His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 95

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Chapter 95

Sloane

The stick was the worst part.

Not the leg, although the leg was bad enough. Not the locked door, or the men outside it, the whole cabin smelled of pine smoke and him. I had gotten used to all of that in the way used to a stone in your shoe.

It was the stick.

the way get

Malachi had made it himself. I had watched him through the gaps in the shutters three days ago, sitting on a stump in the clearing with a length of ash across his knees and a knife in his hand, shaving it down with the same patience he used for everything. When he brought it in, it had been cut to exactly the right height, the top sanded smooth and wrapped in strips of leather so it wouldn’t blister my palm.

He had leaned it against the bed and walked out without a word.

I hated how well it fit.

I hated more that I used it.

By the end of the second week I could stand on my own. By the third day with the stick, I could cross the room, from the bed to the window and back, without stopping to breathe through the pain. The splint still ran from my knee to my ankle. Under it, the bone ached constantly, a deep, grinding ache that got worse at night and worse again when the weather turned.

It had turned. The first snow had come two days ago, and the cold had settled into the walls.

Rhea paced restlessly inside me. She had been doing that for days.

We could run.

On one leg?

We could try.

That was the difference between us. Rhea thought trying counted for something.

***

Malachi left before dark with Teague and most of the men.

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She hadn’t touched it since the second day, when Malachi took the basin out of her hands. She did it now the way she had done everything since I woke up in this cabin – with cold hands, a tight mouth and the air of a woman scrubbing a floor she had been ordered to clean. She cut away the outer bandage, looked at the swelling, pressed two fingers hard against the skin above the splint until hissed.

“Healing,” she said, as if it disappointed her.

“Sorry to let you down.”

Her gaze lifted to mine. Her hand, the one Diana’s chain had burned in the temple, was stil wrapped in linen. She held it a little away from her body.

“You should have let the mountain keep you,” she said. “It would have been kinder to him.”

“Kinder to him?”

She didn’t answer. She wrapped the leg again, efficiently, too tight, gathered her things and left.

I waited for the sound of the lock.

It didn’t come.

I sat very still on the edge of the bed and listened. Footsteps crossing the main room. The outer door. The creak of the porch steps. Then nothing but the wind moving through the pines and, farther off, the low voices of the two men Malachi had left by the fire at the front of the clearing.

I stared at the door for a long time.

Cressida didn’t forget things.

Maybe she wanted me gone. Maybe she wanted me to run into the snow on a broken leg and solve her problem for her. Maybe it was a test, and she would go to Malachi afterward and tell him exactly how much his mate wanted to stay.

I knew all of that.

I took the stick anyway.

***

7

One of Malachi’s coats hung on a hook by the door. I hesitated for one second, then pulled it on, because I wasn’t stupid and it was the warmest thing in the cabin. It smelled like him. Rhea pressed her nose into the collar so hard I felt it in my own chest.

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The shutters on my window were screwed shut from outside. The ones in Malachi’s room weren’t. His window faced the trees at the back of the cabin, narrow and high, and I had measured it with my eyes the few evenings he had let me sit by the fire. It took me far too long to get through it, and when I dropped onto the snow on the other side, the jolt went up my leg so hard I had to bite down on the sleeve of his coat to keep from crying out.

Then I was standing in the dark.

Outside.

Nobody shouted. Nobody came.

I started walking.

The ground sloped downhill through the trees, and downhill meant lower ground, and lower ground meant roads, eventually. That was as much of a plan as I had. The stick sank into the snow with every step. The splinted leg dragged. Within a hundred yards my good leg was shaking, and within two hundred I had stopped feeling my fingers.

I kept going.

The forest was quiet in the way only snow makes it. My breathing sounded enormous. Every branch that shifted under the weight of the snow made me stop and look back.

There was nothing behind me but my own tracks.

When the trees thinned enough to see the sky, I stopped and leaned against a trunk and closed my

eyes.

Then I reached.

I hadn’t let myself try the pack link since the temple. I hadn’t wanted to know.

Liam.

Nothing.

Liam, it’s me.

The silence on the other end wasn’t empty, exactly. It was distance. A long, cold stretch of it, like shouting across a valley and hearing your own voice come back thinner.

Too far.

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I made myself answer it properly, standing there in a stolen coat with my leg on fire.

Moonhaven. I could walk for days and maybe reach the border, and then what? Ryan’s patrol would find me. They would bring me to Kade. And Kade would look at me the way he had looked at me the night he found out I’d hired Jax – the way he must have looked when he learned it was me who led Abby into that tunnel.

He would be fair. That was the worst thing about Kade. He would be fair, and he would never rust me again, and he would be right.

Liam would come. Liam always came. He would stand in front of me with that steady, disappointed face he had worn since we were children, and he would be kind to me because he couldn’t help it, and I would have to watch him decide every day whether I deserved it.

My father’s house wasn’t a choice at all.

I stood in the snow and went through every door I had ever had, and every one of them was shut.

I had shut most of them myself.

The stick slipped.

I went down hard on my side in the snow. The splinted leg twisted beneath me and the pain was so huge and white that for a few seconds I couldn’t hear anything except the sound I was making.

When it passed, I was lying on my back, staring up through the branches.

I didn’t get up.

I wasn’t sure I could.

***

I don’t know how long it was before I heard him.

He didn’t make any noise until he wanted me to. Then a branch cracked deliberately somewhere to my left, and I turned my head and he was there, standing between two pines in his shirtsleeves with

snow in his dark hair.

Not shifted. He had come after me on two legs, in the cold, without even a coat. He must have come back early, found my room empty and followed my tracks from his window without stopping for anything. It was only then that I remembered whose coat I was wearing.

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Malachi didn’t move closer right away. He looked at the tracks. The stick lying half-buried beside

The leg. Then my face.

“Where are you going?”

His voice was quiet. Not cold. That was almost worse.

I opened my mouth to answer

Nothing came out.

He waited.

“Away,” I said finally.

“Away where?”

I looked up at the branches again. Snow had begun to fall, small and dry, drifting down through the

dark.

“I don’t know.”

He came closer then and crouched in the snow beside me. He didn’t touch me. His gray eyes went over my leg, and I watched the muscle in his jaw tighten.

“The door was unlocked,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Cressida.”

It wasn’t a question. Something hard moved behind his eyes and then went still again.

“Maybe she wanted me to leave,” I said. “Maybe you should let me.”

“And go where, Sloane?”

“Home.”

The word came out of me and lay there between us in the snow, and I heard how small it sounded.

Malachi didn’t laugh. I think I would have preferred it if he had.

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“Do you?”

“Yes.” My voice cracked. I hated it. “I know exactly what I am. You don’t have to explain it.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“Your Alpha has his Luna now,” he said. “The bond is complete. Cressida felt it.”

I closed my eyes.