Page 82 of The Gilded Cage

Kiva closed her eyes with resignation, all the excuses she’d come up with on her ride back now useless. Even so, she cupped his cheek with her ice-cold hand and said, “It’s all right. I don’t blame you.”

Rising again, she turned to face the others. No one spoke, as if waiting for her to make the first move. But when she continued to just look at them, Caldon finally snapped, pointing a finger at her face and demanding, “Where thehellhave you been?”

“I —”

“You were abducted barely a week ago!” he interrupted loudly. “You don’t go wandering off on your own, and youcertainlydon’t leave the city for any reason, least of all to see your siblings who haven’t cared a whit about you for a decade. Gods, Kiva, I thought you were smarter than that.”

“But I —”

He cut her off with another finger jab. “And you do not, underanycircumstances,gods-damned drug me.” Yelling now, he finished,“What the hell were you thinking?”

Kiva curled her arms around her middle, unable to defend herself in the face of his — admittedly justified — anger.

“Cal,” Jaren said quietly, lowering his cousin’s hand. “Let her speak.”

“This ought to be good,” Mirryn said gleefully from her position on the couch, a goblet of wine in her hand.

Kiva didn’t look at the princess, her focus torn between Jaren and Caldon, one who was vibrating with rage, the other who was eerily calm.

Swallowing, she drew her wet cloak tighter and asked, “What did Tipp tell you?”

“No,” Caldon snapped. “You don’t get to repeat what we already know. We’ve been worried —for hours.We were just about to call the guards to launch a search party.Anothersearch party. So you need to start talking. Right now.”

Through all of this, Jaren remained silent, his face still alarmingly blank. Caldon’s anger she could handle. But Jaren’s remoteness?

That was too much for Kiva to bear.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered — to them both. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just —” She drew on everything she was feeling, repeating the performance she’d given Tipp earlier that day. “I just wanted to see my family. To see if they — if they —” She made her throat bob, allowed tears to pool in her eyes. “To see if they wanted anything to do with me. After Zalindov.”

Caldon’s anger didn’t fade, but Jaren’s eyes flickered with compassion, his expression thawing. He reached for the blanket Tipp had left out and moved forward to wrap it around her shoulders, reminding her of how soaked she was.

“You were gone a long time,” Jaren said quietly.

“I got caught in the storm,” Kiva said, a partial truth. “I decided it was safer to wait it out.” She indicated her drenched clothes and offered a small, self-deprecating smile. “I didn’t realize the rain wasn’t finished.”

“The storm didn’t hit until late this afternoon,” Caldon stated, ignoring her attempt at levity. “You had plenty of time to return before then.”

“We had ten years of catching up to do,” Kiva lied. “I didn’t realize how quickly the day was passing.”

“You still haven’t saidwhereyou were,” Caldon said. “All Tipp could tell us was that it was ‘just out of the city’ — we had no idea where to look for you.”

“I didn’t ask you to look for me.” The words left Kiva before she could stop them.

“What part of this aren’t you understanding?” Caldon growled, his ire rising anew. “Wecareabout you, Kiva. Ignoring that you deliberately kept me from coming with you — which I would have done in aheartbeat,as you damned well know — when you didn’t return, we thought something had happened to you. Do you have any idea how that feels, to know someone you care about is missing, possibly in danger, and you don’t know how to find them?”

The tears welling in Kiva’s eyes weren’t fake this time.

Caldon had lost both his parents after a storm had hit. He’d had no way to find them, or to know if they were still alive.

There were too many parallels with what Kiva had put him through that afternoon, unintentionally making him relive the worst moments of his life.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again, her voice breaking on the words.

Her emotion didn’t sway Caldon. “Saying sorry doesn’t change what you did. I can’t even stand to look at you right now.” True to his word, he turned his fiery glare to Jaren and demanded, “Come find me later.”

He didn’t wait for his cousin to agree before storming out of the room.

Kiva stared after him, feeling numb.

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