Page 83 of Crave Me

There Caspian was leaning against the kitchen counter sipping at an espresso as he stared at two trays full with food—fried eggs, bacon, tomatoes, toast, hash browns—and a glass of orange juice and a piping hot mug of coffee on each.

“Hungry after your fuck-fest with Asher?”

His head shot up, his gaze snapping to mine.

He’d obviously been deep in thought, because it took him a moment to blink out of it and focus on me properly. He gestured at the trays. “These are for you and Skylar.”

“They are?”

He nodded. “You’ve been in there with Frank for the last couple of hours. We all woke up at the crack of dawn to his arrival and the two of you haven’t eaten, so I knew you’d be hungry.”

That was beyond thoughtful.

It was the Caspian King I knew.

The surprise that I was seeing this from him after the way he’d been lately was clearly all over me, because he commented, “You’re acting like this is the first time I’ve made you breakfast, Bastian.”

“It’s not that. It’s…” I considered getting into all of that.

But it wasn’t really the right time. There was so much else happening.

So, instead, I said, “I figured you’d be with Riley Hutchins demanding information, including about that disturbing tidbit Frank revealed before passing out about us all being in danger.”

“She’s already been debriefed. She made it clear that her only objective was to track Frank down. She wasn’t involved in his mission against Wheeler, nor privy to any intel that Frank may have gathered. Even where she found him was useless to our goal of tracking down Caleb and determining Elijah’s whereabouts. He’d passed out in a cornfield miles away from anything whatsoever. Judging by the state of him when she found him, he’d sustained that knife wound then hiked for hours to seek help before succumbing to exhaustion.”

“Shit. So it’s a waiting game now until he wakes up.”

“Pieces of intel are still constantly coming in from my contacts and Dante’s, and they’re being filtered into the program Asher is working with. We’re not at a standstill. But, yes, Frank’s information could prove vital if he was able to make contact with Wheeler.”

“You think that wound was inflicted by that shithead?”

“I do, yes. It would take somebody highly-skilled to catch Frank Bennett off guard like that, to be able to get one over on him, let alone actually injure him severely enough that he was forced to call a retreat.”

“Just like his protégé.”

“Precisely.”

I frowned. “And you’re not bursting into the infirmary to force Frank awake?”

“He’s Skylar’s father.”

“The way you’ve been lately, I wasn’t sure you could recognize that on an emotional level. On any level, actually.”

“I know and I’m sorry.” He put his espresso down and crossed to me. “I also apologize for the way I was with you and Skylar in your bedroom the other night. My desperation to acquire that intel from her was all I could see.”

“It was all you could allow yourself to see.”

“Yes,” he admitted.

I laid my hand on his shoulder. “Trust me, Cas, I’m kind of the leading authority on shutting down. Adding all this compartmentalization of yours just makes it all the worse, all the more dangerous. I get the need to do it under times of stress, which there’s a shitload of right now, especially for you. It’ll feel really good at first, a huge weight off, freeing even. But the fallout absolutely isn’t worth it. You’ll lose yourself. It’s already had you pulling away from us, which is the last thing any of us want, you included. I understand you wanting to be willing to do what needs to be done and not pulling any punches when it comes to bringing Caleb back to us and putting Elijah down, but all this blackness engulfing you—”

“It’s poisoning me, I know. Poisoning everything around me too.”

“Wow, fucking Asher really brought about one hell of an epiphany, huh?”

He gave me a withering look. “It was the discussion we had before that which assisted.”

“So fucking around with him was just a release?”

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