Chapter 55
FIFTY-FIVE
CADEN
Emma stormed into the training room right as I sent the fifteenth heavy bag flying off its chain, pieces of canvas still drifting to the floor like snow. Sweat was rolling down my spine, my pulse thundering from the workout, but none of that compared to what my heart did the second I saw her.
“Caden,” she breathed, one hand braced on her side as she stumbled in like she’d run a marathon barefoot.
She lifted a finger—a shaky little gesture that basically meant ‘give me a second before I die right here’—and bent over, gasping, her lungs working like they’d never heard of oxygen before. She looked like she’d sprinted the entire stretch of Kanata C without stopping.
“Fuck, I can’t breathe,” she wheezed, still hunched over like a ninety-year-old who’d taken the stairs for the first time since the war. Her hair was sticking to her forehead, her chest heaving, and she was trying—failing—to pull air into her body fast enough to stay upright.
And even in her absolute disaster of an entrance, even in this chaotic state, she’d never looked more beautiful.
I couldn’t move.
Couldn’t breathe.
Couldn’t do a damn thing except stand there like someone had nailed my boots to the floor.
When she finally straightened, her gaze locked onto mine with a force that damn near knocked the air out of my own chest.
“Caden,” she said, voice trembling in a way I almost never heard from her. “I am so sorry. I hope you know, I didn’t mean any of it. I didn’t know what else to do. I don’t even know how to begin to apologize for half the things I said.”
I stayed silent.
Not out of anger.
Not out of pride.
Because I genuinely didn’t know how to think with all these fucking emotions slamming around inside me—relief, fear, fury, love—every one of them clawing for space in my chest at once.
She took a step toward me.
A shaky, hesitant step, like she expected the floor to crack under her feet.
“I am so sorry,” she whispered, the words splintering. “So fucking sorry. Please let me make this up to you. Please.”
Her hands had curled into fists at her sides, like she was trying to physically hold herself together, and she looked at me with those wide, devastated eyes, the same eyes that had haunted me since the second I’d met her.
And I felt something inside me crack, like a fault line shifting under my ribs.
“What happened?” I asked, though I barely recognized the sound of my own voice…raspy, rough, scraped raw from too many fucking hours imagining her bonded to someone else.
“They tried to force us to bond,” she said, the words tumbling out fast, and frantic, almost desperate. “But James was brilliant. He suggested we’d do it in the Human World, where my magic is invisible if I want it to be. And untraceable.”
I frowned, tension wrapping around my spine. “So?”
“So we bonded!” she burst out, throwing her hands a little as she spoke. “For like ten seconds. They did this test to confirm it, and as soon as they let Nino go…” She pressed a shaking hand against her chest, “I healed us of it.”
It hit me slowly at first, then all at once.
“You guys formed the bond,” I said quietly, needing to repeat it in order to understand it, “and then you healed yourself from it in the first minutes…undoing it entirely.”
She nodded with such urgency, as if she needed me to hear her, and her eyes were so bright, so open, so painfully hopeful that it hurt to look at her.
“Yes!” she exclaimed. “Caden, listen to me. James and I aren’t bonded! Of course we can’t tell anyone, but I insisted on telling you, obviously. I didn’t want you to think that I—”
I closed my lids.
Not in anger, but in defeat.
In exhaustion.
In the kind of bone-deep ache that came after hours of imagining the worst and then hearing something only slightly less catastrophic.
“Caden?” she whispered.
“So you’re not,” I said, letting the words fall heavy between us, “but you’ll pretend to be?”
Emma stilled. Then she swallowed, throat working around the weight of everything she’d done and everything she’d been forced into. “Caden… Please, believe me, I didn’t know what else to do.”
I nodded slowly, jaw clenched so tight it hurt. “I know. I understand that. I do.” I breathed out hard, running a hand down my face. “But where does that leave us? Back into hiding?”
My fucking soulmate stared at me with so much pain and hope, it nearly broke me.
“Caden, please.”
My heart twisted. Hard.
“Please…what?” I asked, though I didn’t sound like myself. I sounded like someone trying not to break.
“Please understand,” she whispered, anxiety bleeding into every word. “I was trying to keep people alive! You, Nino, everyone. There was no good choice. Only the one that killed the fewest people.”
I nodded again—mechanically, instinctively—but the agreement didn’t settle anywhere inside me.
I couldn’t get my thoughts to line up.
