Page 59 of Caged

I’m starting to realize that Alexander is most likely only one in a long list of terrible options Father has planned for me.

I want my life to matter.

I want to be the main character.

Change is coming. I don’t know when, but it is. Even if I have to make it.

And when it does, I’m going to be ready for it.

Chapter 9

Caelan

Aheavy sense of deja vu clings to me as I stalk through the forested area around the Varenthrall estate.

It’s been over seventy-two hours since I’ve seen her.

More than three days since my pack started looking at me like I’ve gone insane.

Maybe I have.

My boots make no noise, and I make sure to keep to the shadows and follow the same path as before. The sky glitters overhead, and there are no sounds outside of my controlled breaths and the skittering of animals who make their home in these trees.

Since the last time I was here, nothing has changed.

Yet at the same time… everything has changed.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious. Not because I’m worried I might get caught. I don’t get caught. My ability to ghost through places I’m not supposed to be is second nature, and I’m damn good at it.

No, it definitely isn’t the mission fucking with me.

It’s the girl.

Idril.

These last three days, I can’t get her out of my head no matter how hard I try. I wake up in the middle of the night hard as stone, imagining I can smell her. I see her when I close my eyes. Can practically feel that long white hair playing gently around her delicate face in the wind. I hear her voice when no one else is around—lyrical, soft, and fragile

Just like her.

“I’m coming around the south end now,” I murmur into my comm.

“Copy.” Dax’s reply is short and clipped. Professional.

We’ve barely talked since the meeting when we blew up at each other not once, but twice. Haven’t said much outside normal conversations about mission prep. We’re basically using work as a band-aid, pretending that the last few days haven’t happened.

They did, though. I’d almost gone for his throat, and he’d accused me of being compromised in front of the entire team, including Gav.

Now, here we are, falling back into patterns we’ve perfected over centuries like nothing’s happened. I knew it would be this way. No matter how pissed we may be with each other, when one of us is in the field, the other always has our back.

Dax clears his throat, and it’s as if he has a direct line to my stream of consciousness when he asks, “We good?”

I clench my jaw, unwilling to roll over and forgive him, but also not wanting our issues to play on his anxiety tonight. I reply honestly. “For now. We can deal with our shit later.”

“Copy.”

A truce, then, if not total forgiveness. It’ll have to be enough.

Varenthrall is gone for the night. I watched him drive away twenty minutes ago while standing at the tree line, masked in the shadows.