His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 83

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103 Mon, Nov 2 MO

Liam

Chapter 83

went west one more time on Saturday morning.

I told myself it was a patrol. Ryan knew it wasn’t, and he let me go anyway, because by now he had stopped arguing with me about it.

The ridge above the old service road was still gray with dawn when I reached it. Below, the forest stretched toward the mountains in long gray folds, and somewhere beyond the farthest of them, the ruins of the temple lay under a mountain that had finally finished falling.

I stood at the edge of the ridge and reached.

Sloane.

Nothing.

I hadn’t expected anything. I had been trying for nearly two weeks. At first every attempt had felt like shouting into a well. Now it felt like a habit, the way you check a pocket for keys you already know you lost.

Sloane. If you can hear me, just once. Anything.

The wind moved through the trees below.

I thought about the blood dried black on the corridor floor under the temple, far too much of it.

She had helped them take my sister.

She had told me where to find her.

I didn’t know which of those things I was supposed to hold on to. Most days, I held on to both, and

they cut my hands.

I stayed until the sun cleared the treeline. Then I turned around and drove home, because today

wasn’t about Sloane.

Today was Abby’s.

***

Cassandra had come to my house two days earlier and stood on the porch with her coat buttoned to

the throat.

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Eight years. I had carried those boxes out of our parents’ house myself, the week after the funeral, and they had followed me from roof to roof ever since. When I bought this house, I had carried them

p one more set of stairs.

I had never opened them.

“Why?”

She had looked at me with an expression I didn’t understand then.

“Because your mother had a dress,” she said, “and I think it’s time someone wore it.”

I had brought the boxes down and loaded them into her car without looking inside. Then I had gone back into the house and sat at my kitchen table for a long time.

***

The packhouse was chaos.

Every door stood open. Someone was carrying chairs down the main corridor. Someone else was carrying them back. The kitchens smelled of roasting meat and fresh bread and something sweet with cinnamon, and the noise coming out of them sounded like a small, well-organized war.

Cassandra intercepted me at the foot of the stairs. She looked me up and down: the dark suit, the tie I had fought with for ten minutes, the shoes I had polished at midnight because I hadn’t been able to

sleep.

She straightened the tie.

“You’ll do,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“She’s upstairs. Her room.” Her hands lingered on my collar for a moment. “Liam.”

“What?”

She seemed about to say something. Then she shook her head and patted my chest.

“Go on.”

The door to Abby’s room was half open. I could hear Chloe’s voice inside, fast and bright, and then a laugh that I would have known anywhere.

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squeezed my arm on the way past and whispered, “Don’t make her cry, she’s wearing mascara.”

She was halfway down the hall when Abby stepped out into it.

or a second, I didn’t recognize her.

The dress was dark blue, the color of the sky just after the sun goes down. It fell from her shoulders to the floor in a simple, clean line. The sleeves were long and close, the neckline wide enough to leave the side of her neck bare, where the mark sat like something she was no longer interested in hiding. Her hair had been pinned up on one side, the side with the mark, and the silver strand at her temple had been left free on purpose. It caught the light from the lamps along the hall.

At her throat, on its white-gold chain, hung our mother’s crescent moon.

I knew the dress.

I had never seen it in real life. But I had seen it every day of my childhood, in the photograph that sat on the mantel in our old living room. My parents, young and laughing, at the edge of some dance floor with string lights behind them. My father in a suit that didn’t fit. My mother in dark blue, her head thrown back, caught in the middle of a laugh at something he had said.

Cassandra’s wedding. The night they met.

I had looked at that photograph so many times I knew the pattern of the lights.

“Liam?”

Abby’s voice was uncertain. She smoothed her hands down the skirt. “Is it-Cassandra said it was Mom’s. She took it in herself, and changed the sleeves, because the old ones were-” She stopped. “Say something.”

I couldn’t.

I stood in the hallway in front of her, and for a long moment I just looked.

When she was ten and it was suddenly just the two of us, I had cut her sandwiches wrong for a month before she told me she liked them in triangles. I had learned to braid hair from a video and done it so badly that Cassandra had quietly taken over.

I had taught her to drive, in the empty lot behind the feed store, with her stalling the truck so many times we both ended up laughing too hard to go on. I had taught her to throw a punch. I had paced the yard on the night of her first shift, terrified.

All of that, and somehow I had missed the moment she grew up.

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“She already warned me.”

he laughed, wet and shaky, and pressed a knuckle carefully under each eye.

“I didn’t know,” she said. “About the dress. Cassandra just showed up with it yesterday. She said you

had it the whole time.”

“I didn’t open the boxes.”

“Ever?”

“Ever.”

She looked at me for a long moment. She had always been able to see through me more easily than anyone else. Even when she was little.

“That’s okay,” she said softly.

I didn’t know how she always knew what I needed to hear.

***

Back in her room, she sat on the edge of the window seat while I fixed the clasp of the necklace, which had slipped around to the front. My fingers were too big for it. It took three tries.

“You’re doing the thing,” she said.

“What thing?”

“The thing where you go quiet and look at something very hard so nobody can tell what you’re

thinking.”

I got the clasp to sit straight and stepped back. “I’m not doing anything.”

“Liam.”

I sat down beside her. The window seat was too small for both of us now. It hadn’t been, once.

“I was just thinking I should rent out your room,” I said. “Seems a waste. You’ve got a whole wing

now.”

It came out lighter than it felt, and still not light enough.

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“Luna,” she said.

“Yeah.”

She was quiet for a moment. Then she leaned over and put her head on my shoulder, careful of her

hair.

“I’m always going to need you,” she said. “Just differently.”

“Differently how?”

“I don’t know yet.” She sighed. “Probably less help with algebra.”

I laughed despite myself.

“I mean it,” she said. “You’re still the one I’m going to call when everything goes wrong. You’re still the one who’s going to tell me when I’m being an idiot. Kade can’t do that. He thinks everything I do is wonderful.”

“That’s going to wear off.”

“I hope not.” She smiled. “But just in case, I’ll need you.”

We sat there for a while. Through the door, the noise of the packhouse rose and fell.

“Mom would have cried all day,” she said.

“From breakfast.”

“Dad would have pretended he wasn’t.”

“And then cried harder than her during the ceremony.” I swallowed. “He’d have taken Kade aside, too. Made some speech about how he’d known him since he was in diapers.”

“You already did that.”

“I did not do that.”

“Kade told me. He said you marched him out into the yard.”