His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 81

Next Chapter Chapter 81

Rate Chapter

Send Gift

Comments

MON

2

OK

|||

Г

Chapter 81

Abby

Daphne said one more day.

Kade didn’t argue with her, which was how I knew how much this meant to him. He simply modded, wrote something on the corner of a patrol report, and the next afternoon, at the exact momen Daphne signed off on “moderate walking, flat ground, nothing stupid,” he was standing at the bottom of the packhouse stairs with a bag over his shoulder, pretending he hadn’t been waiting.

“Flat ground,” I reminded him.

“It’s flat.”

“Mostly flat?”

“Mostly.” He held out his hand. “I’ll carry you up the last hill if I have to.”

“You will not.”

He didn’t smile, but his eyes did.

We left through the back of the packhouse just as the sun touched the treetops. The air had that sharp, bright smell that came before frost. I had borrowed Chloe’s thickest sweater, and Kade had wound one of his scarves around my neck twice before letting me out the door, then stepped back and looked at me as if he had done something he wasn’t sure he was allowed to do.

The eastern woods were older than the rest of the forest around Moonhaven. The trees grew tall and far apart, and the path between them was soft with fallen needles. Kade walked slowly. I knew it was

for me. I let him.

Halfway there, I slipped my hand into his.

He looked down at our fingers. Then he laced them together and kept walking, and neither of us said anything for a long time.

The cabin sat in a small clearing beside a stream.

I don’t know what I had expected. Something bigger, maybe. Something with the weight of the packhouse. Instead it was small and plain, built of dark logs with a stone chimney and a narrow porch with two chairs on it. The roof sloped low on one side. There was a stack of firewood under the eaves, split and neat.

Smoke was already rising from the chimney.

002

MON

OOK

|||

O

Г

Mon, Nov 2 MO.

“A little?”

“There was a mouse.”

“Was?”

“It’s been relocated.”

I laughed, and the sound carried across the clearing. Something in his shoulders loosened.

Inside, it was one room and a loft. A wide bed under the slope of the roof. A worn sofa in front of the fireplace. A small kitchen along one wall with a table for two, and on the table, in a glass jar, a handful of late purple asters he must have picked from the edge of the stream.

I stopped in the doorway and looked at them.

Kade followed my gaze and went faintly red. “Too much?”

“No.” My voice came out softer than I meant. “No. It’s perfect.”

He had built it the year he became Alpha, he told me while he unpacked the bag. Eighteen, with his father barely buried and a pack that looked at him every morning as though he was supposed to know what to do. Liam had helped with the roof. They had argued about the chimney for a week.

“I needed one place where nobody called me Alpha,” he said. “Where I could just be tired.”

I looked around at the bare walls. The single shelf of books. The scarred table. No photographs. No maps. Nothing that belonged to the pack.

“And you’ve never brought anyone here.”

“Liam, when the roof leaks.”

“That isn’t what I meant. Not even-‘

“No one like this.” He met my eyes. “Not until you.”

***

The one thing he could cook well turned out to be pasta with a sauce of tomatoes and garlic and something he refused to name.

“It’s my mother’s,” he said. “She made me swear.”

002

MON

OOK

|||

O

୮

¡

102 Mon, Nov 2 MDD

kitchen with the same focus he brought to everything else, frowning at the sauce, tasting it, frowning

harder. His sleeves were pushed up. The tattoos on his forearms moved when he stirred.

was such an ordinary thing. A man making dinner. A pot steaming on a stove.

I had never seen him do anything ordinary before.

“You’re staring,” he said without turning around.

“I’m allowed.”

“Are you?”

“You invited me.”

He glanced at me over his shoulder, and the corner of his mouth lifted.

The pasta was very good. I told him so twice, and the second time he looked so pleased that I almost said it a third time to see what would happen.

We talked. Not about the temple. Not about Malachi or Cressida or the strand of silver in my hair. By some unspoken agreement, we left all of that outside on the porch with the firewood.

Instead I learned things I should have known years ago. He hated the taste of coffee and drank it anyway. He had broken his arm at eleven jumping off the roof of the old woodshed because Liam had told him he wouldn’t dare. He had wanted to be a carpenter, once, before he understood he was going to be Alpha whether he wanted it or not.

