask what I was doing. I think he knew. I saw him know. I saw something come into his face that I had never seen there before. Something like fear.

I put my hand on his face.

His skin was warm from the stove. His stubble was rough under my palm. He didn’t lean into it, and he didn’t pull away. He held perfectly still under my hand and looked at me, and I felt him stop breathing.

“Sloane,” he said. Barely a sound.

“I know.”

“You don’t have to-”

“I know I don’t.” My voice was shaking. I let it. “Nobody’s making me. Not you. Not the bond. Not Rhea. I’m not cold, and I’m not sick, and I’m not frightened, and there isn’t a door in this cabin with a lock on it.” I swallowed. “I want to. That’s all. I’m choosing it.”

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I bent down and kissed him.

It wasn’t much. I had thought about it, sometimes, at night, on the narrow bed with the window open, and in my head it had always been something else. Bigger. Harder. Something with all of it in it, everything that had happened, every terrible thing. It wasn’t like that. It was only my mouthon his, very lightly, for the space of a breath, and his hands still lying open on his knees, and the froin the

stove.

When I lifted my head, his eyes were still closed.

He opened them slowly. He looked up at me, and I had never in my life seen anyone look at me the way he was looking at me then. As if I were something he had been told about once; a long time ago,

and never believed was real.

“Again,” I said. “If you want.”

He stood up.

Slowly. Carefully. He had to, because I was still standing so close, and for a moment we were only inches apart, my hand still on his face, his breath on my forehead. Then he lifted one hand. He put it very gently against the side of my neck, under my hair, with his thumb along my jaw. The way you would hold something that might fly away if you closed your fingers.

He bent his head and kissed me.

This time it was more. Not much more. But more. He kissed me slowly, the way he did everything, as if he had all the time in the world and was afraid to use any of it, and I put my other hand flat on his chest and felt his heart going under my palm like something trying to get out. Inside me, Rhea had come all the way up, every hair on end, and somewhere at the back of my mind, where the bond had been, something that was nearly a sound went through me, low and long, like a struck bell.

He felt it too. I felt him feel it. His hand tightened on my neck, just for a second. Then he let go.

He stepped back.

Not far. A foot. Enough to breathe. He stood there in front of me with his hands at his sides again, and his breathing ragged, and his face open in a way I had never seen it, and he didn’t reach for me.

“That’s enough,” he said. His voice was hoarse. “For tonight.”

“Is it?”

“For me, it is.” He almost smiled. It didn’t quite get there. “I’m an old man, Sloane. My heart can

only take so much.”