His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 186

Chapter 186

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Chapter 186

Kaia

Chloe arrived at nine in the morning with three dresses over one arm, a makeup case in the other hand, and a face that said she had been crying in the car and had no intention of discussing it.

“Right,” she said, in Liam’s doorway. “Where’s the good light in this house?”

There wasn’t any. It was the middle of winter and Liam’s house faced the wrong way. She marched through every room anyway, frowning, and settled on the back bedroom, which got the sun for an hour in the late morning if there was any sun, and pushed the bed against the wall and dragged the dressing table under the window, and stood back with her hands on her hips.

“It’ll do,” she said. “Sit.”

I sat.

She didn’t say anything about Abby. Not at first. She laid out the three dresses on the bed, one after another, smoothing them flat with quick hands. A cream wool one with long sleeves. A pale gray silk that I knew was hers, because I had seen her wear it at the reception. And a soft, old-fashioned thing in ivory, with tiny buttons all the way down the back and a high lace collar, that I had never seen

before.

“Don’t ask where I got that one,” Chloe said, before I could. She sniffed, hard. “It’s too long for you. Ivy’s coming at ten to take it up.”

“Chloe-”

“Don’t.” She picked up a brush. “If you’re nice to me, I’ll cry, and I’ve already done my mascara

once.”

She brushed my hair. Long, firm strokes, the way she did everything. I watched her in the mirror. Her mouth was set very tight.

“She should be here,” Chloe said, after a while. Not to me. To my hair. “Abby. She should be standing right there, telling me I’m doing it wrong.”

I couldn’t answer that.

Chloe put the brush down. She stood behind me with both hands on my shoulders, looking at me in the mirror.

“She’d have cried through the whole thing,” she said. “She’d have pretended she wasn’t. She’d have been terrible at it.”

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mother came at noon.

I heard her car in the lane. I was at the window in my robe with half my hair pinned up before I knew I had moved.

She got out slowly. She was smaller than I remembered. That was the first thing. She stood beside the car in her good gray coat with her handbag over her arm and looked up at Liam’s house, at the window, and saw me.

I went down the stairs barefoot.

She met me at the door and put her arms round me and held me, there in the cold doorway, with the snow blowing in round us, and she smelled of home. Of the kitchen at Ravenwood, and lavender water, and the wool of her coat. I put my face against her shoulder and felt five years come off me all at once, like a coat I had been wearing so long I had forgotten it was heavy.

“My girl,” she said into my hair. “My girl. Look at you.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. I didn’t even know what for. For all of it. “Mom. I’m so sorry.”

“Hush.” She held me tighter. “Hush. You’re here. You’re well. You’re happy.” She drew back and looked at my face, hard, the way she used to look at me when I came in from the woods with a scraped knee and said it didn’t hurt. “You are happy?”

“Yes,” I said.

She looked at me a moment longer. Then she nodded, once, as if that settled it, and turned to the stairs, where Chloe was standing halfway down with the brush in her hand.

“You’ll be Chloe,” my mother said. “Tiernan told me about you.”

Chloe went pink to the roots of her hair.

***

She gave it to me in the back bedroom, when the dress was on and Ivy had finished on her knees with a mouthful of pins and gone to make tea.

She took it out of her handbag in a small worn box of dark red leather, with a gold catch that didn’t

quite close anymore. She held it in her lap for a moment, with both hands round it, before she opened

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“It was your grandmother’s,” my mother said. “She wore it at her bonding. I wore it at mine.” She turned it a little, so the pearl caught the gray light from the window. “I put it away for you the day you were born. I used to take it out sometimes and look at it, and think, one day.” Her voice didn’ty shake. Her hands did, a little. “And then you went away, and I didn’t take it out anymore.”

I couldn’t speak.

She stood up. She took the cloak Chloe had found for me off the back of the chair, deep green wool lined with something soft and pale, and put it round my shoulders, and drew the edges together at my throat. And she pinned the brooch there, carefully, her fingers cold against my collarbone, the way she had pinned my coat closed every winter morning when I was small.

“There,” she said. She smoothed the cloak once over my shoulders. “Now it’s yours. And one day, if you have a daughter, it’s hers.” She looked at me. “That’s what it’s for.”

Behind her, in the doorway, Chloe made a sound like a kettle and fled.

***

They had cleared the snow from the paths in Cassandra’s gardens.

Somebody had done it that afternoon. I don’t know who. Ryan, Liam told me afterward, and Owen, and three of the young warriors from the hall who hadn’t been asked. They had swept the long gravel walk that ran down between the bare rose beds to the low wall at the bottom of the garden, where you could see the lake. They had hung lanterns in the old apple trees, small glass ones with candles in them, all the way down. By the time we came out of the side door of the packhouse at dusk, they were all lit, and the snow on either side of the path was blue, and the lanterns made small warm circles of gold in the dark.

