Chapter 353-Acting Sus!

Jaguar:

Nights had changed. Or maybe it was the moments I spent with Verity that had become special.

Never had I imagined I would reach a point where I could forget the rest of the world whenever I was with her.

Yet that was exactly what had been happening lately, and that was the crazy part.

Lying beside Verity after another perfect night together, I couldn’t help wondering what had changed in me.

Obviously, something had.

I wasn’t the same Jaguar I had been before.

If I were, I would have been going crazy right now, running around looking for Gigi, my best friend.

I used to think that, God forbid, if Gigi ever left us, we would all be devastated.

Our lives would fall apart, and some spark inside us would disappear with her.

But that hadn’t happened.

Of course I missed her. I worried about her whenever we were out in the field searching.

We panicked. We were anxious.

But when we weren’t searching, things were different.

I couldn’t speak for the others, but I wasn’t as devastated as I had always imagined I would be.

I prayed for Gigi to be safe, yet my normal life continued, and there was only one reason for that.

I turned my head toward Verity.

She was asleep beneath the covers, her bare shoulders visible, her beautiful platinum-blonde hair scattered across the pillow and blanket.

Rolling onto my side, I gently gathered strands of her hair between my fingers, like collecting silver feathers.

She had become so important in my life that everything else seemed to fade from my mind.

I still thought about Gigi.

I still prayed that we would find her, because I wanted Verity to have a fair chance to be introduced as my girlfriend without everyone being consumed by something else.

My fingers traced along her arm before I leaned over and kissed her shoulder.

And it wasn’t only her beauty that drove me crazy.

There was something about the way she spoke, the way she rolled her eyes, even the way she questioned me and put me in my place.

I needed someone who would remind me exactly where I stood whenever I crossed the line.

After a while, my phone started beeping.

These days, that wasn’t unusual. It rang constantly, and it was usually Ragnar calling with an update on whether they had found any news about Gigi.

The moment I saw Ragnar’s name on the screen, sadness engulfed me.

That was the problem. No matter how much we wanted to escape the tension, we couldn’t.

I just couldn’t understand what we could have done differently to stop Gigi from taking that step.

With so many days having passed, I was beginning to worry about her even more, wondering whether we would find her alive.

I immediately shook the thought away.

Even thinking about it felt insane.

Then a message popped up on my screen. Ragnar was asking where I was.

I could tell he was probably feeling lonely.

Maybe they found some new information.

He definitely had to be feeling low.

I slipped out from beside Verity and pulled on my clothes, fixing myself up before walking over to her and pressing a kiss to her forehead.

Then I adjusted the blanket over her and left the room.

However, I hadn’t even made it out of the wing when Ragnar saw me.

I almost stopped and considered taking a few steps back, but that would only make things messier.

Maybe Theodore wasn’t home, and Ragnar had returned earlier than I’d expected because they usually spent the entire night and day out searching.

That was what worried me. Something had to be wrong if Ragnar was coming home at three in the morning and asking where I was.

Ragnar narrowed his eyes, already silently questioning what I was doing there.

"Brother. You are home early?" I asked, completely avoiding the fact that I had just come from the wing where Verity was.

"No. I wasn’t feeling well, so I thought I’d come home and have a drink with you." His eyes remained fixed on me. "Where were you?"

As expected of Ragnar, he wasn’t going to let it go.

At this point, I wasn’t sure why he even had to ask.

Maybe because he already had some idea that I liked Verity, but he probably didn’t know how far things had gone between us.

And with everything going on right now, me coming out of Verity’s room looked wrong.

My brother was suffering, and everyone was out there trying to find Gigi while I was pursuing a relationship.

I could understand why that might not sit well with him.

"I went to speak with her. She wasn’t responding to my calls, but when I reached her room..."

I paused and fixed my hair, growing increasingly anxious under Ragnar’s harsh stare. Then I cleared my throat.

"I think she’s sleeping because she didn’t open the door."

I gave him a faint smile as I lied.

"I’ve been in the living room for the past ten minutes. You’re telling me you stood there for ten minutes waiting for her to open the door?" Ragnar questioned, giving me a strange look.

"No. I sat in the living room first. I thought maybe she was, you know, in her nightclothes, so that’s why she wasn’t opening the door right away. But I guess she’s asleep."

I swallowed.

"She’s asleep."

Another lie.

Of course there was no way, absolutely no way, I was going to admit anything right now.

It would look terrible, and worse, it would upset my brother.

I wasn’t going to do that.

Ragnar stared at me in silence before slowly nodding, as though deep in thought.

"Did you find anything about her? