scared of approaching her boss for fear of him biting her head off.
Master Castien rarely displayed his anger on his face, but when he was in a foul mood, his telepathic presence became so dark and oppressive it was hard to breathe in the same room as him.
Irrene had learned to just avoid her boss when he was angry, but unfortunately, in the past few months, the ratio of bad days to good days had become decidedly not normal. She had sensed her boss’s growing agitation for months: it had built and built and built, and she had been dreading what was going to happen when so much tension finally found an outlet.
She didn’t understand what was going on. Master Castien hadn’t been that way in the first few months after assuming the role of the Grandmaster. He had been a remarkably calm man—a freakishly calm one, even by the Order’s standards—but something must have happened, because his telepathic presence had become tenser with every month. As months passed, she noticed the visible clues, too: the growing tension around his eyes and mouth, the way he tracked his apprentice with his eyes, something dark lurking in his telepathic presence.
Speaking of his apprentice, the boy had changed his demeanor, too, and even more drastically than Master Castien had. Eridan used to come to the monastery all the time to bother his Master while he worked, but now Irrene barely saw him. When she did, he was quiet and withdrawn. The few times she’d managed to get him talking, Eridan smiled insincerely and told her that everything was fine when she asked him if anything was wrong.
The most disturbing part was when she saw Eridan interact with his Master. Eridan would barely lift his gaze, speaking very little and murmuring only “Yes, Master” or “No, Master” when he was asked something by Castien directly. It was a striking contrast to the boy who had constantly sassed and talked over his Master in the beginning of the year. It baffled Irrene immensely, and she could sense that such behavior only served to irritate Master Castien.
In fact, she was positive Castien’s foul moods were directly linked to his apprentice.
Irrene didn’t know what to think. There were all sorts of rumors about Master Castien and his apprentice, and some of them were not fit for polite company, but she had never believed that Master Castien and his apprentice were in an inappropriate relationship. Not because she thought Master Castien wasn’t capable of it—she had no delusions about him: men like that took what they wanted, and damn the morals—but because she could sense so much toxic, unresolved tension between them that it made her uncomfortable just being in the same room with those two.
As days turned into months, and months stretched into a year, she could sense that things were coming to a head. She had no idea what would happen, but she knew that when that horrible, dark tension building under Master Castien’s skin finally snapped, it would not be pretty.
She could only hope she wouldn’t be there when it happened.
Unfortunately, she was, and it happened in a way she had not expected at all: Eridan was kidnapped right from the monastery’s gardens.
That in itself wasn’t enough to make Master Castien snap.
But when security cameras captured the image of the kidnapper, Irrene winced, trying to shield herself from the icy, biting fury that filled the room.
“Blockade the area around Hangar Bay 4,” Castien ordered the security guards, his cold eyes still fixed on the image of the tall man carrying his unconscious apprentice away.
Chapter Fifteen: Something Lost
Eridan didn’t remember being knocked out.
He just remembered that he had been enjoying a walk outside the monastery, and then… nothing.
The next thing he knew, he was waking up inside this tiny room, bound to a chair and gagged, with two strangers—a man and a woman—arguing over him.
“Is the gag really necessary?” the man said gruffly. “We’re in the middle of nowhere.” He was a tall, broad-shouldered man with piercing blue eyes and brown hair with streaks of gold. His age was hard to determine: he could have been anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five. He would have been a handsome man if the scowl on his face didn’t make his face look so unpleasant.
The woman was a tiny thing, beautiful, blonde, and probably around the same age as the man. “He could have woken up while we transported him,” she said, shrugging. “The kid would have hardly kept