His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 93

Chapter 93

Kade

Abby fell asleep a little after midnight, curled against my side with one hand fisted in my shirt, as if part of her expected me to get up and leave.

I didn’t.

I lay on my back in Vincent’s guest room and listened to the wind come down off the mount, and I didn’t sleep at all.

We had talked, the way I promised her on the trail. Not about everything. About enough.

She had sat cross-legged on the bed in one of my sweaters, her eyes still swollen from crying on the mountain, and asked me what I had felt while Aldric was talking.

“Sick,” I had told her.

That much was true.

“You’re not him,” she said. “You’d never take something from me without asking.”

“I’d settle for stacking wood that neatly at ninety,” I said.

She looked at me for a long moment. The bond hummed between us, and I had kept it as still as I could. I had never tried to hide anything from her through it before. It was harder than I expected. Like holding my breath underwater.

“Then why does it feel like you’re deciding something?” she asked.

I kissed her instead of answering.

She let me, but she knew. She always knew. Before she fell asleep she pressed her face against my neck and whispered, “Whatever it is, you don’t get to decide it alone,” and I stroked her hair until her breathing evened out.

Now the house was dark and quiet, and I let myself think it.

Before we left Moonhaven, I had put three of my best warriors on the mat one after another. Abby had been sitting on the bench at the edge of the training hall, close enough that I could pick out honey and vanilla over the sweat. I hadn’t been breathing hard at the end. Liam had looked at me oddly. I had laughed it off.

Knox stirred inside me, low and uneasy. He had been restless since Aldric’s door. Pacing, the way he

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I made myself go back. All of it, in order.

The temple. Diana in the center of that chamber, blazing silver-white. I had caught her head in my hands, and light had moved over my skin. Warm. Almost electric. At the time, I had thought it was only her, burning out in front of me. I hadn’t thought about what it did to me. I had carried her out of a collapsing mountain without stopping once, and somewhere on the climb out I had stopped feeling the weight of her at all.

I had thought that was fear. Adrenaline. Anyone would have done it.

Then the cabin. The night she accepted me. The moment I marked her, something had poured through the bond that I had no word for. I had told myself it was happiness, because that was what it felt like. I had never been that happy in my life.

The morning after, I hadn’t been tired. Not even a little.

None of it had made me wonder. It hadn’t made Aldric wonder either.

The cold that went through me then was nothing to do with the mountain air.

Abby made her mate stronger. Cressida had known it before any of us. The temple had known it. A ninety-year-old man had learned it on the ice seventy years ago and spent every year since alone with

She could make anyone stronger. She had done it for Tessa with chains on her legs.

But she did it for her mate most of all.

For me.

Which meant that if Abby ever burned herself out the way Seraphina had, it would not be for a stranger in a stone room. It would not be for the pack, or for some battle she chose on her own.

It would be for me.

I turned my head and looked at her.

Snow had started outside. Not much, just a few flakes drifting past the glass, but the faint gray light off them fell across the pillow and caught the single strand at her temple, so that for a moment it looked like the only part of her that was awake.

Three days she had lain in that clinic bed. Three days, and I had sat beside her counting breaths, and nobody could tell me whether she was coming back. I remembered every hour of it. I remembered

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I had watched what losing a mate did to someone. After the attack, my mother had kept the packhouse running, kept the pack fed, kept me upright when I was eighteen and suddenly Alpha. She had done all of it with half of herself gone. Nineteen years with him, and then nothing on the other end of the bond but silence. She never talked about it. She didn’t have to. I had seen her ston doorways sometimes, as if she had heard him call her name.

Aldric had carried that for seventy years. And he had carried something worse with it.

He had done it himself.

We will not let it happen, Knox said.

She’ll do it anyway. If we’re losing, she’ll do it anyway.

Knox was silent. He knew Diana too.

Tessa had told us what Abby did in that chamber. Chained, starved, half-dead herself, she had kept pushing for a girl she had never met, long after she should have stopped. That was who she was. She would empty herself down to nothing for someone she loved and call it a choice, exactly the way Seraphina had.

I closed my eyes.

So I would be careful. I would never need her that badly. I would learn what it felt like when she was giving, and I would stop before she had to. If that meant losing a fight, I would lose it. If it meant bleeding, I would bleed.

I would turn around and look at her. Every time.

I had once said the worst words of my life to her, out loud. This promise I made in silence, and I

meant it more than anything I had ever said.

It won’t be you, I told her silently, careful to keep it out of the bond. Whatever happens, it won’t be you. Not for me.

Knox lay down inside me, heavy and watchful.

And if it comes to that, he said, if it’s her or us?

I didn’t answer.

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