Page 133 of Gift from the Wing

“Be quiet, for fuck’s sake. Get dressed.” Caspian hisses.

“You two stop manhandling me. What the fuck is going on?” I whisper-shout.

He rolls his eyes, ignoring me, and turns back to an even more impatient-looking Tillman.

What the fuck has happened now?

“Recon, Cas. I’m fucking serious. The two of you have no backup right now besides the three there. No funny business,” hesays sternly, shooting us both serious looks that I don’t understand at all before walking back toward the bedroom.

“Hurry up,” Cas commands and this time I growl in warning. “Stop that shit before you ruin my fun.”

Once a-fucking-gain, he snatches me up and whisks us through the walls until we’re outside the ward of the south wing. If not for his grip on my arm, I would’ve busted my ass from how I’m hopping around, trying to put my shoe on. Wordlessly, he continues to drag me until we’re outside.

He’s yet to tell me what’s going on, but obviously, I’m down.

A little warning isn’t too much to ask for, though.

“Ready?” he asks.

“Hell, I don’t know, Cas. What’s going on?”

He turns back toward the doors with a devious, shit-eating smirk on his face, and my beast ruffles himself out in my chest. My body alights with the giddiness of whatever it is that he has planned.

Fuck yeah. He’s up to trouble.

“We’re going hunting,” he says cryptically and my little heart jumps with joy. I swear I’m so excited I could fucking squeal, but that doesn’t really explain the secrecy.

“And Tillman couldn’t know because…”

“About thirty minutes ago, he received a phone call that he had to leave the room to answer, so I followed him. Obviously. How you and the Primary can sleep through shit like that is concerning, by the way,” he says as his eyebrows draw down and he scans me from head to toe as if he’s looking for some sort of issue. I throw my hands in the air and then cross my arms, silently telling him to get the fuck on with it. He rolls his eyes but continues, “The team that he put on Oakly’s parents’ house called and said they’ve returned home. He told them to stand watch for a couple hours to make sure no one else showed up. I volunteered us to join them.”

“Volunteered us to join them, but we’re really…” I trail off, wiggling my brows, hoping I’ve got the right line of thinking. There’s no way he just pulled me from bed, away from my little wanderer to hide in the shadows.

“Exactly, dragon, now you got it. Couldn’t let Tillman know that. He wouldn’t have let us go. Then the Primary would’ve woken up and wantedto go, or not let us go. Or worse, Corentin, then we’d have to wait around for a sound plan. It just seemed like a headache all the way around.”

“Then what are we waiting for?”

We share bloodthirsty little smirks with one another before he grips my shoulder and pulls us through a transport. I don’t like keeping secrets from Willow, like at all, but this doesn’t too much feel like a secret. I mean, she’ll know what we did as soon as she wakes up. She may be a little mad that we didn’t invite her along, but her beauty rest is far more important.

This is also going to be such a fun surprise for Nikoli, Ry, San, and Jamie. The little tidbits Willow has shared without putting Oakly’s feelings out there for us haven’t alluded to much, so I don’t know how she’ll feel about knowing her parents have been caught. She’s struggling with this level of betrayal. Fucking understandably. So her men can break this news when we get them back to the dungeons.

Palace prison. What the hell ever.

We pop in a couple feet behind the E.F. members and I’m a little disappointed we didn’t startle them. They look like they were expecting us, so Tillman must have warned them.

“Any movement?” Cas asks.

“They’re awake, sir. They came in and…” The E.F. guy trails off, looking a little uneasy sharing the news with us.

“And what?”

“Just started cooking. From what we’ve observed, they’re acting completely normal. Leader Tillman was hoping to see, I don’t know, maybe a sign of distraught, coercion, regret. He instructed us to watch their behavior, see if they acted upset, irrational, but for people who just sold their daughter, they’re carrying on with a mundane routine.”

My beast heats my chest, and I hold in the smoke that wants to come out of my nostrils. Not that I seriously expected them to act like they felt bad for what they did to Oakly, but at least shed a fucking tear. Be asleep, something. Making breakfast, flipping fucking pancakes—as little wanderer calls them. Are you serious?

“So they’re in the kitchen?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. All five of them.”

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