His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 89

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04 Mon, Nov 2

Chapter 89

Abby

The farther north we drove, the more the world seemed to lose its color.

We left Moonhaven just after sunrise, when the trees along the main road were still red and gold and the air only smelled like cold if you went looking for it. Three hours later, the leaves had tied to bare branches. By the fourth hour, the pines had taken over completely, dark and close on both sides of the road, and the mountains ahead had white along their tops.

I pressed my fingers to the window. The glass was freezing.

“Snow,” I said.

Kade glanced past me. “Good thing Liam made you bring the heavier coat.”

I looked at him. One hand rested on the wheel, the other on the gearshift between us, close enough that his knuckles brushed my knee whenever the road curved.

He looked relaxed.

He wasn’t.

I didn’t have to guess anymore. It sat at the back of my mind where the bond had settled after the cabin, a low, steady hum that was entirely him. Most of the time it felt like warmth. Right now there was something tighter underneath, a kind of watchfulness he was very carefully keeping off his face.

“You’re nervous,” I said.

“I’m driving.”

“You’re nervous and driving.”

He exhaled through his nose. “That bond is going to make it very difficult to hide anything from

you.”

“That’s sort of the point. Why are you nervous? He’s my uncle.”

“He’s your uncle,” Kade repeated, “and an Alpha, and the last time he saw you, you were ten years old in a clinic bed. Now you’re showing up with a mark on your neck from the man who rejected you on your first shift.”

I touched the mark without meaning to. It had healed into a pale crescent of teeth on the side of my throat, still tender if I pressed it, and Diana still went warm and smug every time I remembered it was

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He worries too much, Diana said.

He worries exactly enough, I told her, and felt her huff of amusement.

I reached over and laid my hand on top of his where it rested on the gearshift. He turned his palm up at once and laced our fingers together.

“If he’s angry with you,” I said, “he’ll have to be angry with me too. I accepted you. That was y choice.”

He looked at me then, quickly, before his eyes went back to the road. The bond warmed so suddenly that I felt it in my chest.

“I know,” he said quietly. “I’m still not going to stop being nervous.”

***

My phone buzzed against my leg twenty minutes later.

Liam.

Did you make it?

Not yet. Snow on the mountains.

She’s coming tomorrow. Tiernan’s bringing her. I cleaned the spare room.

I stared at the screen.

How clean? I typed.

The dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

I bought new sheets.

I pressed my lips together so I wouldn’t laugh out loud.

That’s very sweet.

It’s not sweet. It’s sheets.

Liam.

Focus on your uncle. I’m fine.

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Love you. Wear the coat.

held the phone up so Kade could see it. He laughed, and some of the tightness in the bond eased.

Blackridge appeared all at once.

The road crested a ridge, and the whole valley opened below us.

A long lake filled the bottom of it, narrow and dark and so still that the mountains lay upside down on its surface. Snow had already settled along the higher slopes and dusted the trees closest to the water. At the far end, where the valley narrowed, buildings of dark gray stone climbed the hillside in uneven rows, smoke rising from their chimneys into the cold air.

Kade slowed the car.

“My mother grew up here,” I said.

“So did mine.”

Two girls who had grown up somewhere this cold and this quiet, then followed each other south and never really came back.

Diana pushed forward, alert and restless. It feels old, she said.

I didn’t know what she meant. But the hair on my arms had risen, and it wasn’t from the cold.

The packhouse stood at the top of the town, larger than the rest and built from the same dark stone. The warrior who met us at the gate gave Kade the careful respect any wolf gave another pack’s Alpha. Then he looked at me, and his eyes widened and stayed on my face a little too long. An older man by the door stared openly until someone nudged him. By the time we reached the steps, I was holding Kade’s hand tightly enough to hurt.

The front door opened before our guide could reach it.

The man who stepped out was tall and broad through the shoulders, with dark hair gone gray at the sides and a short beard to match. His eyes went straight to me.

They were blue-gray.

