His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 98

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Sloane

Mon

Chapter 98

the dream, the slab came down again.

It always started the same way. The corridor. The dust. Malachi’s voice saying my name, ha a warning. Then the weight, and the sound my leg made, and the dark.

Then his back, walking away into the dust with Cressida.

In the dream, he never came back.

I woke with a scream already in my throat and my hands clawing at a stone that wasn’t there. The room was black. Something heavy was on my leg, and I fought it, and the pain that tore up from my shin was so real that I sobbed out loud.

The lock turned. The door opened.

“Sloane.”

Light from the main room fell across the floor. Malachi stood in it, still dressed, his shirt untucked,

as if he hadn’t been to bed at all.

“It’s the blanket,” he said. “Stop. You’re tangled. It’s just the splint.”

I stopped.

He was right. The weight on my leg was only the blanket, twisted around the wooden brace. There was no stone. Only the small, dark room with the screwed-shut shutters, the fire burning low next door, and my own breathing, loud and broken.

I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. “Go away.”

He crossed the room anyway, crouched beside the bed and, without touching my leg, carefully untangled the blanket from the splint. Then he straightened.

He didn’t say anything. He went back to the door, and stopped there with his hand on the frame.

“I’ll leave it open,” he said.

Then he was gone, and the door stayed exactly as he had left it. Open. A long bar of firelight lying across the floorboards.

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After a while, I got up.

took time. It always took time. I found the stick in the dark and got my good foot under me and limped to the doorway with the blanket around my shoulders.

He was sitting by the woodstove with a cup in his hand. He looked up when I appeared, and something passed over his face too quickly-to-read.

I lowered myself into the other chair. It took long enough that we both had to pretend not to notice.

For a while neither of us spoke.

“How often?” he asked eventually.

I could have lied. I was tired of lying. It seemed to be the only thing I had ever been good at, and it had gotten me exactly here.

“Most nights.”

He turned the cup slowly in his hands. “Do I come back? In the dream.”

I stared at him.

He didn’t look up.

“No,” I said.

He nodded slowly, as if that was the answer he had expected.

The wind moved in the pines outside. Snow ticked against the window.

“Why did you?” I asked. “Come back. I’ve asked you twice, and you’ve never answered.”

For a long moment I thought he wasn’t going to answer this time either.

Then he said, very quietly, “I got as far as the eastern passage. Cressida was ahead of me. There was air coming in from outside. I could smell the trees.” He rubbed one hand over his jaw. “And I couldn’t take another step. I stood there and my legs wouldn’t work, and the only thing in my head was that you were lying back there in the dark, thinking I was exactly what you’d always thought I was.”

I didn’t breathe.

“I wanted you to be wrong,” he said. “Just once.”

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I went still.

had never told me anything. Not where he came from, not how old he was, not even his full name. I had learned more about him from the way his men moved out of his way than from anything he had ever said.

“Older,” he went on. “Much older. He was the best of us. Everybody said so. I spent my whole life trying to be good enough for him to look at me the way he looked at the people he trusted. And when he had to choose who would stand beside him, he chose someone else. Someone with no claim to it at

all.”

His voice stayed flat and level, the way it always did. But his hand had closed into a fist on his knee.

“I thought if I was strong enough, he’d have to see me. So I tried to take it from him.”

“What happened?”

“He won.” A pause. “He let me live. Then he sent me away and never said my name again.”

I thought about my father’s face across the dinner table. The way he looked at me when I came home with a bruise from training, or a dress he thought was too short, or anything less than perfect. Not anger. Disappointment. Patient and measured and endless.

Be useful enough. Be good enough.

“My father never sent me away,” I said slowly. “He didn’t have to. He just made sure I knew, every day, that I hadn’t earned the right to stay.”

Malachi turned his head and looked at me.

“I used to stay at the packhouse sometimes, when it got bad. The Luna would make up a bed for me in one of the guest rooms. She never asked why. She’d leave a cup of tea on the table and never say a word about it in the morning.” I swallowed. “That was the only place I ever felt like I didn’t have to pay for being there.”

“And now you can’t go back.”

“No.”

He didn’t say he was sorry. I would have hated him if he had.

He held out the cup instead. After a moment, I took it and drank.

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“It’s what Teague brought up from the valley.” The corner of his mouth moved. “He has no taste.”

gave the cup back. Our fingers touched.

Neither of us moved away.

We were the same. That was the terrible thing I had been refusing to see for weeks. Two people who had spent their whole lives trying to earn a place at someone else’s table, and who had finally uned the table down rather than keep asking.

“I’m going down to the ridge tomorrow,” Malachi said. “The men Cressida hired are camped below it. I’m going to tell them there won’t be anything this moon.”

I stared at him. “You’re calling it off.”

“I’m putting it off.” His jaw tightened. “I don’t know for how long. I don’t know if it will hold. But

not this moon.”

I didn’t ask why. Two days ago on the porch I had asked him why he hadn’t decided, and I had seen how long it took him not to answer.

“Does Cressida know?”

“She will.”

Something cold slid down my spine. It passed when he looked at me.

“Sloane.” He hesitated. “My name-”

I waited.

He looked at the fire for a long moment. Then whatever he had been about to say went back behind

his eyes, and I watched the door close on it.

“Nothing,” he said. “Go to bed. It’s late.”

He stood, set the cup on the table and went into his room.

He didn’t shut the door.

***

I sat by the stove until the fire burned down to a red glow.

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Mon, Nov 2

He was sitting on the edge of the bed in the dark. He hadn’t lain down. He looked up.

The mark on my neck woke and throbbed. Rhea lifted her head inside me and went very, very still.

Waiting.

For once, she didn’t push. She was letting me decide.

I had slept with him before, back in the temple, in the days when I thought being wanted was Ne same as being safe. I had done it angry and I had done it desperate and I had done it trying to prove something, to him or to myself.

I had never done it like this.

Not because the bond pulled me. Not because I needed something from him. Because I was standing in the dark with a man who had just told me the worst thing he knew about himself, and I wanted to.

That was all. I wanted to.

I leaned the stick against the wall and crossed the room to him.

He didn’t move. He didn’t reach for me. He sat there and let me come, and when I stood in front of him, I put my hands on either side of his face and he closed his eyes.

I kissed him.

For a moment he didn’t respond at all. Then his hand came up and cradled the back of my head, and he kissed me back, slow and careful, as if I were something he had broken once and was afraid of breaking again.

When he pulled away, his breathing was uneven.

“You don’t have to do this.”