His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 86

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Chapter 86

Abby

was after midnight by the time the last of the guests left the hall, and nearly one by the time Kade and I made it back to the packhouse.

I had stopped feeling my feet sometime around eleven.

“You could take the shoes off,” Kade said as we climbed the stairs to the Alpha wing.

“Your mother said Lunas don’t walk around barefoot in front of visiting Alphas.”

“The visiting Alphas are asleep.”

“She might still be watching.”

He glanced back down the empty staircase as though he wasn’t entirely sure I was joking. I wasn’t entirely sure either.

At the top of the stairs, I stopped and leaned against the wall to pull them off anyway. The relief was so enormous that I closed my eyes.

When I opened them, Kade was watching me with an expression I couldn’t read. Through the bond, I could. Fondness, warm and lazy. And underneath it, still, the restless edge that had been there since

Liam walked out of the hall.

“Have you heard from him?” I asked.

“Once.” Kade took the shoes from my hand without asking and carried them for me. “He said he was going home.”

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.”

I reached into the pack link myself. It felt different now. Wider. I had to search for Liam in a way I never used to, as if someone had moved all the furniture in a familiar room.

Liam?

A pause. Then his voice, tired but steady.

I’m fine, Abs.

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I bit my lip.

Okay. But tomorrow.

Tomorrow, he agreed. Then, after a moment: Go to bed, Luna.

It was the first time he’d called me that, and he managed to make it sound both proud and lightly mocking, the way only an older brother could.

I let the link fade and found Kade still watching me.

“He says tomorrow.”

“Then tomorrow.” He nudged the door to his room open with his shoulder. Then he stopped in the doorway.

I came up beside him and stopped too.

The room had changed.

My books were stacked on the shelf beside his. My hairbrush sat on the dresser. The blanket from the window seat in my old room had been folded across the foot of his bed, and someone had hung my winter coat on the hook behind the door, next to his.

“When did she do this?” I asked faintly.

“During the ceremony, apparently.”

“She was at the ceremony.”

“She has people.” Kade set my shoes down beside the dresser. “Do you mind?”

I looked at the room. At my things beside his. At the window, where the dark shape of the forest

stood against a sky full of stars.

“No,” I said. “I think I would have minded if she hadn’t.”

His relief brushed against me through the bond, quick and almost shy, and it undid something in my chest.

I sat down on the edge of the bed. The moonstone ring caught the lamplight. I turned it around my finger the way I had been doing all evening, and the band slipped easily over my knuckle.

“It’s too big,” I said.

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Kade sat down beside me. The mattress dipped, tilting me toward him, and I let it.

“You’ve been doing that all night,” he said.

“What?”

“Turning it. Like you’re trying to find the end of something.”

I was quiet for a moment.

“When the pack said it,” I said finally. “When they all stood up. I felt every one of them.”

“I know. I felt you feel it.”

“Kade, I don’t know how to do this.”

The words came out smaller than I wanted.

He didn’t answer right away. He waited, the way he had learned to wait with me, and that made it easier to keep going.

“I’m eighteen. A few weeks ago my biggest responsibility was making sure Daphne’s supply cabinet was restocked. I know how to clean a wound and take someone’s temperature and calm a kid down before a shot. I don’t know how to be what your mother was.”

“You don’t have to be what she was.”

“Everyone expects me to be.”

“Everyone expected me to be my father.” His voice was quiet. “I was eighteen too.”

I turned my head to look at him.

“I had no idea what I was doing,” he said. “I made decisions because someone had to make them, and half of them were wrong. My mother told me so. Liam told me so, more often than he needed to.”

“That sounds like Liam.”

“It was useful.” He took my hand, the one with the ring, and turned it over in his. “The pack didn’t need me to be Nathaniel. They needed someone to keep showing up. You already know how to do that. You’ve been doing it at the clinic for years.”

“That’s different.”

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Through the bond, I felt him turn careful.

Sloane spent her whole life trying to be one,” he said slowly. “She knew which fork to use and how to talk to visiting Alphas and when to smile.” He paused. “I don’t think it ever made her happy And I don’t think it’s what the pack needs.”

“What does it need?”

“Someone who went to the community hall to sit with girls who couldn’t remember where they came from, when Daphne still wanted her in bed.”

“Daphne said I could go for ten minutes.”

“You stayed two hours.”

I looked down at our hands.

“I’m afraid I’ll get it wrong,” I said. “Not small things. Something that matters. Somebody gets hurt because I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“Then you’ll tell me, and we’ll fix it. Or I’ll get it wrong and you’ll tell me.”

“And if you don’t listen?”

He looked at me, and the corner of his mouth lifted. “Then you’ll tell me louder.”

I laughed despite myself. It loosened something in my chest that had been tight since the doors of the hall opened.

“That’s what a Luna does?”

“That’s what this one does.” He lifted my hand and pressed his mouth to the inside of my wrist, right over the faint mark the silver had left. “I’m not asking you to be my mother. Or Sloane. Or anyone else. I’m asking you to stand next to me. Even when I’m being an idiot.”

“Especially then.”

“Especially then.”

I leaned my head against his shoulder.

For a while, neither of us said anything. The packhouse had gone quiet around us. Somewhere far below, a door closed, and footsteps faded down a corridor.

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“It felt like running under a full moon,” he said slowly. “Like Knox had just woken up from a long sleep. Everything was sharper. Stronger.” He frowned slightly. “It faded after a minute.”

Was that me?”

“I don’t know.” His thumb moved over my knuckles. “Maybe that’s something to ask in Blackridge.”

Blackridge, the day after tomorrow. My mother’s home, and an uncle I barely remembered,

whatever answers might be waiting there.

“What if I don’t like what we find?”

“Then we’ll find out what to do about it,” he said. “Together.”

I lifted my head and looked at him.

He was so close. The lamplight caught the dark stubble along his jaw and the tired lines at the corners of his eyes. He had stood in front of a hundred people tonight and called me his, and I had felt every bit of what it cost him to say it in front of them. Not because he hadn’t meant it. Because he had meant it so much it frightened him.

I could feel all of that now. Every bit.

“Kade.”

“Hm?”

“Your mother sewed thirty-two buttons into the back of this dress.”

He blinked. Then his gaze dropped to my shoulder, and something warmer moved through the bond.

“Thirty-two?”

“I counted while she was doing them up.”

“That’s-” He breathed out a laugh against my hair. “That seems deliberate.”