Page 255 of Scarlet Wars
The bond was gone.
No roots.
No residue.
Nothing for the Chiefs to detect.
Nothing left but the echo of their mistake.
I pulled the golden haze back into myself in one swift, practiced motion, locking it down, hiding every glimmer of its glow before the Nexus flickered.
Saoirse’s empty chair.
Nino stumbling into someone’s arms.
And the High Chief’s satisfied smile... All flashed once before the connection snapped shut.
FIFTY-FIVE
CADEN
Emma stormed into the training room right as I sent the fifteenth heavy bag flying off its chain, pieces of canvas still drifting to the floor like snow. Sweat was rolling down my spine, my pulse thundering from the workout, but none of that compared to what my heart did the second I saw her.
“Caden,” she breathed, one hand braced on her side as she stumbled in like she’d run a marathon barefoot.
She lifted a finger—a shaky little gesture that basically meant ‘give me a second before I die right here’—and bent over, gasping, her lungs working like they’d never heard of oxygen before. She looked like she’d sprinted the entire stretch of Kanata C without stopping.
“Fuck, I can’t breathe,” she wheezed, still hunched over like a ninety-year-old who’d taken the stairs for the first time since the war. Her hair was sticking to her forehead, her chest heaving, and she was trying—failing—to pull air into her body fast enough to stay upright.
And even in her absolute disaster of an entrance, even in this chaotic state, she’d never looked more beautiful.
I couldn’t move.
Couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t do a damn thing except stand there like someone had nailed my boots to the floor.
When she finally straightened, her gaze locked onto mine with a force that damn near knocked the air out of my own chest.
“Caden,” she said, voice trembling in a way I almost never heard from her. “I am so sorry. I hope you know, I didn’t mean any of it. I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t even know how to begin to apologize for half the things I said.”
I stayed silent.
Not out of anger.
Not out of pride.
Because I genuinely didn’t know how to think with all these fucking emotions slamming around inside me—relief, fear, fury, love—every one of them clawing for space in my chest at once.
She took a step toward me.
A shaky, hesitant step, like she expected the floor to crack under her feet.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, the words splintering. “So fucking sorry. Please let me make this up to you. Please.”
Her hands had curled into fists at her sides, like she was trying to physically hold herself together, and she looked at me with those wide, devastated eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me since the second I’d met her.
And I felt something inside me crack, like a fault line shifting under my ribs.
