His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 97

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Chapter 97

Malachi

Cressida didn’t bother pretending.

“If she wanted to stay,” she said, “an open door wouldn’t have mattered.”

I stood in the doorway of her room at the back of the cabin and looked at her. She was sitting the table with her burned hand resting on a folded cloth, the other turning a small stone over and over between her fingers. Dried herbs hung from the rafters above her. The whole place smelled of smoke and bitter roots.

“She has a broken leg.”

“She had a stick. You made sure of that.”

“She could have died out there.”

Cressida looked up. Her eyes were very calm. “Yes.”

The word sat between us.

Thirteen years. Thirteen years she had been at my side, and in all that time I had never once seen her do anything without a reason. She had found me in my seventh winter of exile, half-starved, with nothing but a grudge. She had fed the grudge until it grew teeth. She had brought me the old story of the Moonsilver wolf like a gift wrapped in someone else’s blood.

I had always known what she was.

I had simply never been on the wrong side of it.

“You don’t go into her room again,” I said. “Not without me.”

Cressida set the stone down. “You’re angry because I showed you something you didn’t want to see.”

“I’m angry because you went behind my back.”

“She ran, Malachi. On a broken leg, into the snow, in the dark. She would rather freeze than stay with you. I didn’t make her do that. I only opened the door.”

I didn’t answer.

There was nothing to say that wasn’t a confession.

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“Numbers,” I said.

touched the map with one thick finger. “Ours, eight who can fight. Nine with you.”

Nine.

Before the temple I had commanded forty-three. Some had died in the collapse. Some had run the moment the mountain started shaking and never come back. I didn’t blame them. I had nothing left to pay them with but promises, and promises were thin food in winter.

“Hers?”

Teague’s mouth flattened. “Twenty-two. Southern ridge rogues, mostly. Some from the coast. They

came for money.”

“Will they fight?”

“They’ll fight while they’re winning.”

That was the problem with hired wolves. They would follow you over a wall. They would not follow you back over it.

I leaned over the map. Moonhaven sat at its center, the packhouse marked in black ink, the clinic, the training hall, the long curve of the eastern woods. I had drawn half of it myself from memory. Some of the buildings were new. Most were not.

I had grown up in that packhouse. I knew which stairs creaked.

“The scouts?” I asked.

“Back last night. They’ve doubled the border patrols. Ravenwood wolves on the northern edge.” Teague paused. “And there’s a stranger at the packhouse. A woman in a long coat. Drove in right behind the Alpha’s truck in a pickup with mountain plates, and nobody let anyone near her bags.”

I looked up from the map.

“A witch.”

Teague shrugged. It meant yes.

Behind me, the door opened. Cressida came in, unhurried, and stood at the other side of the table.

She had heard. Of course she had.

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hand flat on the map, over the packhouse. “Every moon she spends with a teacher, she becomes harder to take. Six days, Malachi. The moon will be full in six days.”

“We’re not ready.”

“We will never be more ready than we are now.”

“Nine men and twenty-two mercenaries against a pack that size? With Ravenwood on the order?”

“We are not fighting a pack.” Her voice was patient, as if she were explaining something to child. “We have never needed to fight a pack. We need one wolf dead.”

The Alpha.

My brother’s son.

“When he dies, she will be open,” Cressida went on. “Raw, everything she is spilling out of her with no one to hold it. Under a full moon, I can catch it. I can bind it to you.”

Teague looked at the map and said nothing.

I said nothing too.

I had heard this plan a dozen times since the night her stones lit up and she came to me with the news that the bond was complete. Every time, it sounded the same. Clean. Simple. Inevitable.

Every time, something in me refused to move.

“I have a mate,” I said.

Cressida’s eyes went to the window. Outside, Sloane was sitting on the bench at the end of the porch in the thin sunlight, her splinted leg stretched out in front of her and a blanket around her shoulders.

“You have a mark on a girl who didn’t accept it,” Cressida said, “and who crawled out of your bedroom window to get away from you. That isn’t a bond. It’s a bruise.”

My hand closed on the edge of the table.

Teague straightened very slightly.

Cressida saw it. She always saw everything. She lifted her hand from the map and stepped back, and her voice gentled again.

“I’m not your enemy, Malachi. I am the only one who has ever told you the truth.” She looked at me with something that, on another face, I might have called fondness. “Do you remember the first night

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once carried on your shoulders.”

She left.

he door swung shut behind her. The fire popped.

Teague rolled up the maps without being asked and tucked them under his arm.

“Boss.”

I looked at him.

“The men will follow you,” he said after a moment. “Whatever you decide.”

He didn’t say what the rogues would do. He didn’t need to.

“Not this moon,” I said.

He nodded once and went out.

******

The thing about Cressida’s story was that she had been telling it so long, I sometimes forgot which

parts were mine.

Nathaniel had been ten years older than me. By the time I was old enough to want anything, he was already Alpha, already mated, already the center of everything. I had grown up in his shadow, and I had loved him in the stupid, furious way younger brothers do.

Then he chose Adrian Hayes.

An outsider. A wolf with no Blackwell blood at all. My brother put him at his right hand and trusted him with the pack, with his family, with his life, and when I asked why, he looked at me with something like pity and said, Because he’s ready, Malachi. And you aren’t.

I challenged him when I was eighteen.

I lost.

He didn’t kill me. He sent me away and never spoke my name again.

I had been the boy’s uncle for six years by then.

Kade. Small and dark-haired and loud. I used to gallop him down to the lake on my shoulders while he shouted at me to go faster.

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faced him. I remember his eyes when he recognized me. I remember that he said my name, once, and) that it didn’t sound like an insult.

Then the night closed over everything, and when it opened again, my brother was dead.

I had never been able to remember that moment clearly. I had stopped trying.

And now Cressida wanted me to do it again. To his son.

*****

I went out in the afternoon.

Sloane was still on the bench. Teague was splitting wood at the edge of the clearing, close enough to see the porch, which was the point. She had the stick across her knees and her face turned up toward the weak sun, eyes closed. The blanket had slipped from one shoulder. The raised, healed mark on her neck showed above the collar of her sweater, half hidden by her hair.

My mark.

She heard me coming. She didn’t open her eyes.

“If you’re here to check that I haven’t escaped,” she said, “I’m on a bench.”

“I can see that.”

“Then go away.”

I didn’t. I stood a few feet from her with my hands in my pockets and looked at her. The cold had put color into her cheeks. There were shadows under her eyes. Her honey-colored hair had grown out of whatever shape it had once been in and fell untidily past her shoulders.

She was beautiful. She had been beautiful the first night they brought her to me too, standing in my hall with her chin up, refusing to look afraid. I had known she was my mate before she said a word.

I had wanted her from the first breath.

I had never known what to do with it.