Chapter 11 - Jail Break
With Adalyn seeming a bit more relaxed, Kai left her with Tsuna to answer a call on his phone from Arrow.
“What do you have for me?” Kai answered as he started walking back towards the main house.
“Yo! Well, I have both good news and bad news for you. The good news is that your little friend that you left for me back at the abandoned building sang like a little birdie after you both left.”
“And?” Kai prompted.
“Well, this is the bad news. As we both suspected it seems like these were low level criminals for hire. He didn’t have many details on who had given them the job. From his perspective, someone was supposed to be coming to collect her and pay them the rest of the money that they were owed. I staked out the place for a while just incase somebody decided to turn up, but no luck."
Kai sucked his teeth in frustration. Another dead end. Great!
“Annoying, I know” Arrow followed up. “There are a few old security cameras in the area. If any of them are working I’ll see if I can pull the videos. If this was purely for someone to confirm their suspicions about her being your mate then I would suspect that they would have had someone close by observing, to see if you’d show up. Any video footage might give us some new leads to follow up.”
“Okay, if you’re able to get anything send it over to me.”
“Sure…”
There was a long pause in the conversation as Kai waited to hear if he had found out anything else.
"Anything else?" Kai asked, annoyed at the silence.
Kai could hear Arrow’s smile down the phone.
“What?” Kai prompted again.
“I was just curious to know how our new princess was doing?”
Kai rolled his eyes “ 'Adalyn' is doing fine”
“Have you claimed her yet?”
“I’m not having this conversation with you.”
“I just assumed you would have by now. Watching her put you on your ass last night was spectacular. Just for that she gets my vote for queen, never mind future princess”
Great! Kai thought, if Arrow had seen that then he knew that he was never going to hear the end of it
“I’m hanging up.”
Arrow struggled to hold back a laugh. “Okay, okay!” After managing to hold back his amusement Arrow continued. “Seriously though, have you told her everything?”
“I’ve told her what she needs to know for now. Keeping her safe is all I’m interested in at the moment. I’m gonna scare her off if I suddenly try to claim her and force her back to the palace with me. It's been a struggle just trying to convince her to stay here for now.”
As Kai continued walking back to the main house, he turned back around to look at her chatting with Tsuna. Small streams of sunlight had broken through the gaps in the clouds, landing directly on her face. With her long brown hair blowing in the breeze, she looked like some kind of ethereal being. It was breath-taking.
“She’s just so…so innocent. I’m worried I’m gonna corrupt her if I go in too heavy handed.”
It was very rare that Kai spoke of his feelings to anybody, but Arrow was one of a very small group of people that he could trust.
“I hear ya.” After a moment, Kai could hear the humour slowly starting to return in Arrow’s voice. “Well, if you decide to pass her up, I’m currently single so be sure to send her my way. I’d be more than happy to show her a good ti..”
Kai hung up the phone “Dumb ass! I swear I’m going to murder him one of these days!” Arrow always had a habit of winding him up for his own entertainment and he knew exactly which buttons to press to get a rise out of him.
Slipping his phone back in to his pocket, Kai looked back up to the sky. The breeze had started to pick up and more dark clouds had started to gather. It looked like a storm was coming.
Later that evening Adalyn had expressed that she was tired and would be turning in early. She had tried all day to remain indifferent around Kai, but she was struggling to keep her guise up. Once back in the bedroom she started putting her plan in to action.
She knew that her best bet was to try and sneak out unnoticed across the rooftop and then shimmy down the piping on to the green below. From there she could run through the forest to the empty guest houses by the coast. She could then climb up and over the roof to the back of the buildings and then scale down the rocky cliff face to the coast line below. “Perfect!”
“First things first. I need to get out of this room” she uttered to herself.
Directly behind the bed were some beautiful white shutters. If she was going to get out through the window, she’d need to remove one of them to fit through. She tried to force one of them off the frame with her bare hands but it didn’t seem like it would budge without her making a lot of noise. Realising that wouldn't work, Adalyn pulled out the letter opener that she found earlier and started unscrewing one of the shutter panels directly from the metal fitting that fixed it to the wall. The first 3 screws came out relatively easily but the last one had rusted and had refused to come undone. After trying and failing to undo it she started tugging at the whole panel. The corner of the shutter cracked at the edge but finally came loose from the frame. Just as she was about to ease it out there was an abrupt knock at the door.
Alarmed she dropped the letter opener and it clanged on to the hardwood floor.
“Hey, it’s me” Kai answered from the other side of the door. “Can I come in for a sec?”
In a panic Adalyn hurriedly started leaning the shutter panel back in to the frame. “One second!” she called out. She wouldn’t have time to screw it back in to the frame, so she angled it in a way that would hopefully stop it from immediately falling back out. Once she was happy, she sat back down on the bed to make it look like she had just woken up.
“Come in!” she called back towards the door. As Kai entered Adalyn spotted the letter opener on the floor. She had forgotten to put it away. Trying not to make any sudden moves she slowly covered it with her foot.
“Everything okay?” Kai asked. He looked at her curiously. He could tell something was off. She was breathing a bit fast for somebody that had just woken up.
“Yup, fine” she responded bluntly
Her response confirmed it for him. The “yup, fine” she used was the same one that his sister Melody used when everything was definitely not fine, but he didn’t feel like calling her out on it. He questioned himself wondering if he had done something to tick her off during the day. He thought that they had made some progress in their interactions earlier in the day but for some reason things had seemed to regress since then.
“I noticed you didn’t eat much earlier; did you want me to get someone to bring you something else to eat?”
When something in the room caught Kai's attention, Adalyn used that opportunity to retrieve the letter opener from the floor. She slowly started to draw back her foot with the letter opener directly underneath it until her foot reached the bottom of the bed frame, then pretending to stretch her legs she kicked it underneath the bed.
“No, thank you” With the letter opener now under the bed, she relaxed a bit more and her voice sounded less tense. “I’m pretty tired so if you don’t mind...” she looked at the door in a way to suggest that he should leave.
“Err..okay…” Kai replied, getting the hint that she made. "Well, if you change your mind Tsuna is just down the hall." He gave her one last quick glance before stepping back out, and then slowly closed the door.
Breathing a small sigh of relief, she waited to hear his footsteps head down the hallway before resuming her earlier efforts. She lifted the shutter panel back out of the frame and then leaned it against the wall. As she opened the window, the breeze whipped through the room. The sky was looking increasingly overcast and the wind had started to pick up. “It’s now or never.” With that Adalyn climbed through the window and set off out.
Fifteen minutes later Adalyn had finally made it to the roof of one of the guest houses that perched on the side of the cliff face. She could see the waves lapping the beach of the coast line below. Freedom was finally in sight. The drop down from the cliff face to the beach looked a bit steeper than she had anticipated but she still felt confident that she could handle it. With that being said, she knew that scaling down would be so much easier if she could partially shift, but she still couldn't sense the presence of her wolf at all.
The clouds had grown grey and angry and she felt a few drops of rain starting to fall from the sky. If she was going to start climbing down, she’d have to it now before the rain got too heavy.
She sat down on the edge, then slowly swung her legs over the side. Once she had managed to get some footing she started to lower her body over the edge.
Just at that moment, she heard a small thud and then sound of footsteps clacking against the tiled roof. Her eyes followed the dark figure approaching her. Once it stopped her eyes traced the figure up from their bare partially shifted feet to their face. Behind his dark hair, blue menacing eyes looked back at her. It was Kai.
'Shit!' Adalyn thought. He'd found her.