Hearing the rustling of pages as the human frantically flipped through her book, Caeyin bit the inside of his cheek to stifle a laugh. He would sleep better knowing that he’d ruined her attempt to read. It wasn’t as good as killing her, of course, but while he was still figuring out how to get out of his restraint, it was the next best thing. Even better was the knowledge that she wouldn’t know he was the one interfering with her vision. Her kind didn’t know much of anything about his, and even if she did know a little, his trick was unique among Lunairans. Unless she was clever, she would probably assume she was going crazy rather than associate the phenomenon with him—

Suddenly, his thoughts were interrupted as he felt a sharp pain in the side of his head. He yelped in surprise and scrambled into a sitting position, eyes snapping open as he reflexively looked for the threat. As he brought his free hand to the sore spot just above his temple, he spotted the human’s book laying haphazardly on the floor nearby. She’d thrown it at him.

Indignant, he turned toward her with a scowl as she went on to throw a petty insult at him. “Stupid [i]human[/i],” he spat in return, inwardly aware that exchanging snubs was immature but too irritable to care about maintaining a stoical image. He had already been in a foul mood before she’d made it worse by hitting him in the head. It also didn’t help that he was naturally competitive and refused to let her have the last laugh.

Tilting his chin upward arrogantly, he decided to step up his efforts and give her a scare. “I was going to stay here a little while longer to see what I could get out of you, but I’ve changed my mind,” he bluffed, forging a new connection with her mind as he spoke. In the next moment, he took control of her sight again and transmitted a vision that was more complex than the last. In it, he reached for the shackle around his wrist and pulled on it hard enough that the chain link that attached it to the pole snapped in half, freeing him from his tether. He rose to his feet and took a few steps toward the human, closing the distance between them menacingly.

“If you surrender, I’ll kill you quicker,” he offered, reaching around to draw a silencer from his back pocket and aiming it at her chest. In reality, he only had one weapon—the one she had stolen from him after she’d knocked him out—but unless she had searched his body too, he doubted she would know that. The vision of him simpered at her cruelly and gestured with the fake silencer, “Go on, get on your knees. Try anything funny, and I’ll shoot you faster than you can blink.”