#1. The Alpha's Little Caster{MxM}

CHAPTER 23

Elijah Castwood

"I fucken knew it!" I felt startled, blinking rapidly and stepping back as Arson swung his dagger in the air with a look of triumph in his eye.

"What do you mean, you knew it?" Winston asked with a growl. I could feel it, his unsteady aura in the way he had subtly stepped back and was almost pressed into the wall behind his desk and I found myself clinging to Donovan, pressing into his side and swallowing.

I knew it, I knew this was a bad idea. Now he's afraid, they'll all be. I felt my throat close up and I stared at the ground.

"Well, it was a hunch really, but a strong one nontheless. Wow," there was a breathlessness about his tone that had me looking back at him. He stared at me, fascinated, like I was something he never knew he'd see in his life and I furrowed my brows. "A real life caster," he laughed and clapped his hands, a little jump as he stepped forward and bent down, leaning his hands on his knees and shaking his head. "Give me a moment, I'm processing."

Caster? What did he mean by caster? What is that? I watched him feeling oddly curious and finding the word very familiar and oddly nice.

"Caster? What?"

"Right, so," Arson chuckled and looked at me. "Would you like to break the news, or shall I?"

I blinked feeling Donovan's gaze on me along with Winston's mildly uneasy ones. "I don't-" I shook my head- "know what your talking about."

He tilted his head like a puppy and for the moment he really did look like one as he smiled gingerly at me. "Well, I guess that leaves me to giving you the whole process, try not to get lost."

Donovan groaned then and next thing I knew he was pushing me into a seat I hadn't noticed and took one himself.

"Now, I started thinking since that whole 'you see a lake and we don't' fiasco." He waved he hand with the danger around. "Something about it was just too convenient, too tricky to be just any kind of kidnapper, then I thought to how you claimed to get out," it was as though the excitement made him crazy and oddly dramatic. "I made an experiment in the library, but realised, judging by your assumed current age and the fact that you'd been down there since you were 4, I didn't have roughly 15/16 years to wait. Anyway, you broke through the cemented wall, I thought for that to happen it would've had to be weakened by time and environmental factors, you said you were in a lake, that's where it became even stranger. A body of water to make any damage to that wall, would need to be moving.

"Lakes are still water." He said it like he was the smartest person in the world. "Then I thought, okay, a cup, let's see. I took a few bricks made of cement and chipped at them to create the kind of damage that a wall would need to be weakened enough to be broken by a cup and guess what I realised?"

He looked around at all of us as though we were his students. We said nothing and I felt myself swallow nervously for some reason. "It would need to be so thin, that a finger with enough force would break through it," he said it gently, folding his arms and ceased his pacing. His eyes on me alone. "That was impossible."

"Why?"

"If the wall got that damaged, he wouldn't have needed to break it assuming the body of water was flowing constantly and it wasn't, meaning it couldn't have been damaged that way in the first place."