Initially, it seemed like Caeyin’s trick had worked. As the human stared at the vision he’d created in shock, a sly smile crossed his lips. Still trapped by her metal chain in reality, he didn’t have a profound goal that he was trying to achieve by fooling her. Whether she fell for it or not, nothing had changed. He was still her prisoner, and he still had no way to kill her unless she was dumb enough to come within his reach. He would have loved to wrap his hand around her throat, but she wasn’t giving him the chance as long as she kept her distance. Instead, he satisfied himself by watching her obey his orders and drop to the floor while he sat, unarmed and immobilized exactly where she’d left him.

The sight of her reluctantly folding to his whims led him to wonder what else he could make her do. How far could he push her before she stood her ground? He debated between making her grovel and testing the waters to see if he could coax her to come closer to him, but before he could experiment with either option, he noticed something strange. Furrowing his brows, he studied the human warily as she tilted her head at the vision of himself that he’d projected. Something was off. The connection he’d made was still working, but her demeanor had shifted as if she’d noticed that he wasn’t actually standing in front of her.

He stiffened as she suddenly closed her eyes. To his own surprise, he began to feel the mental link straining. She was fighting back against his grip on her sight. [i]Impossible,[/i] his eyes widened. Even the other soldiers that he’d trained with hadn’t been able to sever the connection when he’d used his ability against them. It was the reason why they loathed him so much. Any time he engaged in a one-on-one sparring match, his opponents were always rendered helpless because he veritably blinded them by taking control of their optical nerves and manipulating their vision. None of them had ever broken free from his invisible hold, yet this human—a supposedly inferior being—was actually pushing him out of her head.

The instant the link was broken, his pupils retracted to their normal size, and he stared at her in disbelief. Maybe there was more to her species than the previous explorers had recorded. Either that, or he’d found an exceptionally gifted human that was much more difficult to kill than the majority of her kind. He supposed that would explain why she’d survived against the virus his people had released over the Earth. Most humans had succumbed to its effects, but the hardiest had overcome. Again, he mentally kicked himself for being so overconfident when he’d found her. He should have known better than to assume she would be easy prey.

At her insult, Caeyin glowered at her venomously. There was no way she could have known, but the term she used struck a raw nerve in him. He’d heard it whispered among the colonists on the ship after it had been discovered that he’d been born different than the rest of his people. [i]Outcast[/i] was essentially what it meant. In the back of his head, a red flag raised, alerting him to how peculiar it was that a human knew about such a curse, but he didn’t dwell on it. Right now, he was too irate to slow down and process the context of the situation.

“I don’t take orders from the likes of you,” he snarled, yanking on the chain around his wrist again in the slim hope that it would break, and he could finish what he’d come here to do. “And I’m not going to just sit here and wait for you to decide you’re through with me either, so you had better kill me or release me if you don’t like my prison manner, because I’m not going to stop until one of us is dead.”