His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 192

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Chapter 192

Kade

My heart stopped a little after two in the morning.

I didn’t know that was what it was, at first. I only knew I was awake, all at once, flat on my pack/in the dark, with something closed round the inside of my chest like a fist. Not pain. Pain would have been easier. A grip. Cold and complete and absolutely still, and inside it, nothing. No beat. Nound in my ears. I lay there with my mouth open and my hand on my breastbone and waited for mymeant to do the next thing, and it didn’t.

One. Two.

Then the fist opened, and my heart came back so hard it hurt. Slamming. Ragged. Too fast. I rolled onto my side and dragged in air like a man pulled out of the lake, and lay there, shaking, with the sweat going cold on my skin.

And then, before I could think, before I could even get my breath, something else happened.

The thing under my ribs lay down.

I felt it go. It had been awake for weeks. Climbing. Stretching. Turning over every night a little higher. And now, between one breath and the next, it went down, all of it, into the bottom of me, and went quiet. Not sullen. Not waiting. Quiet, the way it had never once been since the night of the battle. As if someone had laid a hand on it and told it to sleep.

I lay there in the dark with my heart still slamming and tried to understand what had happened to

I couldn’t. I was asleep before I had finished trying.

****

I woke at seven, to light.

I hadn’t slept past dawn since the autumn. I lay there and looked at the gray square of the window and the ceiling and Abby’s robe on the back of the door, and felt rested. That was the strangest thing. My body felt like my own. The threads at my throat were still there, I could feel them when I swallowed, but they were quiet. Cold and faint and still.

For one moment, I thought she had done it. From a hundred miles away. I thought she had broken the ruling and poured herself down the thread to me in the night, and I didn’t know whether to be furious or to weep.

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her window, thinking of me.

It wasn’t there.

That’s not right. It was there. I could feel the bond going out of my chest the way it always did. But at the other end of it, where she should have been, I couldn’t feel her. Nothing. Not her warmth, not her fear, not her breathing. Only the bond itself, going out and out into nothing.

I said her name. Out loud, in the empty room..

Then I said it down the bond, with everything I had. Abby.

Nothing came back. Not warmth. Not words. Not even the faint, stubborn hum of her that had been there every hour of every day since the night she first put her hand on my chest.

I was out of bed and halfway down the stairs before I had my shirt on.

*****

Liam was in my office when I got there.

He had come up early, the way he did now, with Kaia’s mark on his neck still raw and pink above his collar. He was standing by the window with a cup of coffee he hadn’t touched. He turned round when I came in, and saw my face, and put the cup down.

“You felt it,” he said.

It wasn’t a question.

“What did you feel?”

“Last night. About two.” His jaw was tight. “The link. My sister. It went-” He stopped. He pressed his hand flat against his own chest, the way I had pressed mine. “It was so faint already. Since Greyhollow. I could barely find her. But she was there. And then at two, something happened. It was like a voice stopping mid-word, a long way off. And this morning I can’t find her at all.”

We stood there and looked at each other.

“Something stopped my heart,” I said.

Liam went white.

“At two. Two beats. And then-” I made myself say it. “And then the curse lay down. All of it. The way it does when she binds it. And I slept. Five hours. I haven’t slept five hours since the autumn.” I looked at him. “And when I woke up, I couldn’t feel her.”

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opened it. And then laid the thing in my chest down to sleep like a dog.”.

Liam didn’t say anything. We both knew whose hands had made the thing in my chest.

Harlan of Stonecrest arrived the next afternoon.

He came in his own car, with his own driver, and two of the Council’s guard in the back, and face like a closed door. Ryan met him at the foot of the steps. I didn’t. I watched from my office window as he got out, slowly, an old heavy man in a dark overcoat, and stood looking up at the packhouse, as if he were trying to see through the walls.

I already knew why he had come. Liam had heard it from Tiernan, who had heard it from Corran, who had heard it from Harlan himself at ten o’clock the morning before, on the telephone. The Luna of Moonhaven had walked out of Greyhollow in the night. Drugged the Council’s guard. Used the Greyhollow girl again to open the doors, the way she had used her to burn the storehouse and put a knife in my mother. Eyes gone silver in Sebastian Thorne’s garden, in defiance of the ruling. And nobody in the valley could think where a young woman with no money and no friends would go, in the

middle of a winter night, except home.

