His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 80

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Chapter 80

Abby

Daphne’s rules for recovery fit on a single sheet of paper, and she taped it to the inside of my door so I couldn’t pretend I had forgotten them.

Eat everything they bring you.

Walk twice a day. Not alone. Not far.

No shifting until I say so.

If you feel dizzy, sit down. On a chair. Not the floor.

The last one was underlined twice, which I thought was unfair. I had only sat on the floor once.

By the third day after I woke up, I was allowed to leave the clinic and go back to my own room in the packhouse, mostly because Daphne said she was tired of Kade sleeping in a chair outside her office. By the fourth, I could walk the whole length of the Alpha wing and back without stopping, although my legs complained about it afterward.

Kade walked it with me every time.

He never held my arm unless I reached for him. He simply stayed close enough that if I swayed, he would be there before I finished deciding to fall. I knew he was doing it on purpose, and he knew I knew, and neither of us mentioned it.

The kitchens had apparently decided that I was a personal project. Trays arrived with soup and fresh bread, roast chicken, honey cake, enough eggs to feed a patrol. On the third tray in one afternoon I found a folded note in Cassandra’s handwriting.

Daphne says everything. That means the cake too.

I ate the cake.

It was easier to think about cake than the photographs.

Since the night Cassandra had shown them to me, the face from the temple had followed me everywhere. Younger, unsmiling, from the years before Moonhaven had learned to forget his name. The same gray eyes. The same hard mouth, before it had learned to be cruel.

I kept trying to put the boy in those pictures together with the man in the chamber, and they kept sliding apart, and every time they did, I woke up a little more tired.

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She came through my door without knocking, took one look at me in the window seat and burst into

tears.

“loe-”

“Don’t.” She held up a hand and kept crying. “You don’t get to talk yet.”

Noah came in behind her carrying a paper-bag and an expression of deep patience. “She priced a speech all the way up the hill,” he told me. “This isn’t it.”

“I know it isn’t it,” Chloe snapped, then crossed the room and hugged me so carefully it was almost funny, as if she thought I might come apart in her arms.

I hugged her back harder than she was hugging me.

Her hair smelled like the cold outside, and Skye pressed close through the edge of the pack link, warm and bright and relieved. After so long with nothing in my head but Diana and silence, the touch of someone else’s wolf made my throat go tight.

“You disappeared,” Chloe said into my shoulder. “You were just here, and then you weren’t, and nobody would tell us anything, and then you were in a temple, and then the temple fell down.”

“That’s a fair summary.”

She pulled back to glare at me. Her eyes were red. “I’m serious.”

“I know.” I squeezed her hands. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t get to be sorry. You were kidnapped.” She sniffed. “I’m allowed to be mad at the people who kidnapped you. Not you.”

Noah set the paper bag on my knees. Inside were three bars of the dark chocolate I liked from the shop in town, and a jar of the instant coffee Daphne had banned from the clinic for being an insult to coffee.

“Contraband,” he said.

I laughed for the first time in days, and it hurt my ribs, and I didn’t care.

Noah didn’t hug me. He never did. He just sat on the edge of the bed and looked at me for a long moment, steady and quiet, and through the link I felt Kai settle the way a big black wolf settles when he has finally finished pacing.

“You look like hell,” he said.

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Chloe hit his arm. He let her.

They stayed for two hours. Chloe told me everything I had missed, which was mostly gossip and exactly what I needed: who had been caught sneaking out of the training hall, which warrior had fallen for a Ravenwood girl, the fact that Ryan had shouted at a delivery driver so loudly the man had

left the van and walked to town.

Then she reached out and touched the white strand at my temple.

She had been looking at it since she walked in. I had watched her try not to.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

She turned it between her fingers. “It’s kind of pretty.”

“It’s a warning.”

Chloe’s hand stilled.

I hadn’t meant to say it like that. But it was what I thought every time I saw it in the mirror. Daphne didn’t know what had caused it. Neither did anyone else. All I knew was that I had pulled more from the moon than my body could hold, and this was what it had cost. One strand. This time.

