His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 182

Chapter 182

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กกร.

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Liam

Chapter 182

Raia was waiting up when I got home.

It was past midnight. The lamp was on in the kitchen, and she was sitting at the table in my old gray sweater with her knees pulled up on the chair and a cup of tea gone cold in front of her and when she heard the door, she didn’t get up. She looked at me across the kitchen, and I saw that he already knew. Somebody had told her. The whole town knew. They had been standing in the lane in the cold, watching the trucks come in, looking into every window for a face that wasn’t there.

I stood in the doorway with my bag still on my shoulder.

“Liam,” she said.

I put the bag down. I didn’t take my coat off. I came across the kitchen and she stood up, and I put my arms round her and my face in her hair and held on, and for a long while neither of us said anything at all.

She smelled of the house. Of soap and woodsmoke and my sweater. Of home.

Abby had smelled of home too, on the steps at Greyhollow, with Ivy’s pins in her hair and her face

held so carefully still.

“I’m sorry,” Kaia said into my coat. Her voice was muffled and shaking. “I’m so sorry. I keep thinking – if I hadn’t come here. If I’d gone home in the autumn when Tiernan asked me to. If Bash hadn’t had a reason to come into your hall-”

“Don’t.”

“It’s true.”

“It isn’t.” I pulled back far enough to see her face. Her eyes were red. She had been crying, alone in my kitchen, for hours, probably. “He’d have found another reason. He’d have walked into that hall for a stray dog if it gave him a chance to see what Kade had under his collar. You know that. You know him better than any of us.”

She looked at me. Then down.

“That’s what frightens me,” she said.

We sat at the table. I made fresh tea, because it gave my hands something to do, and she watched

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I waited.

About what happens now,” she said. Very low. “To me.”

She turned her cup round on the table. A full turn. Then back.

“I’m under Moonhaven’s protection,” she said. “Kade said so. In front of his council, and Tiernan, and Hester writing it all down. No one will take her out of its borders against her will.” She wa quoting it exactly. I could hear Kade’s voice under hers. “But that was before. Before the Council censured him. Before they took his Luna and told him what he could and couldn’t do,” She liked her eyes to mine. “What if Bash goes to them next? At the spring session. Or sooner. What if he stands up in front of all of them, the way he did with that girl, and says I’m a matter for Greyhollow and Ravenwood, and Moonhaven has no business keeping me? And they look at Kade, and they look at what’s happened, and they think-”

“They won’t.”

“You don’t know that.” Her voice rose. “You saw him, Liam. You saw what he did with that girl. He didn’t even know her name, and in five minutes he stood up and said she’s mine, and they gave her to him. They just gave her to him.” She was shaking. “What do you think he’ll say about me? I told him no. Twice. And the second time, I did it in front of your whole pack. He’s never going to let that go. Never. He’ll wait, and wait, and smile, and one day he’ll—”

I reached across the table and put my hand over hers on the cup.

She stopped. Her breath was coming fast.

“He’s not getting you,” I said.

I said it quietly. I didn’t say it to comfort her. I said it because it was the only true thing I had left after three days in Sebastian Thorne’s house, and I needed her to hear it.

“Not from this house. Not from this pack. Not from me. I don’t care what the Council says. I don’t care what he says. If he comes for you, he comes through me, and I won’t be standing still like Kade had to. I’m not an Alpha. Nobody will call it a challenge. They’ll just call it a dead Greyhollow wolf in

a ditch.”

Kaia stared at me.

“Liam,” she said. Very softly. “You don’t talk like that.”

“I know.” I didn’t take my hand away. “I don’t think I’ve ever meant anything so much in my life.”

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In the morning, Kade sent for me at eight. I went up to the packhouse through a town that was very quiet. People were out, the way people are always out, going to the bakery, shoveling the paths But they weren’t talking. They looked at me as I went past. Some of them nodded. The old woman who kept the shop by the lake came out onto her step with her broom and stood there, watching me go by, and said nothing at all, and then went back in.

Kade was at his desk. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. He had shaved, and his shirt was buttoned to the collar, and under the collar, on the left side, I could see the dark edge of a thread that hadn’t been there at Greyhollow. Higher than it had been. Climbing.

He saw me see it.

“Last night,” he said.

I sat down without being asked.

“It woke up.” He said it flatly, looking at the desk. “About two. It didn’t fight. It just-woke, and stretched, and lay there. And then-” He stopped. His jaw tightened. “She spoke to me.”

The room went cold.

“Through it,” Kade said. “The thread. I’d never heard her voice before, and I knew it.” He looked up at me. “She knows Abby’s gone.”

