His Moonsilver Mate (Abby and Kade) novel Chapter 99

Chapter 99

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Chapter 99

Malachi

The camp below the ridge was half empty when Teague and I got there.

Cressida’s hired wolves had dug in at the bottom of a ravine where the snow didn’t reach, and the place stank of woodsmoke, wet dog and cheap liquor. There should have been twenty-two of them. I counted eleven around the fires as the sun came up. The rest of the tents stood open and empt their bedding still rumpled, as if the men had gotten up in the dark and simply walked away,

The one they called Brask came out to meet us. He was older than most of them, gray in the beard, with the patient eyes of a wolf who had sold his teeth to a dozen different masters and outlived every

one.

“Early,” he said.

“Not this moon,” I told him. “There’s nothing to fight for this moon. You’ll be paid for your time either way.”

Brask looked at me for a moment longer than I liked. Then he shrugged. “Whatever you say.’

“Where are the rest?”

“Hunting.”

“Before dawn. In snow.”

“Hungry men.” He scratched his beard. “I’ll tell them what you said.”

He agreed too easily. I knew it while I was standing there, and Teague knew it too. I saw it in the way he kept his hand near his belt the whole time. But I had spent the night in a bed I had not expected to be invited into, with Sloane asleep against my chest and her hand flat over my heart, and some soft, stupid part of me had not yet woken all the way up. My head was still thick with the heaviest sleep I’d had in years. I had barely been able to drag myself out of it before dawn.

I let it go.

I would spend the rest of my life knowing that I let it go.

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I was back before midday, as I’d told her.

The cabin door was open.

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For one long moment, the only thing I felt was that I had expected it.

leave it open. I had said it myself, standing in her doorway last night. At dawn I had gone out past the bolt without touching it, because she was asleep in my bed and it no longer seemede a door I could lock. Some part of me had been waiting for her to do exactly this ever since she imbed out of my bedroom window into the snow. She had told me she wanted me. She had never told me she would stay.

Then I went inside.

Her stick was on the floor beside my bed.

Not leaning against the wall by my door, where she had left it. On the floor, as if it had been knocked over and nobody had cared enough to pick it up. My coat, which she had taken to wearing, still hung on its hook. Her boots stood by the stove where she had put them to dry. The blanket had been dragged half off the mattress, and the pillow I had slept on lay on the boards by the door.

Sloane could walk now, a little, with that stick. Without it, she could barely cross a room. She was furious and proud and reckless, but she was not stupid. She would not have gone barefoot into the snow and left the one thing that kept her upright lying on the floor.

Someone had carried her out of here.

I breathed in.

Under her scent, under mine, under the pine smoke from last night’s fire, there was something else. Bitter and green and old. Crushed roots. Burned herbs.

The same smell that hung from the rafters of the room at the back of the cabin.

My wolf came up through me so fast that the room went red at the edges.

I crossed the main room at a run and kicked Cressida’s door open.

Empty.

The table was bare. The fire was cold. The bundles of herbs that had hung from her rafters for weeks were gone, every one of them, leaving only bits of string and a dusting of dry leaves on the floor. On the windowsill, where she had sat and turned her stones over and over in her good hand, there was nothing.

She had been packed before I left this morning.

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the first time in years.

eague found the tracks behind the woodshed.

Two men, heavy, one set deeper than the other. They led from the back of the cabin straigh into the trees in a line that never wavered. No stumbling. No signs of a struggle. Whoever had carried her had carried her asleep.

Ten yards into the forest, I found a stone half buried in the snow. It was the size of my pal, carved all over with the same cramped symbols I had seen on the temple floor, and the grooves were filled with something black. When I picked it up, my fingers went numb, and the scent trail on the air thinned around me, as if someone had pulled a sheet over it.

“What is it?” Teague asked.

“A way to make sure I couldn’t follow.”

We followed anyway.

The trail came and went for two miles, smothered where the spell was strongest, breaking through again where it frayed. It ended at the logging track below the eastern ridge. Tyre marks in the slush. One vehicle, heading down.

I stood in the road and looked at those marks until Teague said my name.

I didn’t answer.

and a The mark I had put on her neck had never given me her feelings. She had never accepted me, bond without acceptance was only half a thing, a rope tied at one end. But it had always given me something. A pull. A direction. Even when she hated me, I had always known which side of a room she

was on.

Now there was nothing. Not distance. A silence, flat and padded, as if the rope ran into a wall.

A collar, then. Cressida had put a collar back on her throat.

Last night, with Sloane’s hair spread across my chest and her breathing slowing against my skin, I had nearly told her the rest of my name. It had been right there behind my teeth. One word. The only key to the lock I had put on her. For the length of one breath I had wanted to hand it to her and find out, finally, what she would do with it.

I hadn’t.

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She didn’t come alone. That was the message, and she made sure I received it. Brask walked out of he trees behind her, and the eleven men from the ravine behind him, and then the ones who had been hunting before dawn in the snow. They spread out along the edge of the clearing with thei hands loose and their eyes on my men. I counted them. Twenty. Two were missing, and I did need to ask where they were.

My own men came out of the outbuilding and stood behind me. Teague. Rourke. The Dawson brothers. Nine of us who could fight, out of the forty-three I’d had before the temple.

Cressida stopped in the middle of the clearing. Her burned hand was wrapped in clean linen and held against her chest. The cut from the temple had left a pale line running up into her hair. She looked tired. Her eyes looked exactly the same.

“You’re angry,” she said.

I crossed the clearing in four strides. Her rogues moved. Mine moved. I didn’t care. I caught the front of her coat and pulled her close enough that she had to tilt her head back to look at me.

“Where is she?”

Cressida didn’t struggle. “Safe.”

“Where?”

“Somewhere you won’t find her.” Her voice stayed level. “I’d let go of me, Malachi. If I don’t come back tonight, the men who are sitting with her have their instructions.”

My hand stayed where it was.

“You think I won’t kill you?”

“I think you’ve wanted to for years.” She held my eyes. “And I think if you do, she dies in a locked room with a collar on her throat, and nobody left alive who knows where that room is.”

The clearing had gone silent.

I could hear my own heartbeat. I could hear Teague behind me, breathing slowly, waiting to see what I would do.

I let go.

Cressida smoothed her coat. If she felt relief, she didn’t show it.

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“What do you want?”

“What you wanted too, once, before a traitor with a broken leg made you forget it.” Cressida glanced at the empty cabin behind me, at the door still standing open in the wind. “You were going to send them home. I heard you tell her last night, through that wall. That’s when I knew you’d never do it on your own. So I am making it simple for you. The full moon. You know how many nights that. You’ve been counting them too.”

I said nothing.

“You’ll take Moonhaven. You’ll kill the boy. Not his warriors, not his Beta, the boy. Leave the rest to me.” She tilted her head. “Do it, and she comes back to you the morning after. Lock her in whatever room you like. Fail me, or delay one more time-” A small shrug. “Wolfsbane is cheap. So is silver. And a leg like hers goes bad very quickly when nobody changes the dressing.”

My wolf lunged so hard that I felt my hands start to change. Claws pushed at the ends of my fingers.