His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 77

Chapter 77

Cassandra came back just before dusk.

I had slept most of the afternoon, and when I woke, Liam had returned with a bag of my own clothes from the packhouse and a sandwich from the kitchens that Daphne had approved after inspecting it like evidence. Kade was standing by the window. He had been standing there, Liam told me under his

breath, for most of the last hour.

Neither of them had mentioned Cassandra.

Neither of them had needed to.

When the door opened, Kade turned so fast that I knew he had been waiting for it.

His mother stood in the doorway holding a flat cardboard box against her chest. It was old, the corners soft and split, the lid held down with a piece of faded ribbon. She had changed her blouse. Her hair was neat again. But her eyes were red around the edges, and she held the box the way people hold something that might break if they breathe on it.

“Mom.”

“I know,” she said. “I know. Let me sit down first.”

Liam got up and gave her his chair. She set the box on her knees and didn’t open it.

For a moment, she simply looked at me.

“Abby, sweetheart. I need you to look at something for me.” Her voice was steady, but only because she was working very hard to keep it that way. “And I need you to tell me the truth, even if you think

it will hurt me.”

My heart began to beat harder. “Okay.”

She untied the ribbon.

Inside were photographs. Not many. Some loose, some in yellowed paper sleeves. She went through them without looking at most of them, as though she already knew exactly where the one she wanted

was, and drew out a single print with white borders.

She held it out to me.

It was a summer photograph, faded toward orange the way old pictures always were. The lake

O

MON

2

OK

|||

r

face

Mon, Nov 2

My father.

drian Hayes, squinting into the sun with one hand raised against it, smiling.

My throat tightened so suddenly that I had to look away. They were all so young. Our fathers looked barely older than Kade was now, and Cassandra couldn’t have been more than a few years older than me. When I looked back, I made myself look at the fourth-person.

He stood a little apart from the others, at the edge of the dock. Younger than the rest. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Tall and still too thin for his height, the way boys are before they finish growing. Dark hair falling into his eyes. He wasn’t smiling. He was looking at the camera with an expression that wasn’t quite sullen and wasn’t quite shy.

And his eyes were gray.

Cold, pale gray.

I had seen those eyes looking down at Diana in a circle of moonlight. I had watched them narrow at Cressida, and widen when the floor began to glow.

The face around them was softer here. Younger. Unfinished. The hardness hadn’t settled into it yet.

But it was him.

Inside me, Diana woke all at once. She didn’t speak. She growled, low and furious, a sound I felt

along my spine.

My fingers had tightened around the edge of the photograph.

“Abby?” Kade had come away from the window.

“That’s him.” My voice came out thin. “That’s the man from the temple.”

Cassandra closed her eyes.

Liam leaned over my shoulder to look. “Which one?”

I pointed.

The room went very quiet.

Kade took the photograph from my hand. He stared at it for a long moment, and I watched him look

at each face in turn. His father. His mother. My father. Then the boy at the end of the dock.

002

MON

OOK

|||

୮

101 Mon, Nov 2 M.

Kade didn’t move.

“He was your father’s brother.”

For a few seconds, nobody spoke.

Then Kade laughed, short and disbelieving. “Dad didn’t have a brother.”

“He did.”

“I would know if I had an uncle.”

“You would,” Cassandra said quietly, “if we had ever let you.”

Kade looked down at the photograph again. His knuckles had gone pale around the edge.

“He was much younger than your father,” Cassandra went on. “Ten years. He was twelve when I married Nathaniel and came to Moonhaven, all elbows and silences.” Her mouth moved, not quite a smile. “He used to hang around the kitchens pretending he wasn’t hungry until I gave him whatever I’d just baked.”

I couldn’t make that boy fit with the man in the temple.

I tried. I couldn’t.

Cassandra reached into the box again and took out a second photograph. She held it for a moment

before she handed it to her son.

This one was smaller. The same lake. A young man, eighteen or a little older, broader now, dark hair cut short. On his shoulders sat a little boy of five or six with his hands buried in the young man’s hair and his mouth open in a shriek of laughter.