Noah watched me. “The girl you helped. She’s working at the clinic now.”

“Tessa?”

He nodded. “Daphne put her on linens. She’s fast. She keeps asking whether you’re awake.”

Something warm and sore moved through my chest. Tessa had come to see me twice since I woke up. She still didn’t remember the name of her pack, only a river and a red barn and a grandmother who called her little fish. Moonhaven had called every pack within three hundred miles.

Chloe’s gaze slid toward the door, then back to me. Her voice dropped. “So. Kade.”

“Chloe.”

“He carried you out of a collapsing mountain.”

“I was there.”

“You were unconscious.”

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“Liam talks too much.”

“Liam never talks.” She grinned, wet-eyed. “That’s how I know it’s serious.”

I looked out the window. The trees beyond the packhouse had turned red and gold, and the wind was already pulling leaves loose. The light was going soft, though it was barely afternoon.

“I asked him for time,” I said. “Before.”

Chloe was quiet.

“I don’t know if I still need it.”

Noah didn’t say anything for a moment. Then he stood and pulled on his jacket.

“Whatever you decide,” he said, “decide it for you. Not because he carried you out of anything.”

Chloe stared at him. “That was almost wise.”

“I have my moments.”

***

Diana came back to me at night.

During the day, she was there but drowsy, curled somewhere deep where I could feel her heartbeat more than her thoughts. Daphne said it was exhaustion. Her body had burned through everything it had in that chamber, and mine had followed.

But after dark, Diana woke.

That night, I opened my eyes at some hour I didn’t want to know and found myself already sitting up. The room was cold. The moon had risen late, just past half and thinning, nowhere near what it had been at the temple, and still I could feel it on my skin through the glass.

I went to the window seat and pulled my knees up.

Better, Diana murmured.

It was the most she had said in days.

You’re awake.

I’m always awake now. At night. A long, lazy stretch inside me. It feels like drinking cold water.

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It nearly killed us because they chained us and that woman sang at us. Diana’s voice sharpened. That isn’t the same thing.

I don’t know how to stop it if it happens again.

Then we learn.

I looked at my reflection in the dark glass. The silver strand caught the light even when nothing else

did.

Who teaches us?

Diana had no answer for that.

Neither did I.

***

It was Cassandra who did, the next morning.

She called us into Kade’s office after breakfast. Daphne was already there with a folder under her arm. Liam came in last, mud on his boots and shadows under his eyes. He had gone back out toward the mountains again before dawn. He hadn’t found anything. I could tell by the way he didn’t look at anyone when he sat down.

“Sloane?” I asked quietly, when he took the chair beside mine.

He shook his head once. “Snow’s closing the high trails. We’ll try the lower ones tomorrow.”

I didn’t know what I wanted him to find. I only knew I didn’t want him to stop looking.

Daphne went first. Everything she could test, she had tested. My blood was normal. My heart was normal. My body was recovering the way any wolf’s body recovered from exhaustion, only slower.

“Which tells me what I already suspected,” she said. “Whatever happened in that temple isn’t something I can see. I can patch you up afterward. I can’t tell you how to keep it from happening.”

Kade had been standing by the window. He didn’t turn around. “Then who can?”

Cassandra folded her hands in her lap. “Possibly your uncle in Blackridge, Abby.”

I blinked. “Vincent?”

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Naomi was the most open person I ever knew, except about that. There were stories in Blackridge that nobody told outsiders. Not even me, and I grew up there.”

“What kind of stories?” Liam asked.

“I don’t know. That’s the point.” She looked at me. “But if what happened to you runs in the blood, and I think it must, then the place to start is with the blood. Vincent is the Alpha. If anyone knows,

he does.”

The room went quiet.

I touched the crescent pendant at my throat without meaning to. The white-gold chain was warm from my skin. Kade had kept the scratches on the crescent when he had it repaired.

My mother’s necklace. My mother’s family.

I had spent eight years not asking questions because the answers had all died with my parents. It had never occurred to me that some of them might still be sitting in a house in the mountains, waiting for someone to come and ask.

“I want to go,” I said.