There were hardly any people. That was how I had wanted it. Kade, at the bottom of the path by the wall, in a dark coat buttoned to the throat. Tiernan, beside me. My mother, and Chloe, and Ivy, standing together at the side of the path in their coats with their breath going up white. Ryan by the gate, where he always was. Nobody else.

And Liam.

1

He was standing by the wall, beside Kade, with his back to the lake. He was in a dark suit I had never seen, that didn’t quite fit him across the shoulders, and his hair had been combed by someone who wasn’t him. He was looking at the ground. Then he heard the door, and looked up.

I saw his face.

I don’t know how to tell it. He saw me at the top of the path, in Chloe’s sister’s dress and my grandmother’s brooch and the green cloak, with the lanterns going down in two lines in front of me.

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Beside me, Tiernan put out his arm.

Kai,” he said quietly.

I took it. We walked down the path together, between the lanterns, on the swept gravel, very slowly, because my legs had gone. The snow was falling again, a few flakes, drifting down through the light. I could hear my own heart.

Halfway down, Tiernan stopped.

៩

I looked up at him. He was looking down the path at Liam, and then at me. Then he took my hand off his arm, gently, and kissed my forehead, and let go.

“The rest is yours,” he said.

I walked the rest of it alone.

***

There were no speeches. There was no one to make them. There was only the wall, and the lake behind it going dark, and the two Alphas standing a little apart, one on each side, and Liam in front of me with his wet eyes and his borrowed suit.

I had learned the words as a girl. Every girl in Ravenwood did, at the kitchen table, from her mother, the way you learn a song. I had never once said them aloud. I hadn’t been sure, until I opened my mouth, that I still knew them.

I knew them.

“I am Kaia, of Ravenwood,” I said. My voice came out thin and clear in the cold. “I came to this place to find out who you were. I found out.” I swallowed. “I leave the pack that raised me, with my thanks, and my love, and nothing owing. I come to yours. And I take you, Liam Hayes, for my mate, in front of my Alpha and yours, by my own choice, and nobody else’s.”

I felt it go.

I hadn’t known what it would feel like. Nobody tells you. My mother had never said, and I had never asked. It was like a sound you have heard all your life, so long that you stopped hearing it, stopping. Ravenwood. The great quiet hum of it in the back of my head, the pack I was born to, all of them, faint and far away and always there. Tiernan’s steadiness. My mother, like a lamp left on in a window.

Gone.

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Liam’s hand closed round mine.

nd then the other thing came.

It came all at once, like a door opening on a crowded room. Moonhaven. All of it. The great warm noise of it, the whole pack, faint and many and everywhere, the kitchens and the clinic and e warriors’ hall and the lake-shore houses, a hundred threads in the dark. Kade, very near, steady and gray and hurting. Ryan, by the gate, gruff and close. And under all of them, so near it was almost inside my own head, so clear I could have reached out and touched it-

Kaia.

Liam’s voice. In my mind. Not out loud. His mouth hadn’t moved.

I’m here, he said. I’m here. You’re all right. I’ve got you.

I looked at him. He was looking at me, and his face was wet, and he was smiling at last.

He said his words then. Out loud, for the witnesses. I don’t remember them all. I remember his voice cracking on my name. I remember by my own choice. I remember that his hand was shaking in mine, and that mine had stopped.

Then Tiernan said, quietly, “Ravenwood witnesses.” And then, after a moment, more quietly still: “Ravenwood lets her go.”

And Kade said, “Moonhaven witnesses.” His voice was rough. “And takes her in.”

Liam kissed me. In front of all of them, in the snow, with the lanterns in the apple trees and the lake going black behind him. Behind me, somewhere, Chloe was crying very loudly and not caring who

heard.

****

Afterward, I looked for it.

Everyone did. I saw them do it. When my mother had kissed me and held me and wept on my shoulder, and Chloe had kissed me and wept on the other one, and Ivy had kissed Liam and told him his tie was crooked, and Ryan had shaken his hand and said nothing at all and looked at the ground. When Tiernan had embraced me, and held on, and said in my ear, I can’t hear you anymore, Kai, isn’t that strange, and laughed, and hadn’t sounded as if he were laughing.

In the middle of all of it, I saw them look up. All of them, one after another. At the packhouse, at the long row of windows on the second floor. At the one at the end, with no light in it.

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Kade stood by the wall and looked at that window for a long time.

Nam’s hand tightened on mine. Through the new thing in my head, so raw I could hardly bear to touch it, I felt what he was feeling. His sister. The empty window. The place in the link where she should have been, and was barely there at all. A thread so faint, so far away, that it was hardly more than the memory of a thread.

She’d have been here, he said, inside me.

I know.

She’d have cried through the whole thing.

Chloe did it for her, I said. Both of them.

He laughed. Out loud. Everyone turned round to look at him, and he didn’t care.

******

We walked home through the snow. Just the two of us. Everyone else had melted away, the way people do when they know.