His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 163

Chapter 163

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Kaia

Chapter 163

He came back a little before noon.

I had been up since he left. I had walked home from the lake at dawn with the rest of them after the old women had sung the sun up over the eastern ridges and Cassandra had stood alone at the edge of the ice in her black coat and greeted it, and nobody had asked where her son was. I had let myse into Liam’s house and made coffee I didn’t drink, and sat at the kitchen table in my coat, and watched the

lane.

When I saw him coming up it, I didn’t go out. I made myself sit where I was.

He came in and shut the door and leaned on it, and looked at me across the kitchen. He was gray

with tiredness. There was snow on his boots up to the knee and something in his face I had never seen there. Not grief, exactly. Something older than that, and further down.

“You came back,” I said.

“I said I would.”

I got up then. I didn’t go to him. I put the kettle on, because it was what he always did, and I understood for the first time why he did it. It gave your hands something to do while the other person

decided whether to speak.

He didn’t speak. He sat down at the table, heavily, and put his elbows on it and his face in his hands, and stayed like that until the kettle boiled.

I put the tea down in front of him. I sat down across from him.

“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “Anything. I meant that.”

“I know.” He took his hands away. “I can’t tell you most of it.”

“Then don’t.”

He looked at the tea.

“I sat in a room this morning,” he said at last, “with the man who led the raid that killed my parents.”

I didn’t move.

“Twelve feet across. A stone hut with a fire in it. He stood in the corner and I stood by the door, and

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can’t remember what my father’s voice sounded like.”

I reached across the table and put my hand over his on the mug.

looked down at it.

“I can’t give you anything back,” I said. “I don’t have the right words. I don’t know anything about what happened to your parents, except that it happened, and that you were eighteen and Abby was ten and you raised her by yourself in this house.” Lheld on. “But you don’t have to sit here and hold it on your own. Not today. That’s all I’ve got.”

He didn’t say anything.

He turned his hand over under mine, so that it was palm to palm, and held on.

******

He slept most of the afternoon.

I made him go. He fell asleep on top of the covers in his clothes, with his boots still on, and I took them off for him and put a blanket over him and stood in his doorway for a while, watching him breathe. In sleep his face went young again. Younger than me. I had never noticed that before.

I went downstairs and sat in the kitchen with the lamp on, and didn’t read the book I had open, and

thought.

About Wren. About the bond, and what it was, and what it wasn’t.

For five years I had hated it. Not Liam. The bond. The thing itself, the pull under the ribs that had dragged me across a summer meadow toward a boy who wanted to win a bet. I had felt it come alive in me at eighteen and believed every word it said, and it had lied to me. Or I had lied to myself, and called it the bond, because that was easier than saying I had been a fool. I had never worked out which. In the end it hadn’t mattered. I had stopped trusting anything I felt that came from that place.

And then I had walked into the hall at Moonhaven on the first night, and it had come alive again, and I had wanted to scream.

I had spent two months not trusting it. Not trusting Wren, who had wanted him from the first breath. Not trusting the way my eyes went to him across a room. Not trusting the way my chest went tight when he laughed. I had made a list of rules. I had used them like a knife. I had waited for him to show me what he really was, the way the other one had.

He had sat outside my door.

He had come home this morning with a dead man’s ghost on his back and sat at his own table and

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I sat at Liam’s kitchen table with the lamp on and the snow coming down again outside the window, and understood, quite calmly, that I was in love with him.

Not Wren. Me.

I sat there with it for a long time. It was very quiet. It didn’t feel like anything I had expected. It didn’t feel like falling. It felt like finally putting something heavy down.

*******

He came down after dark, rumpled and blinking, with the blanket still round his shoulders.

“You let me sleep all day.”

“You needed it.” I didn’t turn round from the stove. “Abby came by at four. I told her you were asleep. She said you weren’t to be woken, and if you were, she’d know who did it.”

He laughed, rough with sleep, and came and stood behind me to look over my shoulder. Bacon, spitting in the pan. Eggs in a bowl, waiting.

“You’re cooking.”

“I can do breakfast,” I said. “Breakfast at night counts.”

We ate it at the table with the last of the bread. Outside, the snow had started again, thicker now, blowing a little past the window and catching the lamplight. He ate everything on his plate and then half of mine, and I let him, and watched him, and couldn’t think of a single thing to say that wasn’t the thing I had sat there all afternoon working out.

When he got up to take the plates, I caught his wrist.

He stopped.

I stood up. I took the plates out of his hand and put them back on the table. I stood in front of him in the middle of his kitchen, with my hand still round his wrist, and my heart going so hard I could

hear it in my ears.

“I love you,” I said.

It came out too fast. I hadn’t meant it to come out first. I had meant to work up to it, carefully, the way I had worked it out, and instead it was just there in the kitchen between us, and I couldn’t take it back, and I didn’t want to.

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anything that comes from that place. But I can trust what I’ve seen. I’ve watched you for two months, Liam, I’ve watched you with every bit of suspicion I’ve got, and there isn’t anything. There isn’t a crack. And I love you anyway, I mean I love you because of it, I love you despite the bond, not because of it, I’d love you if there were no such thing as a bond in the whole world-” I took a breath. “And want-Tonight. I want one night with you that’s only us. No bond. No mark. No three months. No deadline. Not Wren deciding, not anyone deciding, just me and you, and I know that doesn’t make any sense, because the bond’s there whether I like it or not, but I don’t care, I want-”

He kissed me.

Very gently. So gently I almost didn’t feel it at first. His free hand came up to my face, and he bent his head and put his mouth on mine, lightly, the way you put your hand on someone’s arm to stop

them walking into the road. Just long enough to stop the words.

Then he lifted his head a little. Not far.

“Kaia,” he said against my mouth.

“I’m overexplaining.”

“You are.”

“I always do. When I’m frightened. I can’t-”

He kissed me again. A little longer this time. When he stopped, I didn’t say anything at all.

Then he bent down, and put one arm behind my knees and the other round my back, and lifted me

off my feet.

I made a sound I would deny for the rest of my life. He didn’t laugh. He carried me out of the kitchen and across the hall and up the narrow stairs, with my arms round his neck and my face against his shoulder, carefully, one step at a time, as if I weighed nothing and might break, and the blanket slid off his shoulders on the landing and he left it there.

***

He put me down on the edge of his bed, in the dark, and knelt on the floor in front of me, so that

our faces were level.

The only light came from the landing. I could just see him. His eyes, and the line of his jaw, and his hands resting on either side of me on the blanket, not touching me.

“My turn,” he said quietly.

I waited.

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here That doesn’t change.”

He kissed me. Slowly. Then he drew back, just enough to see my face.

And you tell me to stop,” he said. “Any time. Any second. For any reason, or none. You say it and I stop. All the way. Promise me.”

“I promise.”