Kade went still in a different way.

“That’s me.”

“Yes.”

He stared at it. Something was happening in his face that I had never seen before, a kind of slow, painful searching.

“I remember this,” he said quietly. “Not the picture. This.” He touched the edge of it. “Someone used to carry me on his shoulders down to the water and pretend to be a horse. I could reach the branches of the apple tree by the path. I always thought…” He stopped. “I always thought it was

MON

2

K

|||

Г

Kade put the photograph face down on the blanket beside me, as if he couldn’t look at it any longer.

What happened?” His voice had gone flat. “Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?”

Cassandra folded her hands over the open box.

“Your father trusted Adrian above everyone.” She looked at Liam, then at me. “He wasn’t family. He wasn’t a Blackwell. But Nathaniel trusted him more than he trusted anyone alive, and when he needed a Beta, there was never any question who it would be.”

Our father. I looked at his face in the first photograph, squinting into the sun.

“Malachi grew up with that,” Cassandra said. “He was the Alpha’s brother. Blackwell blood. And every important decision, every hard conversation, every night your father couldn’t sleep, it was Adrian he went to.” Her voice softened. “Not his brother. Malachi felt it. Even as a little boy, he felt

it.”

“That wasn’t Dad’s fault,” Liam said. His voice was rough.

“No. It wasn’t. Adrian loved that boy. He taught him to track.” Cassandra shook her head slowly. “But Malachi never saw it that way. When he got his wolf, he expected things to change. He thought Nathaniel would finally put him where he belonged. At his right hand. Beta, at least. And your father

didn’t.”

“So what did he do?” Kade asked.

“He challenged him.”

Kade’s head came up.

“He was eighteen. Nineteen, barely. He’d had his wolf for less than a year.” Cassandra looked at her son. “He challenged your father for the Alpha title in front of the whole pack. You were six. I kept you inside. You cried because you wanted to watch.”

“And Dad won.”

“Your father won. He had Malachi on the ground in minutes.” Her hands tightened. “And then he didn’t finish it. He couldn’t. He looked at his little brother bleeding in the dirt, and he couldn’t do it.”

“He spared him,” I said softly.

“He exiled him. The same night. Malachi left with nothing but the clothes he was wearing, and Nathaniel stood at the border and watched him go.” She paused. “When he came back, he went

O

MON

2

OK

|||

O

J

101

01 Mon, Nov 2 MO

“I couldn’t burn them. So I put them away.”

“And nobody ever said his name,” Kade said.

“Not once. Not in more than twenty years.” Her voice cracked for the first time. “I let you forget him, Kade. I thought it was kinder.”

I looked at the photograph of the four of them on the dock.

Then at the boy with gray eyes.

Something cold was moving through me, slowly, the way water seeps through cracks.

“Aunt Cassie,” I said. “The attack. Eight years ago.”

Cassandra didn’t look at me. She looked at the photograph.

“They knew where to find Nathaniel,” she said quietly. “They knew our patrol routes, which way the wind came off the lake, where the packhouse doors were. Afterward, everyone said there must have been a traitor inside Moonhaven. We searched for one for years.” She swallowed. “There was never a traitor. There didn’t need to be. They were led by someone who grew up here.”

Liam had gone completely still.

“I heard them,” I whispered.

All three of them looked at me.

“Under the floor. When Mom hid me.” My voice was shaking now. “Someone shouted it outside the house. Take the girls alive.” I pressed my hand over my mother’s crescent. “That’s what he’s been doing all this time. The missing girls. The cells in the temple. It’s the same thing. It never stopped.”

Cassandra pressed her fingers against her lips.

“I never thought he would still be coming for us,” she said. “After all these years. I thought whatever he became, he would at least stay away.”

Kade turned his back to us.

He walked to the window and stood there with both hands braced against the frame. The light outside had gone blue with evening. I could see his reflection in the glass, and his face looked like

something carved.

“He was there,” he said. “In the temple. He was a few corridors away from me.”

O

O

MON

2