His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 75

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MON

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Sloane

Mon, Nov

Chapter 75

Pain found me before anything else did.

It sat in my left leg, heavy and hot, pulsing in time with my heartbeat. For a while that was the whole world. I drifted toward it and away again, and each time I surfaced, something new cake with

Woodsmoke.

Pine.

The rough scratch of wool against my cheek.

The stone was gone. That was the next thing I understood. No dust in my mouth. No grinding overhead. Somewhere close, a fire popped, and wind pushed against a wall that sounded like wood instead of rock.

I opened my eyes.

A ceiling of dark, uneven timber. A narrow window with the shutter half closed and gray daylight coming through the gap. A small room, plain and clean, with a chest against one wall and a door that

was shut.

And Malachi, in a chair beside the bed.

He was awake. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands loosely clasped, watching me as if he had been doing it for a long time. There was a healing cut along his jaw and dust still caught in the seams of his knuckles. He had changed his shirt. Black, like everything else he owned.

“You’re awake,” he said.

My throat felt like sand. “Where am I?”

“Somewhere safe.”

“Safe for who?”

He didn’t answer that.

I tried to sit up. The pain in my leg sharpened so fast that the room tilted, and I fell back against the pillow with my breath caught behind my teeth.

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I made myself look down.

Someone had stripped me out of the nightdress. I was wearing a man’s shirt, dark and far too large, the sleeves rolled to my wrists. A blanket covered me to the waist, but my left leg lay on top it, propped on a folded pillow. From the knee down it had been splinted between two lengths of smooth wood and bound in clean bandages. My foot was swollen and purple where it showed beneath them.

I stared at it.

The slab. The sound my leg had made. Malachi’s hands on the stone.

“How long did I sleep?”

“Two days.”

Two days. I had lost two whole days to fever and darkness, and I didn’t remember any of them.

“Who undressed me?”

His eyes held mine. “Cressida.”

I wasn’t sure whether that was better or worse.

I reached for Rhea. She was there, but faint, curled tight around the pain in my leg the way a wolf curls around a wound. She lifted her head when I touched her. Then she turned toward the man in the chair, and the warmth that went through her made me want to scream.

No, I told her.

She didn’t answer, but she didn’t stop either.

I reached past her, further, toward the pack.

Liam?

Nothing came back. Not static. Not distance. Just a silence so complete that I couldn’t tell whether I was too far away, too weak to reach, or whether something on the other side had simply closed.

Maybe Moonhaven had finally shut the door on me.

I couldn’t even say they were wrong.

Malachi was watching me. “Who are you trying to reach?”

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“You don’t know that.”

“We’re a long way from Moonhaven.”

I couldn’t tell whether that was the whole truth or only the part he wanted me to have. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of seeing that it mattered.

The door opened.

Cressida came in carrying a basin and a folded cloth over her arm. A bandage circled her head, and her left hand had been wrapped from the knuckles to the wrist. The silver-streaked hair she usually kept so neatly pinned had been tied back without care.

She stopped when she saw my eyes open.

“Awake at last,” she said. “Pity.”

Malachi didn’t look at her. “Change the dressing.”

“I’m aware.”

She set the basin down on the chest with more force than necessary and dragged a stool to the side of the bed. The smell coming off the water was sharp, with something bitter underneath that I didn’t

recognize.

She reached for the bandages on my leg.

I pulled away on instinct, and the movement shot fire up through my knee. A sound escaped me before I could stop it.

“Hold still,” Cressida said, “or I’ll let you bleed through it.”

“Cressida.”

Malachi said only her name, but the room went colder.

Her mouth thinned. She began unwinding the bandage, and I made myself look.

The skin beneath was black and violet from my knee to my ankle. A long gash ran down the side of my shin, closed with neat dark stitches. The whole leg was swollen tight and hot, and the smell of it made my stomach turn.

“Broken in two places,” Cressida said, as if she were describing a cracked plate. “The bone was showing. I set it. I stitched it. Your wolf will knit it, slowly, as long as you don’t do anything stupid.”

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She dipped the cloth into the basin and pressed it against the stitches.

burned like nothing else had. I gripped the blanket with both hands and refused to make another sound. Under her breath, Cressida began to murmur something in the old language. The words slid over each other, soft and steady.

The burning eased. Not completely. Enough that Lcould breathe.

I hated that it worked.

She wrapped the leg again with clean bandages, firm and practiced. When she finished, she stood and wiped her hands on the cloth.

Then she looked at Malachi. “You should have let the mountain keep her.”

He didn’t move. “You’ve said.”

“And I’ll keep saying it.” Her voice was low and even. “She brought Moonhaven to our door. Every girl we spent years finding is gone. Half our men are dead or sitting in Moonhaven’s cells. And you went back for her instead of going after the one thing that mattered.”

Something in his face went still.

“Be very careful,” he said quietly.

Cressida held his gaze for a moment longer than I would have dared. Then she picked up the basin.

“I set her leg because you ordered it,” she said. “I am not required to be glad she’s alive.”

She left without closing the door.

Malachi got up and closed it himself.

He didn’t sit down again. He stood with his back to the door, arms folded, and looked at me as if I were a problem he hadn’t decided how to solve.

I looked at him the same way. “You should have left me under the slab.”

His eyes narrowed slightly.

“I mean it,” I said. “You should have walked away. She was right. You had every reason.”

“I’m aware of my reasons.”

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“I told Liam where we were,” I said. “I told him where Abby was. I’d do it again.”

You’ve mentioned that.”

“So what am I now? Your prisoner? Your punishment?” My voice cracked, and I hated it. I don’t want to be saved by you. Do you understand that? If I was going to die in that place, it show have been my choice. Not one more thing you took from me.”

For a moment, something flickered behind his eyes. Then it was gone.

“You don’t get to choose that,” he said.

“I just did.”

“No.” He came away from the door, unhurried. “You lay under a stone and told me to go. That isn’t a choice. That’s giving up.”

“Maybe I was entitled to.”

“Not while you carry my mark.”

My hand went to my neck before I could stop it. The bite had healed into a raised ridge beneath my hair. Rhea stirred at the touch, pleased, and I wanted to tear her out of me.

“Let me go.”

“No.”

“I can’t walk. I can’t shift. I’m no use to you like this.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“Then let me go.”

He looked down at me. “Where would you go, Sloane?”

The question was quiet. That made it worse.

I opened my mouth, and nothing came out.

He waited, as if he already knew there was no answer, and the knowledge sat between us in the small

room until I couldn’t stand to look at him.