My usually rational, calculated mind was a fucking battlefield—logic on one side, ripping, screaming emotion on the other—everything blurred together until I couldn’t tell which part of me was hurting, only that all of it was.
Right as I was about to answer her, a knock landed on the doorway.
“Sorry for interrupting.”
Walker. Of course.
“What do you want, James?” I muttered, already bracing myself for him to launch into a speech about his tactical genius.
“To kill the United Chiefs.”
I stopped mid-motion. “What?”
He stepped into the room, posture coiled like he was barely containing the violence simmering under his skin. “I got in touch with someone at Cyclos again,” he said. “Matthew Conners, Nino’s boyfriend. He contacted me a few minutes ago and told me the Chiefs are holed up at the Bastille.”
I frowned deeply. “That pathetic excuse for a prison? Why the hell are they in there?”
James rolled his eyes with all the patience of a saint who’d run out months ago. “Do I look omniscient to you?”
“No,” I shot back. “You definitely don’t.”
His lips curled, something caught between a smirk and a snarl.
“They killed one of yours,” he said quietly. “Threatened one of mine. I say it’s time they got what they deserve.”
I met his stare head on. And in that split second, cold, brutal understanding passed between us like a promise signed in blood.
“How do we get there?” I asked.
James didn’t answer right away.
Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out a ring: silver, etched with black markings so precise they looked like they might bleed ink if you stared at them too long.
He held it between two fingers, letting the dim light catch on the curves.
I knew that ring. Stephen’s ring.
Memories of Emma and I using it together at Hunza slammed into me so fast, I nearly choked on them.
Emma and I standing side by side, the cold biting our skin, the ring warm in her hand.
Her snapping at me when I joked how proposing marriage wouldn’t get us through the Layers any faster.
The feel of her fingers brushing mine right before we crossed.
Hunza.
Where she nearly died of hypothermia.
Where I realized, somewhere between the panic and the warmth of her coming back to life, I’d already fallen in love with her.
If James noticed the shift in my face—the way every muscle went tight, the way I stared at that damn ring like it might crack open the ground beneath my feet—he didn’t say a word. He simply held it there between us.
“We can’t translate underneath the bubble,” he said, matter of fact, as if he weren’t suggesting treason and bloodshed. “We’ll have to fly out there the human way. But this…” He lifted the ring slightly. “This’ll get us through the Layers.”
Distance from Emma.
And payback for the bastards who made her choke on impossible choices.
Who made her choose between all the people she loved and…me
“Count me in.”
James gave a single, curt nod—one soldier acknowledging another—then turned toward the door. “We leave tonight,” he said loudly as he walked out.
The door had barely clicked shut when Emma spoke up. “We don’t need to fly out there,” she said quietly, but there was steel under the words. “I have magic beneath the bubble.”
She took a step forward, chin lifting with that impossible determination of hers. “I can portal us to Nevada.”
I clenched my jaw so hard it ached, then forced out the word I never thought I’d say to her.
“No.”
Her entire body jerked as if I’d struck her. “What? What do you mean, no?”
“I mean,” I said, each word dragging itself up my throat like broken glass, “I need a clear head for this mission, and your presence is—”
“What?” she snapped at me, anger and fear rising together. “My presence is what, Caden?”
I shook my head. “I can’t fucking breathe when you’re in the same room, Emma. Let alone think. I need…”
I swallowed hard, the words fighting me, my chest tightening even as I forced myself to look at her.
“What do you need, Caden?” she whispered, and gods, she sounded terrified.
“I need some space.”
Emma’s eyes widened in pure panic. Full-body panic, the kind she hid from everyone but couldn’t hide from me. “Caden, please listen to me. I didn’t bond with him.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“How can you say that? How can you say it doesn’t matter?”
“Because it fucking doesn’t, Emma! Because any way you spin it,” I said, my voice rising despite every effort to stay calm, “there is no one—no one—they could’ve threatened in there who would’ve made me do any of that to you.”
She froze. Entirely.
I pushed on, because if I stopped, I wouldn’t get it out anymore.
“They could’ve had Sean in there with them, Emma. And I still wouldn’t have broken your heart. I still wouldn’t have agreed to a fucking True Bond with anyone else. And I would’ve never—ever—asked you to keep a secret relationship with me while I kept a fake public one with someone else.”
Emma went stiller than still, shoulders locked, looking like she’d taken a blade straight to the ribs.
I dragged a hand over my face, everything inside me chaotic and loud and hurting.