His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 74

Chapter 74

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Liam

Chapter 74

ruins didn’t stop settling until the second morning.

By the time the last team came out of the ruins, the sky was already gray. We had walked every corridor that was still standing and found only rogues: seven alive enough to chain, and more who weren’t. Every girl had gone down the mountain with Kade and the healers. Sloane hadn’t been among them, and she wasn’t among the dead either.

After that, the ruins wouldn’t let anyone back in. Whatever had cracked the chamber had weakened every passage around it, and every hour or so something else gave way deep inside: a muffled crash under the ridge, a fresh trickle of rock down the slope, another breath of dust from the entrance Tiernan’s scouts said it needed a day to settle, and I had no argument good enough to send anyone inside before then.

So I did what there was to do. I split the remaining warriors between Ryan and Tiernan, had the prisoners loaded and the bodies wrapped, and sent the trucks down in pairs so no one would be alone on the road.

It was late afternoon when I finally drove back into Moonhaven.

Cassandra had turned the community hall into something between a clinic and a home. Cots lined the walls, every table held food, and a radio played quietly in the corner so the silence wouldn’t get too loud. Girls sat wrapped in blankets in twos and threes, some talking, most not.

She found me before I found her.

“Liam.” She took both my hands and looked me over. Whatever she saw made her mouth tighten, but she didn’t comment on it. “Sit down before you collapse.”

“I’m fine. How are the girls?”

“Better. We’ve identified seven of them. Their parents are already on the way.” She glanced across the hall. “The other four can’t remember where they’re from. Daphne thinks it’s the collars, that the longer they wore them, the more they lost. Some of them have been gone for over a year.”

Over a year. I looked at the nearest cot, where a girl younger than Abby sat with her knees pulled up, eating soup as if someone might take it away.

“Did you find anyone else?” Cassandra asked.

“Only rogues. The ones still breathing are in the cells now, and Ryan’s with them.”

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“How is she?”

Stable. Still asleep.” Cassandra squeezed my hands once before letting go. “Go and see her Then come back and eat something, or I’ll send Daphne after you.”

Abby’s room was at the end of the clinic corridor, and the door stood half open.

Kade sat in the chair beside her bed, still in yesterday’s shirt, with his hand around hers on top of the blanket. He looked up when I came in, and for a second I saw Knox behind his eyes, wary, before, he recognized me and it faded.

“Hey,” I said quietly.

“Hey.” He looked back at Abby. “She’s stable. Daphne says she might just need time.”

“Your mom told me.”

I stood at the foot of the bed. Abby looked small under the white sheets, her hair brushed back from her face by someone who wasn’t me. There was a bandage around one wrist and an IV in her arm, and that pale strand at her temple caught the light every time I looked away from it and back again.

For eight years, I had been the one in that chair. I had sat through her fevers and her nightmares and the night she broke her arm falling out of Chloe’s tree house.

Now the only chair was taken, and the hand on hers wasn’t mine.

I rested my hand on the blanket over her foot instead, the way I used to when she was ten and

wouldn’t let anyone near her.

“Any sign of Sloane?” Kade asked.

“Not yet. The tunnels are still coming down. We go back in when they stop.”

He nodded and looked back at Abby, and I understood that the conversation was over. He hadn’t

meant anything by it. There was simply nothing in the room for him except her.

I stayed a few more minutes. Then I said I’d check in later, and he said “Okay” without looking up, and I walked out of my sister’s room with nothing to do with my hands.

I was halfway down the corridor when someone called after me.

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a single thing about her.

“Hi,” she said, a little uncertainly. “You’re the one who pulled me out, aren’t you?”

That was me.”

“I’m Tessa.”

“Liam.”

“I know. I asked.” She almost smiled, then looked down at her hands. “Thank you. For not avig

me there.” Color crept into her cheeks.

I never knew what to do with gratitude. I nodded, and the silence went on a beat too long. I should have let her go then. Instead I heard myself ask, “Did you see another girl down there? Blonde, tall, about twenty-five?”

Tessa thought about it. “Not in the cells. But the guards talked about a woman like that. Not to us, just around us, like we weren’t there.” She hesitated. “They called her the Boss’s woman.”

Jasper went still inside me.

She watched my face. “Is she your…?” She trailed off.

“My friend.” The word came out too small for everything it had to hold.

“Oh.” She tucked a strand of uneven hair behind her ear, and some of the color left her face, as if she was afraid she had said too much. “I hope she’s okay.”

“So do I.” I made myself smile at her. “Get some rest, Tessa.”

I walked out into the yard before she could see anything else on my face, and I stood in the cold until Jasper stopped pacing.

Ryan called at five the next morning. Nothing had fallen since midnight, and Tiernan’s scouts had checked the entrance at first light and found it holding.

The entrance we had used was half buried. The brush and stacked stone that had hidden the service

passage had disappeared under a slide of loose rock, and only the top of the opening still showed, a dark gap barely wide enough for a man on his stomach.

We went in with six: Ryan, Tiernan, one of his trackers, two of our warriors, and me. I went first.

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I reached through the mind-link as we climbed. Sloane.

Three nights ago, she had answered me. Faint and broken, as though she were calling through á wall, but there. Hurry.

Now there was nothing at all.

The corridor above the cells split. The left side had collapsed completely. The right led into part of the temple that looked nothing like the rest, with heavier doors and rugs on the floor under me dist.

I smelled her before the tracker said anything.

Roses and bergamot. I had known that scent since we were children running between the packhouse and the lake. It had been on the back steps the summer she was sixteen and turned up with an overnight bag, saying she would stay one night. It had been in every meeting she had ever sat through

beside Kade.

Now it came from behind the third door.

The room wasn’t a cell. There was a bed and a fireplace, a heavy chair pulled close to the hearth, and shelves of books. Women’s Clothes lay folded on a chest at the foot of the bed, and a man’s coat hung on a hook beside the door. Her scent was in all of it.

So was another one: woodsmoke and leather. It was laid over hers so thickly that it had soaked into everything she had touched.

Ryan swept his light across the room. “This is where somebody lived.”

“Two somebodies,” Tieman said quietly.

I looked at the bed and then away from it. I had no right to the feeling that came with that. Sloane was a grown woman, and whatever had happened in this room, I didn’t want to know even half of it.

But I knew what the guards had called her. And I could see the bolt on the outside of the door.

I walked out before I put my fist through something.

Her scent was fresher in the corridor than anywhere else, as if she had been the last thing to move through it. It led left and then down, through a passage where the ceiling had come in twice and we had to climb over rubble with our lights between our teeth.

Then it changed.

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