His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 92

108 Mon, Nov 2▷ MD

Chapter 92

Abby

Vincent left us where the trail ended in a wall of snow-covered rock.

“Follow the cairns,” he said, pointing upward to a small pile of stones barely visible against the white. “There’s one every few hundred yards. When you can’t see trees anymore, you’re close He handed Kade the pack of supplies he had carried up. Flour, salt, lamp oil, coffee. “Give him these whether he opens the door or not.”

“We will,” Kade said.

Vincent looked at me for a long moment. Then he pulled my hood up over my hair the way my father used to, when I was small and complaining about the cold.

“If he says anything cruel,” he said quietly, “it isn’t about you.”

***

The climb took almost three hours.

The first part wasn’t bad. Pines, packed snow, a path that wound back and forth across the slope. Then the trees thinned and shrank until they were barely taller than me, twisted sideways by the wind. Then they stopped altogether.

After that there was only rock and snow and sky.

Diana wanted to shift. She pushed at me every time my boots slid on the ice. Four legs are better

than two up here.

And when we get there, I’ll be naked on an old man’s doorstep.

She considered this. He is very old. He will not mind.

I will mind.

Kade climbed just ahead of me, testing each step before he let me take it. Every so often he stopped and waited until I caught up, and every time, I felt him check the bond the way he used to check my breathing in the clinic.

“I’m fine,” I said, the fourth time.

“I know.”

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He held out his hand to pull me over a ledge. “That too.”

The cabin appeared all at once, tucked into a hollow beneath an overhang of dark rock. It was small and built of stone and heavy logs gone silver with age. Smoke rose from the chimney. A pile split wood stood against one wall, stacked so neatly that it looked measured.

There were no tracks in the snow except a narrow path between the door and the woodpile.

My heart was pounding harder than the climb deserved.

Kade set the pack down beside the door. Then he looked at me.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again.

“Leave it and go, Vincent.” The voice came from just behind the door. Low and rough as gravel. “I told you twice a year.”

“I’m not Vincent.”

Silence.

Then the door opened.

He was tall. That surprised me. I had pictured someone bent and frail, but the man in the doorway still had to dip his head beneath the frame. His shoulders had thinned and his hands were knotted with age, but he stood straight, and the force that rolled off him was unmistakable. Old and worn and stubborn, but Alpha all the way through.

His hair was white. His face was all hard lines and deep creases. His eyes were pale, and they went

past me to Kade first.

His nostrils flared.

“Moonhaven,” he said. “And an Alpha.”

Kade inclined his head. “Kade Blackwell.”

“Nathaniel’s.”

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“Abby,” I said. “Abigail Hayes. Naomi was my mother. Vincent’s sister.”

He looked at me for a long moment without any expression at all.

“Then you’ve wasted a long climb,” he said. “I have nothing to say to Vincent’s family that didn’t say to Vincent.”

He started to close the door.

“Please-

“Go home, girl.”

The wind came over the ridge just then, hard enough to sting my eyes. It caught my hood and threw it back, and it caught the necklace where it had slipped free of my collar during the climb. The crescent swung out against my coat and turned once in the pale light.

The door stopped.

Aldric was staring at my throat.

All the hardness went out of his face so fast that it frightened me. For a second he looked like what he was: a very old man, standing in the cold.

“Where did you get that?”

“It was my mother’s.” My voice came out small. “It was kept for her. The first girl born in the family after-”

“After Seraphina.”

He said the name like it cost him something.

His hand lifted. It shook. He didn’t touch the necklace. He held his fingers an inch away from it, as if

he wasn’t sure it was real.

“It’s crooked,” he said.

“It broke. A few weeks ago. Kade had the chain mended. He didn’t want to change the rest.”

The old man’s gaze lifted from the pendant to my face.

Then it stopped at my temple.

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1808 Mon, Nov 2 M

“Since the full moon. Two and a half weeks.”

e closed his eyes.

When he opened them again, he stepped back from the door.

“Come inside,” said my great-grandfather. “Before you freeze.’

****

The cabin had one room. A bed against the far wall, made with military neatness. A table with one chair. A fire. Shelves holding a few tins and a few books.

And, propped on the mantel, a single small painting.

It was much rougher than the portrait in Vincent’s hallway. Done quickly, by someone who loved the subject more than he understood paint. A young woman laughing at something just out of frame, her head tipped back.

Her hair was brown.

Like mine.

“You noticed,” Aldric said.

He had lowered himself onto the edge of the bed and given me the chair. Kade stood near the door, too tall for the low ceiling, watching everything.

“In the portrait, her hair is silver,” I said.

“The portrait was painted in her last year.” He looked at the fire. “When I met her, it was that color. Brown. It started to change the year after we were mated. One strand. Here.” He touched his own temple. “Then another. By the end, there was nothing left of the brown at all.”

My hand had gone to my hair. I made myself lower it.

“Vincent said she died of an illness.”

“Vincent says what he was told.” Aldric’s jaw worked. “I am the one who told it.”

The fire cracked. Nobody moved.

“She didn’t die of anything,” he said. “I used her up.”

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1808 Mon, Nov 2D M

ice.

He was quiet for a moment.

She came with me. She always came with me. I never asked her to stay behind, because when she was beside me, I couldn’t lose.” His voice roughened. “Not a fight, not a sparring match with my own Beta, nothing. When she was near, I felt like the mountain itself was standing behind me. Athought that was what a Luna was for. I thought it was mine.”

Through the bond, something-in Kade went very cold and very quiet.

“We fought from dusk until morning,” Aldric said. “I should have been dead ten times. I wasn’t even tired. I remember laughing. I remember thinking I could fight forever.” He looked at me. I never once looked back at her. Not once in all those hours.”

My throat had closed.

“When it was over, I turned around,” he said. “She was lying on the ice. Her hair had gone completely white. Every last strand. She was so cold that the snow didn’t melt on her skin.”

“Did she…” I couldn’t finish.

“She lived until the next night. She woke once.” His hands tightened on his knees. “She told me not to be angry with myself. She said she chose it.”

He laughed, short and terrible.

“As if I ever gave her a choice. As if I ever once asked how much it cost her. She gave me everything she had because I needed it, and I took it because it felt good, and I didn’t even know I was taking. Every day of our life together, I took her for granted.”

Tears were running down my face. I didn’t try to stop them.

“The records,” Kade said quietly. “You cut them out.”

“Every page.” Aldric didn’t look at him. “Every letter. Every healer’s note. I cut them out myself at night and burned them in my own hearth, a few at a time, so no one would ask what I was burning.”

“Why?”

“Because people would have come for the next one.” His eyes went to me, to the necklace, to my hair. “Wolves like that pack. Witches. Anyone who heard that a Blackridge Luna could make her mate unbeatable. I wanted her forgotten so no one would hunt her blood.” His mouth twisted. “And because I couldn’t stand for my pack to know their Alpha had killed his mate and called it a victory.”

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I got up from the chair.

didn’t decide to. I just did. I crossed the room and knelt in front of him, and after a moment, took one of his knotted hands in both of mine.

It was cold, and it shook.

“I’m not her,” I said. “I know+look like her. But I’m not her.”

“No.” He looked at me for a long time. “She never knew what she was. Nobody told her. There was

no one left who knew. You at least know.”

He turned his hand and gripped mine, harder than I expected.

“Listen to me, child. Your mate will feel like a god with you beside him. That is the moment you will be in danger. Not when he is weak. When he is strongest.” His eyes were fierce and wet. “Learn where your edge is. Learn it before you need it. Learn to stop, even when he’s losing, even when you love him, even when stopping feels like the worst thing you have ever done.”