His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 184

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12:15 Mon, Nov 2

Chapter 184

Abby

the fourth day, I knew the shape of it.

Breakfast at eight, lunch at one, supper at seven, brought up on a tray by the small woman in gray, who set it down by the window and lit or banked the fire and went out again without lifting her eyes. Two of the Council’s guard on chairs outside my door, day and night, a different pair every twelve hours. A walk in the walled garden at two, if I wanted it, with four of them round me. No letters. No phone. No visitors, unless the Council allowed them, and the Council was spread across the valley in

its own houses and wasn’t allowing anything.

The door wasn’t locked. I could have walked down the corridor to the end and back. I did, once, on the first morning, with the two of them a pace behind me the whole way, and some of Sebastian’s people coming up the stairs at the far end saw me and turned round and went back down again. After that I stayed in my room.

It was a beautiful room. I hated it.

*****

Diana hated it more.

She paced. All day, up and down inside me, three steps one way and three steps back, the way a wolf paces in a pen too small for her. She wanted out. She wanted snow under her feet and the smell of the lake and the woods behind the packhouse. More than any of that, she wanted Kade, and she couldn’t understand why we were sitting in a warm room a hundred miles away from him while he hurt.

Because he did hurt. I could feel it.

The bond had stretched so thin that most of the day I could barely find it. But at night, when the house was quiet, I would sit on the floor by the window with my back against the wall, and close my eyes, and follow it. All the way out, through the glass and over the river and up the long dark valley, until I found him at the end of it. Awake. Always awake. Lying very still round the thing in his chest,

the way you hold still round a cracked rib.

It was getting worse. A little every night.

We could help him, Diana said. Not in words. She didn’t use words. But I knew what she meant, as clearly as if she had said it aloud. We could. It’s right there.

It was. I could feel the light in me, full and restless, turning over and over. It wanted to go to him. It had always gone to him.

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So I sat with her. Every night, on the floor, with my hands open on my knees and my breathing slow, the way Imogen had made me sit over the bowl. I didn’t fight her. I let her come up as close to the surface as she liked, and look out through my eyes at the dark garden, and pace, and whine, and stayed exactly where I was until she wore herself out and lay down. It took hours, some night didn’t have anything else to do with them. When it was very bad, I held my mother’s crescent in my fist until the points of it marked my palm.

On the fourth night, she didn’t pace. She lay down at once, heavily, with her head on her pans.

That frightened me more than the pacing had.

***

Sel

on the fifth afternoon, while I was in the garden.

ard him before I saw him. His voice, at the side door, saying something to the captain of the guard. Then the gravel. When I turned round at the end of the yew walk, he was coming toward me down the path with his hands in the pockets of his coat, alone, and the four guards had stopped where they stood, at the corners of the garden, and were looking carefully at the hedges.

I made myself keep walking. He fell in beside me as if we had arranged it.

“You don’t mind,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

“It’s your garden.”

“It is.” He sounded pleased about it. “I used to hide in here when I was a boy. Behind the fountain.” He glanced at me. “You look tired, Luna.”

I didn’t answer that.

We walked. The gravel was loud under our feet. He kept to my pace, a little closer than was comfortable, so that every few steps his sleeve brushed mine. I moved away from it. He let me, and a few steps later, his sleeve was there again.

“Are they treating you well?” he said.

“Very well.”

“I’m glad. I told them to.” He looked up at the house, at the rows of tall windows. “I’d hate for you to think of Greyhollow as a prison.”

“What else would I think of it as?”

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He stopped too, a pace further on, and turned to face me. He was smiling a little. Not unkindly. He ooked like a man who had said something true and was waiting to see if I would be grown-up about

“Who told you that?” I said.

“Nobody needed to tell me. I was in your hall.” He tilted his head. “I saw how they looked at you. The ones on the stairs. The ones along the walls. They were more afraid of you than they were of me, and I’d walked in there to challenge their Alpha.”

I said nothing. My hands were in my coat pockets. I closed them.

“And now he’s on his own,” Sebastian said, more quietly. “With the moon coming. And that witch of his, who can’t do anything without you, and a pack that’s already half decided you’re the reason for all of it.” He looked at me steadily. “I don’t say it to hurt you. You know it already. You feel it, I imagine

every night.”

I felt the light come up in me. Fast and hot, under my breastbone.

I didn’t let it reach my face. I held it where it was, the way I had held it every night on the floor, and breathed, and looked back at him.

“You’re very interested in my mate,” I said.

“I’m interested in what happens after him.”

He let that sit between us on the cold gravel.

“His days are numbered, Abigail,” he said. Gently. As if he were sorry. “Everyone at that table could see it. The marks on his throat. The way he stood up. You held him together on your own, and now you can’t, and it won’t take long.” He took one step closer. Not much. Enough. “And when it happens, you’ll be standing in the middle of the valley with no Alpha and no pack that wants you, and something in you that every Alpha alive would give his right hand to own.”

He looked at me. At my face, and then lower, slowly, and back up. He didn’t pretend not to.

“You won’t have to stand there alone,” he said.

Then he reached out and touched my hair.

He did it slowly, as if he had every right to. A strand had come loose at my temple in the wind, one of the silver ones, and he caught it between two fingers and drew it back and tucked it behind my ear. His knuckles brushed my cheek on the way. Then they stayed there. Resting against my jaw, warm,

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I caught his wrist.

didn’t decide to. My hand was simply there, round his wrist, hard, pulling his fingers away from my face. And Diana came up with it.

All at once, from the bottom of me, the way she had in our own hall with him standing at the hearth. She came up so close under my skin that for one heartbeat I didn’t know which of us was holding his wrist. The light came with her. I felt it go through my eyes like a flash of sun off water.

I saw it land in his face. His pupils widened. His lips parted.

Then I had her. I caught her the way I had caught her every night on the floor by the window, and held her, and pressed her back down, one breath, two, and the light went out of my eyes as quickly as it had come. I felt it go. I was myself again, in the cold, with my fingers locked round Sebastian Thorne’s wrist and my heart slamming against my ribs.

“Don’t,” I said.

My voice wasn’t quite steady. I didn’t let go.

“You stood up in front of the whole Council and told them I was a monster,” I said. “You made very sure they all believed it. So believe it yourself.” I held his eyes. “Whatever you think I am, you put it in a room in your own house, a hundred miles from the only person who can calm it. Don’t come out here and stir it, Alpha. Not with your hands. Not with anything.”

I let go of his wrist. I didn’t step back.

For a moment he didn’t move. He stood there looking down at me with his hand still half raised, and his face had gone very quiet, and there was something in his eyes I didn’t like at all. It wasn’t fear. It was the opposite of fear.

“What do you want from me?” I said.

He lowered his hand. He looked at his own wrist, where my fingers had been, as if he could still see them there.

“I want to know what you are,” he said. “Everyone in that hall wanted to know. They were just too frightened to find out.” He looked up at me. “I’m not.”

“You should be.”

He smiled at that. Slowly.