Chapter 7 - Caitlynn
As much as she tried, Caitlynn couldn’t sleep.
Her body was a catalog of complaints: the bruised hip from the third time Dex had put her down, the cut on her cheekbone that had crusted over and pulled tight every time she moved her face, the deep ache in both palms from catching herself on frozen dirt again and again and again.
She got up and paced.
The room was smaller than the others she’d seen in the compound, but it still had a window seat wide enough to sleep on, a wardrobe that could have housed a family of four, and a rug so thick her feet disappeared into it.
She paced the perimeter of it like something in a zoo: past the wardrobe, past the door, past the window, and then started the routine once more.
Eventually, she stopped at the window.
The boundary was invisible from here. She knew it was there. She’d felt it, hadn’t she? The wall of it throwing her backward onto the ground like she weighed nothing. But from the window, it just looked like darkness and mountain and a sky so full of stars it seemed indecent.
There’s nowhere to go.
Gideon had said it without saying it. The whole room had said it without saying it.
She’d walked out of that hall with her spine straight and her hands steady, and she’d made it all the way to her room before she’d sat down on the floor with her back against the bed frame and just stayed there.
She hadn’t cried. She’d just sat there while the room ticked quietly around her and thought, with great methodical thoroughness, about every single thing she’d had two weeks ago.
The bakery. The flour-sticky counters at four in the morning. Margaret’s leather purse, the customers who smiled, and the way the espresso machine hissed.
Her apartment. The mattress on the floor and the boxes she’d never unpacked and the photograph of her mother on the windowsill, smiling, taken a month before she died.
That photograph was still there. She hadn’t had it with her when they’d dragged her out.
It was sitting in an empty apartment in a city she couldn’t get back to.
Eventually, someone would notice she was gone, and eventually Margaret would open the bakery without her.
Eventually, the photograph would just… be there, uncollected, until someone decided to clear the unit.
She pressed her forehead against the cold glass of the window until the ache in it was something she could focus on instead.
The man who’d called her weak had a claim on her now. Ancient magic had decided, without asking, without caring, that she belonged to a stranger with ice-blue eyes and a jaw that could cut glass and an arrogance so deeply structural it was probably load-bearing.
Her pulse raced at the thought of him.
It was anger, she decided.
Of course it was.
She had to sleep. She truly had to, and she made her way to bed again. Her head didn’t stop until dawn broke. Only then did she manage to fall asleep.
It felt like she’d only been asleep for two minutes when there was a hesitant knock on her door. It opened almost immediately, without the customary wait for permission to enter.
The irritation in her quelled somewhat when it was Olivia who entered with two other women.
“Your things,” she said carefully. “I’ve had them packed up. We’re moving you to the Alpha house this morning.”
Caitlynn looked at the boxes. Looked at Olivia. “My things consist of a flour-stained sweater and the jeans I was kidnapped in.”
“We’ve supplemented.”
“How thoughtful.”
Olivia held her gaze patiently, kindly. There was nothing performative about it: no pity, no guilt, no attempt to dress the situation up as something other than what it was. That, more than anything, was why Caitlynn picked up her own box instead of making Olivia and the others do it all.
She didn’t say it was fine. It wasn’t fine. But there was a difference between a fight worth having and a door already closed.
***
The Alpha house was a separate building from the main compound, connected by a covered walkway that someone had lined with climbing plants, currently bare-stemmed and skeletal in the early spring cold.
The house itself was three stories of dark timber and stone with wide windows and a fireplace she could see burning from thirty feet away.
She walked through it with the very blankness she’d developed at fifteen, in her ninth placement, when she’d learned that reacting to nice things was just a way to hurt worse when they were taken away.
Her room—her room, as though possession was transferable by declaration—was at the end of a hallway on the second floor. It had a window that looked out at the mountains and a bed with a carved headboard and curtains in deep green and a writing desk that someone had put fresh flowers on.
Caitlynn set her box down. Looked at the flowers.
Left them there and sat on the edge of the bed instead, hands in her lap, looking at the wall.
Then she made her way to the bed—it was impossibly soft, softer than any bed she’d ever been on. She fell asleep almost immediately.
When she woke up, it was quiet again. She spent some time sitting at the desk. Doing nothing in particular. What was there to do, after all?
She frowned when there was another knock, infuriated at once when the door opened to reveal her… future mate.
It was her room, in his house, and he knocked, and it grated her nerves though she couldn’t explain why.
He filled the doorway, as though the architecture of it bent and shifted to envelop him. His dark hair was slightly disheveled, and though his hands were thrust into his pocket—a sign of discomfort, she was certain—his eyes kept hers.
“I know this isn’t what you wanted,” he said at last, only when she thought the silence would drive her mad.
She faced him coldly.
“Excellent start.”
He breathed out through his nose. “It’s not what I wanted either.”
“I’m sure. This must be such a shock for you, completely out of the blue. You had no idea it would be your life. Oh, wait.”
“Caitlynn—”
“Are you giving me a look on the bright side speech?” She turned to face him fully. “Because I have to be honest with you, the bright side is a little difficult to locate from where I’m standing.”
