Souls Entwined

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen
Elle's POV

What the hell was I thinking? I thought twenty minutes into my first lesson with Kaden and shortly to be my only one.

He was light on his toes, a graceful predator to my fumbling prey. He studied me with sharp, clear eyes, intensely focused on every move I made. If I so much as flinched, his body moved in reaction, but the rest of his expression was emotionless.

It wasn't something I was used to seeing, and it threw me as my thoughts swirled. I tried to untangle the sense of loss at suddenly being unable to read his expression. As I strained to find a flicker of emotion, it wasn't until now that I realised just how much I had taken his openness for granted.

I wasn't sure when, but at some point in the last year, Kaden had started letting me through the barriers he had been building, allowing me to see what was going through his mind, even if he didn't tell me. But, I understood why he let me see the thoughts flash across his face rather than tell me because, for a long time, I wouldn't have listened or trusted him, and now we had fallen into a pitiful rhythm.

I wanted him to tell me. But I was still learning how to ask him.

I must have been in my head too much because Kaden barked gruffly, 'Show me how you should stand.'

I'd had shown him twenty, thirty, forty times. I had stood how I thought I should, and each time he had circled me, correcting my stance over and over again. I was about ready to throw fists, not because I wanted to learn how to hold that pose a million times before moving on to something else.

This is stupid. I was so close to saying something, but I didn't because that felt like I was admitting defeat, and I refused to put myself in a position where someone could so easily poke holes at my weaknesses.

'You're not stupid.'

I was sure I hadn't said the words, but I'd had a year to learn Kaden's facial tics. He had been given fourteen years.

He came back into focus after tucking my elbows back down for the fiftieth time, and he flinched as my teeth ground together. I couldn't even muster the willpower to be annoyed with him because I was the one still making mistakes. 'You'll get there,' he said simply, double-checking my fists to check that I wasn't still tucking my thumb over the top.

You'll end up breaking your thumb. After correcting me the first time, he'd explained calmly, and I'd realised with trepidation that the Kaden I'd become familiar with over the past year had sunken back into the façade.

It had been so easy to believe that I'd gotten good at reading him, that something about our bond had meant I could see more than others could. I'd forgotten that he had spent over a decade mastering his emotions.

Even before he'd found and decided to keep his secret about us, Kaden had witnessed the consequences of emotions. He had seen the greats fall after a flicker of emotion had sent them begging for mercy. His first vivid memory was when he was three. It had been a birthday party or a celebration, he couldn't quite remember, but an Alpha of some pack had been so desperate for help that they'd started propositioning other leaders. The desperation ended their pack because while they'd secured the aid they needed, they'd sold their souls in the process and hadn't survived much longer. Kaden's memory was of the fallout.

His steady gaze was unflinching, and it told everyone who looked the same thing, I am a fearless leader. It was the most selfless thing he'd ever done because it wasn't true, and he'd donned that persona for his people.

He had also been pretty good at fooling the entire world, and worst of all, me, into believing that he had never had a second thought about me. But it was those thirteen years of keeping secrets so tightly bound to his soul that had, at some point, slowly started whittling away at his sanity. Now, he was the man he was to—the man who tried his hardest to let me in but still struggled in his unique way.