His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 79

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Chapter 79

Sloane

Nhad started counting the days by the bandages.

Morning and night, the door unlocked, and Malachi came in with a basin of hot water, a roof clean linen and the small brown bottle of something that smelled like pine sap and burned like re Morning and night, he unwrapped my leg, looked at it without any expression at all, and wrapped it

again.

By that count, I had been awake for six days.

It felt like sixty.

The room was small. One bed, one chair, one chest against the wall. One window, its shutter fixed half-closed from the outside so that all I could see was a strip of clearing, two muddy trucks and the edge of the forest. Rough log walls, the gaps stuffed with old moss, and when the wind came down the mountain at night, it found every one of them.

The door had a lock on the outside.

I had checked. On the third day I had crawled there on my hands and one knee, dragging the splinted leg behind me, and by the time I reached the handle I was shaking too hard to have done anything with it even if it had opened.

I hadn’t made it back to the bed before the lock turned. He must have heard me through the wall. He didn’t say a word. He simply put me back in the bed and checked the bandage for fresh blood.

There had been some.

On the sixth morning, the lock turned before the light through the shutters had turned from gray to gold.

I didn’t look at him.

He set the basin on the chair and pulled back the blanket from my leg without asking. He never asked. In the first two days, that had made me furious enough to fight him, and fighting him had made the leg bleed, and the leg bleeding had made him go cold and quiet in a way I hadn’t liked any

better.

Now I just stared at the ceiling.

The splint ran from below my knee to my ankle, two flat lengths of wood bound on either side. Under it, the bandage had stiffened overnight. When he started unwinding it, the linen pulled at the

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I hated that he had learned to do that.

wound underneath was ugly. A long, ragged split held closed with black stitches, the flesh around it gone from purple to a sick yellow-green. The skin beside the stitches looked tight and shiny, and it was hotter than it had been yesterday. I could feel the heat coming off it without touching it.

Malachi looked at it for longer than usual.

Wolves healed fast.

I wasn’t healing fast.

Rhea had been too quiet since the temple. Not gone, the way she had been under the collar, but curled small and tired around the pain, as if keeping me alive through the blood loss had used up everything she had. Whatever usually knitted us back together was working at half strength.

Malachi cleaned the stitches with the brown bottle.

I bit down on the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper.

“You can make noise,” he said.*

“I’d rather not give you the satisfaction.”

“You think this satisfies me?”

“I think you like having something to fix.”

His hands didn’t stop. “If I liked it, I would be better at it.”

That was almost a joke. I refused to acknowledge it.

He laid clean linen over the wound and began to wrap it again. His fingers were always careful with my leg, which made no sense, considering what else those hands had done. I had watched one close around Jax’s throat. I had felt the other hold the back of my neck while he put his teeth in me.

The mark beneath my hair throbbed, as if it knew I was thinking about it.

Cressida had changed the bandages the first two days. She had done it with her mouth pressed thin and her burned hand still wrapped, and on the second evening she had pushed her thumb into the swelling beside the stitches hard enough that I screamed.

She had said it was to check for infection.

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He tied off the bandage and checked the splint bindings, tightening one. Then he stood and pushed he shutter as far open as it would go, so that more of the gray light fell across the bed. It caught h the hard lines of his face and the dark stubble along his jaw. He looked tired. He always looked tired

now.

“There’s food,” he said without turning.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You said that the day you threw it at the wall.”

“Next to you,” I corrected. “If I’d been aiming at you, I wouldn’t have missed.”

He didn’t argue.

I would eat today, though. Not for him. Because Rhea needed it, and because if I was ever going to get through that door, I would need two working legs. Starving myself to make a point wouldn’t give

me either.

He went out and came back with a tray. Warm bread. A bowl of something thick with meat and barley. Tea, set on the floor where I could reach it.

Then, instead of leaving, he sat in the chair.

I stared at him. “What are you doing?”

“Sitting.”

“Do it somewhere else.”

“This is my cabin.”

“Then let me leave it.”

He didn’t answer that. He never did.

I picked up the bread, because eating was better than looking at him.

He watched me for a while. Then he said, “Teague thinks the weather will turn tonight.”

I tore off a piece of bread. “I don’t care what Teague thinks.”

Teague was the scarred one who sat on the porch most of the day. Boots on the boards. The scrape

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“First snow,” Malachi went on, as if I hadn’t spoken. “It comes early this high up.”

“Where is this high up?”

He looked at me.

“It was worth a try.

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. It was gone before I could decide what it was,

I ate the stew. It was good, which annoyed me. Malachi stayed in the chair with his forearms on his knees, and he talked. Not about anything that mattered. The firewood running low. The stream behind the cabin icing over at the edges. A fox that came around the woodpile at dawn.

At the temple, he had barely spoken to me unless he wanted something. Here, he sat and said ordinary things in that low, flat voice, as though he was trying to remember how it was done.

I didn’t answer. But I listened. There was nothing else to do.

When I set the empty bowl down, I asked the question I had been holding for days.

“What’s your name?”

He went still.

“Your whole name,” I said. “Malachi what?”

“Malachi is enough.”

“Not for everything.”

His gaze didn’t move from my face. Gray and cold and very steady. “No,” he said. “Not for everything.”

He knew exactly what I meant. I could see it in his eyes, and I could see that he had known it long before I asked, maybe since the night he put his teeth in my neck.

If I’d had that name, I would have said the words right there, in that bed, with my leg in a splint and my bowl still warm in my lap. Not because I was ready. Because I wanted to watch it hit him. I wanted to take one thing from him the way he had taken everything from me.

Half a name was a door with no handle, and he had made very sure I never found one.

He stood and picked up the tray. “Get some rest.”

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Then he went out, and the lock turned behind him.

Teague was right about the weather.

By nightfall, the wind had picked up enough to rattle the shutters, and the cold coming between the logs had a new edge to it, sharp and clean. Snow hissed against the window. Somewhere outside men were talking around a fire, and then even they went in.

I couldn’t get warm.

At first I thought it was the room. I pulled the blanket up to my chin and curled as much as the splint would let me, and the shaking only got worse. My teeth started to chatter. My skin was cold and my leg was burning, and the two didn’t make sense together, and then nothing made very much sense

at all.

The room tilted when I closed my eyes. The ceiling beams kept moving when I opened them.

Sometime in the night, voices came through the wall.

Hers. Then his.

I couldn’t hold on to them. They came and went like the light under the door, words breaking loose from the rest and floating up to me through the fever.

“-the girl-”

“-every day you wait-”

“-Moonhaven owes you a debt, Malachi. You’ve waited long enough to collect it.”

Then his voice, flat and low. “Not yet.”

A door opened somewhere. Cold came in under mine, sharp with snow, and then it was gone.

I lay there shaking and tried to make the pieces fit. The girl was Abby. I knew that much even

through the fog. But the rest kept sliding away from me.

Moonhaven owes you.