Page 184 of Claimed By Fangs and Darkness
Dread flooded my system. Kylo knew something had gone wrong. He’d tried to write to me. Yet he wasn’t here. The born were indeliberations.
What the fuck had happened?
I wrote back anyway, using the nightstand next to me that was within my leash’s radius.
Kylo? Are you okay?
I waited. I knew I needed to update him about my own predicament, but I honestly didn’t know what to say. Everything inside my body was tight with shame. It seemed like every move I’d made in the past twenty-four hours had been the wrong one.
Kylo would feel if I’d written to him. It had been magickally designed to deliver a noticeable zap with each message.
If he were okay, he would drop everything to read my note and respond.
Instead, silence.
My fingers trembled as I wrote to him. I still wasn’t sure what to say, what was best for myself or anyone else. All of my instincts felt wrong.
So I told the truth.
I fucked up. Juliette got me captured. I’m uninjured, but they’ve blocked my magick. Please don’t punish the city for my failures. I will escape.
The last sentence was stupid to say. Like a hopeful affirmation from the depths of my enormous fuck-up.
As if Kylo would focus on anything except the wordcaptured.
But worse than Kylo reading my message was the evidence that hehadn’tread my message.
I wasn’t the only one in trouble. And like everything else that didn’t make sense, I had the glaring intuition that it was all connected in a way I couldn’t yet fathom.
Whatever the full picture, all roads led back to me.
I sat there and stared at the blank note, shoulders hunched, for what must’ve been hours. It was only when I heard footsteps approaching that I quickly folded it back up and slipped it back inside the hidden pocket.
Juliette slipped inside the room.
Her stomach was heavily bandaged. She wore only a bralette and a long cream skirt.
When she saw me on Aster’s bed, her face fell, as if it hadn’t been me she was searching for. She looked like she was holding back tears. But when she wiped at her eyes, we both stared at the droplets of crimson on her hands.
“Why?” she asked me, lowering her blood-specked hands to her sides. “Why do you want to take everything from me?”
“Me?”I scoffed.“Take everything fromyou?”My voice squeaked, a bitter laugh escaping my lips.
“This all could’ve gone so much differently,” she said as she clenched her fists. “You’re about to learn exactly how it feels.”
“Howwhatfeels?” I asked, on the verge of sounding utterly hysterical.
Violence built in my body that had nowhere to go.
“He never forgot about you,” she said, repeating what she’d told me previously. “You or your magick.Never.”
Juliette didn’t look angry, or manic, or deranged.
As she stood between me and the door, she only looked hurt.
“I just want him to be happy.”
She stared at the chain above my head and then at her feet.