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. I sat there across the desk from him and thought about Abby, alone, in a strange room in Sebastian Thorne’s house, with a Stonecrest wolf on her door who couldn’t smell a witch coming. With no one at all who knew what it looked like when it started.

“I’ve told Imogen,” Kade said. “She’s going through her books. She says the thread runs both ways, and if Cressida can speak down it, then she’s closer to the surface of it than she’s ever been. Closer to me.” He was very calm. Too calm. “Imogen wants to try a binding at the moon on her own. Without Abby. She doesn’t know if it’ll hold.”

“Kade-”

“I know.” He put his hand flat on the desk. “I know, Liam. I don’t need you to say it.”

So I didn’t.

***

It came that evening.

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And something touched the edge of the link.

was very faint. Right out at the farthest edge of it, where the pack thinned out into the dark and the mountains and nothing. A thread. Somebody, very far off, reaching. Too weak to be anyone from inside the borders. Too tired.

I knew it before I knew it.

Liam.

I stopped talking. Ryan looked at me.

Liam. It’s me. Can you hear me?

Her voice was raw. Rough with smoke and cold and something else, something at the very end of itself. I had heard her like that once before, on the Longest Night, by the fires.

I hear you, I said. Sloane. Where are you?

The hut. A breath, ragged, even through the link. The shepherd’s hut. We’re at the hut. Liam-

She burned it, Sloane said. The cabin. Three nights ago. The truck. Everything. Her voice wavered, and steadied. We’re all right. We’re alive. But Teague’s arm is cut deep, and his feet are bad, and we haven’t eaten since yesterday, and we’ve got one blanket between the three of us and the wood here’s damp. A pause. I’m sorry. I know what I’m asking. I didn’t have anywhere else.

Ryan had put the clipboard down. He was watching my face.

I closed my eyes.

Sloane, I said. Listen to me.

***

I told her. I didn’t make it gentle. There wasn’t any way to make it gentle, and she would have hated me for trying.

No further dealings with Malachi Blackwell, I said. Or any rogue under him. Without the Council’s leave. I made myself go on. It wasn’t a request, Sloane. Harlan looked straight at Kade and said so. If he walks up that hill to you, if any of us does, and anyone sees it, and Sebastian hears of it-

I didn’t finish.

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cold under the lamp with my eyes shut, waiting for it.

I told her that too.

felt it go into her. Through the link, across that mile of dark and snow and the line between us. I felt it hit her the way a blow hits, without a sound, and I felt her fold round it.

In his house, she said at last. Her voice was a thread. In Bash’s house. On her own.

Yes.

You promised me.

I know.

You promised me you wouldn’t let him get her alone.

She stood up before any of us could stop her, I said. She said yes, Sloane. To keep Moonhaven out of a war. To keep him from having a reason. I watched her do it. I couldn’t have stopped her if I’d had

a hundred men behind me.

Silence.

Then, very faint, so faint it was barely there, something that might have been a laugh, or might have been the other thing.

Of course she did, Sloane said. Of course she did. The little idiot. The stubborn, brave, stupid little

She didn’t finish. The link wavered. I felt her lose hold of it for a moment, and find it again.

Cassandra?

Better, I said. She’s started squeezing people’s fingers.

A long breath, through the link. Something in it let go.

Good, Sloane said. That’s good. And then, after a moment, steadier: Liam. I’m not asking you to come. I’m not asking Kade. I understand. I won’t be the reason she sits in that house a day longer. I just- Her voice cracked. Teague’s arm. And food. And something dry to burn. That’s all. Anyone.

Anyone who isn’t you.

I opened my eyes.

Ryan was still there, under the lamp. He hadn’t moved. He had heard none of it, and all of it. He was

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Kade was in his office. He was standing at the window with his back to the room, looking out at the dark, and he didn’t turn round when I came in. I think he had felt it. Through the link, faint, the way the whole pack would have felt it, out at the edge. Something reaching. Something hurt.

I told him.

He listened to all of it with his back to me. When I had finished, he didn’t move for a while.

“I can’t,” he said.

“I know.”

“I can’t, Liam.” He turned round. His face was gray. “If I send so much as a blanket up that hill and Thorne hears of it, she stays in that house till the spring. Or longer. Or forever. Every rule I break is

one more reason for them to keep her. You heard Harlan. You were there.”

“I know,” I said again. “I’m not asking you to send anyone.”

He looked at me.

“I’m telling you who’s going,” I said. “So that if anyone ever asks you, you can tell them, with your hand on your heart, that Moonhaven sent nobody.”