His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 82

Chapter 82

walked back through the eastern woods a little after sunrise, and I felt every step Abby took.

Not her feet on the path. Her.

The bond sat in my chest like a second heartbeat. When she stepped over a root and her sore legs complained, I felt the small flafe of it. When a jay screamed at us from a branch and she laughed, the laugh went through me before I heard it. When the roofs of the packhouse came into view between the trees, something tightened in her, quick and bright and nervous, and Knox lifted his head inside me to see what was wrong.

Nothing was wrong.

She was embarrassed.

I looked down at her. She had pulled her hair forward over one shoulder and kept tugging at it, arranging it over the side of her neck. The scarf I had wrapped around her the evening before was gone, because I had been the one to unwind it, and neither of us had thought to look for it in the

morning.

“It won’t stay,” she muttered, pulling the hair forward again.

“Then leave it.”

She glared at me. Her cheeks were pink. “You don’t get to be smug about this.”

“I’m not smug.”

Through the bond, I felt her suspicion, and under it, warm as sunlight, something so happy it was almost painful to hold.

“You are so smug,” she said. “I can feel it.”

That was going to take some getting used to.

***

My plan was simple. Go in through the side door, past the laundry, up the back stairs to the Alpha wing. Let Abby shower and change before anyone saw her. Have one more hour where this belonged

only to us.

My plan lasted until the kitchen.

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She looked up when we came in.

Good morning,” she said pleasantly. “I was starting to wonder whether-”

She stopped.

Her eyes had gone to Abby’s neck. To the place where the hair, despite everything Abby had one to it, had slipped back over her shoulder.

The kitchen went very quiet. One of the cooks at the stove turned around, saw what Mom was looking at, and immediately turned back to the eggs with tremendous concentration.

Abby froze beside me. Through the bond, her panic went up like a flock of startled birds.

My mother set down her tea.

She stood up.

She walked around the table, very slowly, and stopped in front of Abby. She reached out and moved

the hair aside with one finger.

Then she burst into tears.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, sweetheart.”

She pulled Abby into her arms and held her, rocking slightly, the way she had held her eight years ago, when Abby was ten and too shocked to cry. Abby made a muffled sound against her shoulder. I felt her surprise melt into something soft and shaky, and then she was hugging my mother back.

I stood there and let it happen. My throat had gone tight.

Then my mother lifted her head and looked at me over Abby’s shoulder, and the tears were still

running down her face, and her expression had changed completely.

“In a cabin?”

“Mom-”

“You took her to that cabin. With the smoking chimney. Without a word to anyone.” She released Abby, kept one arm around her and pointed at me with the other hand. “Did you at least feed her?”

“I fed her.”

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“You said only for someone important.”

Abby made a small noise. When I looked at her, she had both hands over her mouth, and through the bond I could feel her trying very hard not to laugh.

My mother stared at me. Then she looked at Abby, and her whole face softened again.

“Well,” she said. “At least your listened to something.”

She wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand, sniffed once, and then I watched it happen watched her straighten her shoulders and turn back into the woman who had run this packhouse for my entire

life.

“There will be a ceremony,” she announced.

“Mom.”

“A proper one. Abby is Luna of this pack now, and the pack is going to see it done properly.” She was already reaching for her lists. “Saturday.”

Abby lowered her hands. “Saturday? That’s two days.”

“Then we had better start. I wrote the invitations the morning she woke up.” She didn’t look the least bit sorry. “All they were missing was a date.”

“Mom, she’s barely recovered-”

“She will sit for most of it.” My mother flipped one list over and began writing on the back. “The hall needs to be cleaned. The neighboring Alphas need to be invited, Ravenwood first, after everything Tiernan did for us. We need food for the whole pack, and Daphne will want to inspect the chairs, and Abby needs a dress.”

“I have dresses,” Abby said faintly.

My mother looked up, smiled at her with enormous fondness and said, “No, darling. You don’t.”

Abby looked at me.

I shrugged. I did warn you, I told her through the link.

You didn’t warn me about anything.

I meant to.

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jacket.

Mon

He saw my mother wiping her eyes. Then he saw Abby.

stopped.

His gaze went to the mark, and stayed there.

For a long moment, he didn’t move at all. Abby had gone still under my mother’s arm. Through the bond, I felt her worry, sharp and sudden. Not about what he would say to me. About whether he was all right.

“Abby,” he said quietly. “You okay?”

She nodded. “I’m good, Liam. I’m really good.”

He looked at her face for a moment longer. Whatever he found there seemed to settle something.

Then he looked at me.

“Outside.”

My mother opened her mouth

“It’s fine,” I said.

I followed him out into the yard. The morning was cold and very bright, the grass along the fence still white with frost. He walked to the edge of the gravel and stood there with his back to me, hands in his jacket pockets, looking at the trees.

I waited.

“I spent eight years making sure she was okay,” he said finally.

“I know.”

“Every nightmare. Every school form. Every time she came home crying because some idiot said something about our parents.” He turned around. “I know what the night you rejected her did to her. I

was the one sitting outside her door.”

“I know.”

“I know you know.” He looked at me hard. “I’m saying it anyway.”

I didn’t look away.

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Then Liam stepped forward and pulled me into a rough, hard embrace, one hand thumping my back

once, twice.

About damn time,” he said into my shoulder.”

He let go a beat sooner than I expected, cleared his throat, and stepped back. He nodded, looked back toward the kitchen window, where my mother’s silhouette could be seen gesturing at someone,

and some of the tiredness left his face.

“She’s going to make it huge, isn’t she.”

“Saturday.”

He let out a short breath that was almost a laugh. “Goddess help us.’

He went back inside. I stayed out in the cold a moment longer, because I wasn’t ready to walk back into that kitchen with whatever was on my face.

***

By noon, the entire pack knew.

I don’t know who told them. Probably the cook with the eggs. Probably everyone. By the time I came down from my office for lunch, wolves who had known Abby since she was a child were stopping in the corridor to stare at the place on her neck where she had finally given up trying to hide the mark.

Some of them smiled. Some looked as though they didn’t know what to do with their faces.

Old Mrs. Hallett from the bakery took both of Abby’s hands in the square and told her she had always known, which was not true, because I remembered her telling half of Moonhaven that Sloane and I would be married by spring.

At the training hall, the warriors stopped mid-drill when we walked in. Someone dropped a practice staff. Ryan, who had been shouting at two of the younger ones about their footwork, turned around, saw Abby, and went silent.

Then he did something I had never seen him do for anyone except my mother.

He inclined his head.

“Luna,” he said.

Abby went white, then red. Through the bond, I felt it crash over her all at once: panic, pride, a terrible fear of not being good enough, and under all of it, something that felt very much like coming

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I watched her stand there with her chin up and her hands shaking slightly at her sides, and I hought I had never been so proud of anyone in my life.

At the clinic, the girl from the temple, Tessa, saw the mark and smiled so widely that she looked almost like someone else. Then she said, “The silver wolf is your Luna?” to the healer next to her, as though she had been personally responsible for it, and Abby laughed out loud.

I felt that laugh all the way down.