Harlan came up to my office alone. He sat down in the chair across from my desk without being asked, and put his hat on his knee, and looked at me.

“Where is she, Kade?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Sebastian Thorne believes she came here.”

“Sebastian Thorne is lying.”

Harlan’s mouth thinned. He looked at me for a while.

“You understand how this looks,” he said.

“I understand exactly how it looks.” I kept my hands flat on the desk. “And I’ll tell you what I told the Council in that hall. The truth. I don’t know where she is. I haven’t seen her. She hasn’t come here. I would give anything I own to be lying to you, Harlan, and have her upstairs.”

“Then you won’t mind if the Council looks.”

“Look wherever you like.” I didn’t take my eyes off his. “Search the house. Search the town. Search every cellar and boathouse and woodshed in Moonhaven. Ryan will take you. You won’t find her.” My voice went rough. I let it. “She’s not here. She’s not anywhere I can feel. Two nights ago she was a

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“She wouldn’t run,” I said. “Not from the Council. Not after she stood up in front of all of you and said yes. She said yes to keep this pack out of a war, Harlan. You heard her. You said yourself it was to her credit.” I leaned forward. “Abby would sooner sit in that room until she was old than give Sebastian Thorne a reason to say you see. Somebody cornered her. Somebody made her go. Somebody walked into that house and gave her something she couldn’t say no to.”

“The girl-”

“The girl was used. You saw her in that hall. You saw her face. You know what was done to her, and who did it.” I didn’t raise my voice. “Ask her who walked her down those stairs. Not Sebastian Ask her

yourself, without him in the room.”

Harlan looked at me. His old face was very tired.

“I’ll be here until the inquiry is done,” he said at last. “The Council has asked me to see for myself I’ll take your Gamma up on his offer.” He stood, slowly, and put on his hat. Then he stopped, and looked at me again. At my collar. At my throat, above it.

His eyes stayed there a moment.

“The moon is full the day after tomorrow,” he said.

“I know.”

“Your witch. Imogen. Is she here?”

“No.”

Harlan didn’t say anything else. He nodded, once, and went out.

***

Ryan took him everywhere. I heard about it afterward. The cellars under the packhouse, and the old icehouse, and the boathouses along the shore. The clinic, room by room, with Daphne standing in every doorway with her arms folded like a woman guarding a henhouse. The Luna’s rooms, where Harlan stood in the middle of the floor and looked at the bed nobody had slept in for a month, and the robe on the back of the door, and the window over the wisteria, and didn’t say a word.

They didn’t find her. I hadn’t thought they would.

I spent those two days at the edge of the bond. I couldn’t stop. Every hour, every few minutes, I reached for her and found nothing. Sometimes I thought there was something. A flicker. A faint warmth, very far off. Then it was gone, and I didn’t know if I had imagined it.

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The night before the moon, I understood why.

was lying awake in the dark, reaching for her, finding nothing. And under my ribs, very slowly, the thing turned over. Just once. As if someone a long way off had lifted a finger, idly, to see if it still

answered.

It answered.

*******

Imogen came back on the afternoon of the full moon, on foot, out of the west, with her basket on her arm and her boots soaked to the knee and her face the color of the snow.

Liam saw her first, from the yard. He brought her straight up to my office. She came in, and stopped in the doorway, and looked at me.

She knew. I saw her know, before anyone said a word. Her eyes went to my face, and my throat, and then past me, at the empty air, as if she were looking for someone who should have been standing

beside me.

“When?” she said.

I told her. All of it. The fist round my heart. The sleep. And then nothing, where Abby should have

been.

She didn’t sit down. She stood there in her wet coat with her hand pressed flat against her pocket, and listened, and when I had finished, her face had gone as hard as I had ever seen it.

“She showed her,” Imogen said. “That’s what that was. She closed her hand on you so the girl would feel it. And then she opened it.” Her mouth twisted. “She showed her what she could do. And what she could stop doing.”

I couldn’t speak.

“And then she put silver on her,” Imogen said. “That’s why you can’t feel her, Alpha. Silver, on her skin. It doesn’t break the bond. Nothing can. But it smothers it.” She looked at me. “She’s alive. If she were dead, the bond would be gone. Torn out of you. You’d know.”

I put my hand over my eyes.

“And tonight?” Liam said, from the door.

Imogen looked out of the window. At the sky over the lake, going gray already, though it was barely

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