His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 165

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Chapter 165

Kade

was a test. I understood that before Sebastian Thorne’s cars had reached the bottom of the lane.

I sat in my office with the door shut and my shirt open, and Imogen on her knees in front of me with her fingers on my throat, and went over it again and again in my head while she worked. Even word he had said in that hall. Every step he had taker toward me across the stone.

He hadn’t come for Kaia. He had never come for Kaia. He had known what her answer would be before he left Greyhollow. He had come to stand in my hall in front of my pack and push, gently, one word at a time, until he found out whether there was anything left of me. The old láw. The remedy First to yield. He had offered me a fight he knew I couldn’t take, in front of a hundred witnesses, and then stood back and watched me refuse it.

And then he had leaned in, and said the one thing he knew would bring Knox up. And watched what came up with him.

He had seen my throat. His men had seen it. They had seen me go down on one knee on my own

floor.

And they had seen Abby.

“Hold still,” Imogen said.

“I am holding still.”

“You’re holding your breath. It’s not the same thing.”

I let it out. Under her fingers, I felt the thing in my chest shift. Not much. Enough. It wasn’t sleeping now, the way it had been after the moon. It wasn’t tied down. It was lying where Abby had pushed it, low and heavy, with its eyes open.

Imogen sat back on her heels.

“Well,” she said.

“Tell me.”

“She put it down. I don’t know how. She hadn’t any right to be able to, not without the moon, not without anything.” She wiped her fingers on her skirt, slowly, as if they were dirty. “But she put it down by hand, Alpha. She didn’t tie it. There’s nothing holding it there now but the memory of being pushed. The binding I tied at the moon is in rags.” She looked at me. “It’ll wake again. Sooner than it should. And when it does, it’ll be angry.”

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cracking. “I wouldn’t count on it.”

Nam came in an hour later, with Ryan behind him.

“Kaia’s gone home,” Liam said. “She wanted to come up. To apologize.” His face was very tired. “I told her it wasn’t hers to apologize for.”

“It isn’t.”

“She thinks it is.” He sat down on the edge of the desk. “She thinks he only came because of her”

“He came because of me.” I buttoned my collar. “She was the excuse. If she hadn’t been here, he’d have found another.” I looked at Ryan. “What are they saying?”

Ryan didn’t answer at once.

“The town had it by noon,” he said. “Half of them say the Luna saved your life on the floor of your own hall. The other half say they saw her eyes.” He paused. “Some of them are saying both.”

“And Garrick?”

“Wants the council. Today.” Ryan’s mouth moved. “He’s using the word display.”

I closed my eyes.

“Tell him he’ll have his council on its proper day,” I said.

***

It went on like that for a week.

I watched it. There was nothing else I could do. I sat in my office with the curse lying awake under my ribs, and I watched my pack, one by one, make up its mind about my mate.

Not all at once. That would have been easier. It came the way frost comes, a little more each night, so that you don’t notice until the whole window has gone white. A woman in the town crossing the street when Abby came out of the bakery. Two of the kitchen girls who stopped talking when she came into the long room, and didn’t start again until she left. A mother on the lake path who picked up her little boy and carried him the other way, quite gently, as if she had only just remembered something at home. A man who had served under my father, turning his face to the wall in the corridor as she went by.

Abby saw every bit of it. She didn’t say anything. She went to the clinic every morning, and Daphne

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next afternoon. When she woke, she was so tired she couldn’t lift a cup without both hands, and so cold that Ivy built the fire up until the room was like an oven and she still shivered under three blankets. She tried to hide that too. I felt it through the bond, every time she touched me, and I felt her try. On the third morning I caught her at the mirror, looking very hard at her own eyes, as if she were checking that they were still the right color.

And the curse woke a little more every day.

I could feel it. The way you feel a tooth going bad. A dull ache under the ribs in the mornings that was a little sharper by the evenings. The threads on my throat darkening again, so that by thefth day I couldn’t button my collar high enough to hide them. Knox, pacing, restless, every time anyone so much as raised their voice in my office. And at night, lying beside Abby in the dark, the faint cold sense of something lying very still under my heart. Listening.

Abby felt it too. Of course she did. I would wake in the night and find her hand on my chest, flat, the way she had laid it there every night in the first weeks, and I would feel her light gathering under her palm, warm, ready. And I would put my hand over hers and hold it still.

“Don’t,” I said. Every time.

And every time, she let it go. But the nights she had to let it go were getting longer, and the look on her face, in the gray before dawn, was getting harder to watch.

*****

On the seventh night, I told her.

I had been working up to it all day. All week. I had sat with Imogen in the office until the lamps were low, going over it, and over it, and every time it came out the same.

“I won’t do it,” I said. “The binding. Not this time. It’s two days to the moon, and I’ve decided.”

She was sitting on the end of the bed in her nightgown with her knees drawn up. She didn’t move.

“We’ve had this conversation,” she said.

“We had it before the hall.”

“It’s the same conversation.”

“It isn’t.” I was standing by the window. I didn’t sit down. If I had sat down beside her, I would never have got through it. “Before the hall, it was only the risk that she was watching. Now there’s Thorne, who knows exactly what I am and exactly what you can do, and is back in Greyhollow telling anyone who’ll listen. And there’s this pack.” I made myself look at her. “You saw them, Abby. You’ve seen them every day this week. Crossing the street.”

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“They’re frightened. They’ll get over it.”

“Will they?” I heard my own voice go hard, and couldn’t stop it. “You were on your knees on the floor of the entry hall with your eyes shining like a cat’s in the dark and your nails gone to claws and you put that thing down with your bare hands, without the moon, without anything, in front of half the town. I saw your face. I saw what it took out of you. I’ve watched you sleep for a day and half and shake for two and pretend you weren’t.” My hand had gone to my side. I took it away. “And you want to do it again. In two days. At the full moon, with you wide open to her, while she sits up there with her candle and watches every second.”

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because otherwise you die.” She said it very flatly, as if it were the simplest thing in the world. “That’s why. That’s the only why there is.”

“Then let me.”

The room went very quiet.

I hadn’t meant to say it like that. I had meant to say something else, something careful, something that would make sense. It came out the way it was. I watched it land on her.

“You don’t mean that,” she said.

“I mean that I won’t have you burned down to nothing to keep me standing.” I couldn’t look at her anymore. I looked at the window, at the black glass and my own reflection in it, and the dark lines on my throat. “Every month, a little more. Every month, more silver in your hair, and colder hands, and more of my pack crossing the street. Until there’s nothing of you left that isn’t this. That isn’t what she wants you to be.” My voice cracked. “You’re turning into something that frightens my own people, Abby. Something she wants. And I’m the reason. I’m how she gets to you.”

I heard her get up off the bed.

I didn’t turn round. I couldn’t.

“Look at me,” she said.

I looked at her.

INT

She was standing in the middle of the room in her nightgown with her arms at her sides, and her face had gone very white, and her eyes were full. But she didn’t cry. She stood there with her chin up and looked at me, the way she had looked at Sebastian Thorne across the hall.

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