“I’m trying to have a conversation.”
“Great. Here’s my contribution to the conversation.
” She stood because being level with his collarbone while sitting was not a dynamic she could work with.
It still only got her to his chin, which was annoying.
“Two weeks ago, I had a life. It wasn’t much—but it was mine.
I chose it. And now I’m standing in a room I didn’t choose, in a house I didn’t choose, bound by a law I’d never heard of to a man I don’t know, and you’re here to talk about making the best of it. ”
“You’re not my property.”
“The law that just bound me to you without asking says otherwise.”
He didn’t respond. Merely looked at her, his brow furrowed.
She turned back to the window. “Get out of my room.”
He left. He didn’t slam the door, which she almost wished he had—it would have been something to push against. Instead, it closed with a quiet, definitive click, and she was alone with the mountains and the flowers on the writing desk and the absolute silence of a place that didn’t belong to her.
The hours dragged by slowly.
Dinner arrived on a tray, delivered by a woman who set it down on the desk without looking at her and left without a word.
The food was good—she could tell that even through the fog of her mood, she could register the care in it, the seasoning—and she ate it alone at the desk in the gathering dark because the alternative was the dining room, and the dining room meant people, and people here meant that she had to face it.
The truth. The fact that this was now her life.
She pushed the tray aside and put her arms on the desk and her head on her arms.
The knock came so quietly she thought she’d imagined it.
Then again—careful, a little hesitant, nothing like the way Kahn had knocked, which was a knock that expected to be answered.
“Yeah,” she called.
The door opened. The figure in the doorway was broad-shouldered, dark-haired, and so familiar that her brain refused to process it correctly at first. She just stared.
She remembered him. It had been the one brother she’d mourned when he aged out of the system, the one who she truly knew would protect her as long as he could. And he did.
Chris.
She was on her feet before she’d decided to move. “What—”
“Hey.” His voice came out rough. He raised a hand. “Hey, Cait. It’s okay.”
“What are you—” She stopped. Started again. “How are you here? Why are you—” Her voice cracked on the last word, and she hated it, hated herself for it, crossed her arms over her chest. “How long have you been here?”
“A couple of years.”
She stared at him. “A couple of—” The number of things she wanted to say compressed itself into a single flat look that she’d been perfecting since she’d stood next to her mother’s grave.
Chris, to his credit, didn’t flinch. He stepped inside, closed the door, and sat down in the chair she hadn’t sat in, hands clasped between his knees.
“I couldn’t tell you,” he said. “I know how that sounds. You needed to go through the trials without—”
“You were here.” The words came out low and measured, which was worse than if she’d shouted them, and they both knew it.
“While strangers were dragging me out of my apartment. While I was walking into a mountain trail blind. While—” She pressed her back against the window. “You could have stopped this.”
“I couldn’t.”
“You could have—”
“Cait.” His voice was steady and quiet, and she recognized the register—the same one he’d used in the foster home they’d shared, when she’d been ready to put a hole through a wall, and he’d talked her down from it.
“The lottery is binding magic. There was nothing anyone could do once your name was drawn. Not me. Not Kahn. Not anyone.”
“Kahn.” She said the name like it had texture she didn’t like. “You know him.”
“We’ve worked together for a few years. I reckon him a friend.” A pause. “He’s a good man, Cait. I know that’s not—”
“Don’t.” She held up a hand. “Don’t do the sales pitch right now. I cannot handle the sales pitch right now.”
Chris closed his mouth. Let the silence sit between them for a moment—not filling it, just waiting.
She looked at him. Really looked. The set of his shoulders, the way he was watching her. Something she’d always clocked without naming, a quality of stillness that wasn’t quite human. She’d assumed it was just Chris. She’d always assumed it was just Chris.
“You’re one of them,” she said.
He held her gaze. “Yes.”
“A shifter.”
“Yes.”
“You’ve been a shifter the entire time I’ve known you.”
“Yes.”
She absorbed this. It moved through her like cold water—the rearrangement of something she’d taken as fixed.
Chris, who’d been the one person to make her feel like she might be worth something, who’d given her his last granola bar on a Tuesday morning in a kitchen that smelled like mildew—Chris had been living inside a world she’d had no idea existed.
She wanted to be angry. She sorted through herself for it, looking for the familiar heat.
What she found instead, underneath the shock, was this: he was still Chris. He was sitting in her chair with his hands between his knees and his eyes on her face with the same expression he’d always had when he was waiting to see what she’d do—hoping she’d stay, prepared to wait if she didn’t.
“You still owe me twenty dollars,” she said at last.
A grin broke open across his face. “I know.”
“This doesn’t cancel it out.”
“I didn’t think it would.”
She uncrossed her arms. Sat back down on the edge of the bed and looked at the floor between them. “Tell me everything,” she said. “All of it. What you are. What this place is. What a Luna actually means.” She glanced up. “No edits.”
Chris leaned forward.
“No edits,” he agreed.
Outside, the mountains swallowed the last of the light, and for the first time since she’d walked out of that hall, the room felt fractionally less like a cage.