My eyes. My mother’s eyes.

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“Abigail,” he said.

Abby,” I managed. “Everyone calls me Abby.”

“Naomi called you Abby too.” His voice was rough. “You were three and you wouldn’t answer to anything else.”

I didn’t remember that. I didn’t remember him at all, not really. A tall shape somewhere at me edge of a crowd, a long time ago. If he had come to Moonhaven after the attack, I didn’t remember that either. I had been ten, and most of those weeks were gone.

But he remembered me.

Then he stepped forward and pulled me into his arms, and he smelled of woodsmoke and pine and cold air, and I hugged him back before I could think about whether I should.

“You look so much like her,” he said into my hair. “Goddess, you look like her.”

When he finally let go, his eyes were wet, and he didn’t seem embarrassed about it.

He turned to Kade.

The warmth in his face didn’t disappear, but it changed. Kade straightened beside me, and through

the bond I felt him brace.

“Alpha Blackwell.”

“Alpha Vincent.”

They looked at each other the way Alphas did, which was mostly a long, polite silence with a great

deal underneath it.

Then Vincent’s gaze moved to the side of my neck. To the mark.

“Cassandra told me,” he said. “About the ceremony. And about before.”

Kade didn’t look away. “I assumed she would.”

“You rejected my sister’s daughter.”

“I did.”

“On her first shift.”

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“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever done,” he said. “I won’t pretend there was a good reason, because here wasn’t. I spent every day after that trying to deserve the chance she gave me anyway. I’ll keep doing that for the rest of my life.”

Vincent studied him for a long time.

Then he looked at me. “And you chose him.”

“I chose him,” I said. “And I’d do it again.”

My uncle let out a slow breath. Something in his shoulders loosened.

“Then that’s the end of it.” He held out his hand. Kade took it. “Nathaniel was a good man. Cassandra raised a good son, from everything she’s told me. I’ll take her word and my niece’s over my own temper.” His grip tightened briefly, and his mouth twitched. “For now.”

“For now,” Kade agreed, and I felt his relief move through the bond like warm water.

“Vincent, let them in before they freeze to the steps.”

A woman had appeared in the doorway. She was small and round-cheeked, with light brown hair braided over one shoulder and a dish towel in her hand, and she looked at my uncle the way Aunt Cassie looked at people who were being difficult in her kitchen.

Vincent sighed. “My mate. Maren.”

“His better half,” Maren corrected, coming down to meet us. She took both my hands in hers. Her fingers were warm. “Welcome home, sweetheart. I’ve heard about you since the day you were born. Come inside. There’s soup.”

***

The soup was thick with barley and venison, and there was bread so fresh it was still steaming when Maren cut it. We ate in a kitchen far smaller than the one at the packhouse in Moonhaven, at a scarred wooden table close to the fire, and somewhere during the second bowl I stopped feeling like a

guest.

Vincent talked.

He talked about my mother the way no one in Moonhaven ever had. Not the Beta’s mate. Not the woman who had died protecting me. Just Naomi, his older sister, who had climbed onto the packhouse roof at twelve to prove she could and then been too scared to climb down. Who had taught him to swim in a lake cold enough to make him scream.

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I laughed. Kade looked like he was trying to picture his mother as a girl and failing.

“Cassandra always had a plan. Naomi always ruined it. Our father used to send me to find them, because I was small enough to be useful and young enough that they couldn’t get rid of me.”

“And when Aunt Cassie married Nathaniel?”

Vincent’s smile softened. “Naomi was furious. Her best friend was moving south to some pack one of us had ever visited. She cried for a week.” He paused. “Then she went to the wedding and m Adrian.”

Maren made a small, fond sound. “The story everyone tells.”

“Because it’s a good story.” Vincent turned his cup slowly between his hands. “She walked into that hall angry at the whole world, and she walked out of it with a mate. Six months later she moved to

Moonhaven too. Our father nearly had a stroke.”

I smiled, but it hurt a little.