“You’d have been a good one,” I said, looking around the cabin.

“I’d have been a mediocre one.” He lifted his glass. “The chimney still smokes when the wind comes

from the north.”

He asked about me, too, as if he didn’t already know everything. He asked what I wanted. Not what

the pack needed or what Diana was or what the moon did when it touched me. What I wanted.

Nobody had asked me that in a long time.

“I wanted to be a healer,” I said. “Really be one. Not just help Daphne roll bandages.”

“Wanted?”

I turned my glass slowly. “I don’t know what I’m allowed to want anymore.”

He reached across the table and put his hand over mine.

MON

002

K

102 Mon, Nov 2 MD

Later, we sat on the sofa in front of the fire.

My legs were tucked under me, my head on his shoulder. His arm lay along the back of the cushions, and every few minutes his thumb moved against my shoulder as if he was checking I was still there.

The fire cracked. Outside, the stream ran on in the dark.

I had been thinking about this for days. Maybe for weeks. In the temple, lying on stone with silver burning through Diana’s legs, had held on to one thing at the very end: his voice in that chamber, breaking through everything, saying, Abby, come back to me.

I had come back.

And I had been waiting, ever since I woke up, for the right moment to tell him something. I had kept thinking it should be bigger than this. Somewhere with the whole pack watching, maybe. Under a full

moon.

But it didn’t need to be bigger. It needed to be ours.

I sat up.

Kade’s hand slid from my shoulder. He looked at me, and whatever he saw in my face made him go

still.

“I asked you for time,” I said.

“I remember.”

“You gave it to me. You never pushed. Not once.” I swallowed. “Even when I know it was driving you

crazy.”

“It wasn’t-”

“Kade.”

He closed his mouth.

“Everything that’s happened between us happened to me,” I said. “The bond. The rejection. Diana knowing you before I did. Even what happened in that temple. None of it was something I chose. It just came, and I had to survive it.”

His jaw tightened. He didn’t look away.

“I don’t want this to be like that.” I took his hand in both of mine. It was warm and rough and so

MON

2

OK

|||

I ignored her.

SLwant it to be because I chose you. Not Diana. Not fate.” My voice shook. “Me.”

Kade didn’t breathe.

“I know your name now means something different than it did a week ago,” I said quietly what it cost you to learn that. But I don’t care who else carries it. It’s yours. And I want it.

Then I said the words.

“I, Abigail Hayes, accept you, Kade Blackwell, as my mate.”

For one heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then the bond snapped into place.

know

It wasn’t like the night of my first shift, when it had arrived out of nowhere and torn me open. This was quieter. Deeper. As if a door I hadn’t known was half-closed had swung all the way open, and warm air was pouring through it.

Diana rose inside me with a sound that was almost a sob.

Kade made a sound too. Low and broken. His hand turned in mine and gripped so hard it nearly

hurt.

“Abby.” My name came out rough. “Are you sure?”

“I just said it out loud.”

“I know. I need to hear it again.”

I smiled through the sting in my eyes. “I’m sure.”

He lifted his other hand to my face. His thumb brushed under my eye, then down along my jaw, slowly, until his fingers rested against the side of my neck. Right where my pulse was racing.

He didn’t move further. He waited.

I knew what he was asking.

I tilted my head.

“Yes,” I whispered.

002

OK

|||

O

J

The pain was sharp and quick and then gone, swallowed by heat so sudden and complete that asped. It poured out from the place where his mouth was, through my neck and shoulder, down ty spine, into my hands. Diana surged up to meet it.

And the light came.

I felt it before I saw it. The same warmth I had felt in the temple, rising from somewhere termy skin. But this time it didn’t tear through me. It flowed. Out of me and into him, through the hond like water finding its course.

When I opened my eyes, my hands were glowing.

Faint silver, soft as frost on glass. It moved over my fingers where they gripped his shirt and spread across his chest. There was barely any moon left that week, and none at all in the sky above the cabin,

and still the light came.

Kade lifted his head. His eyes had flashed gold, the way they did when Knox was very close.

He stared at my hands. Then at me.

“What was that?”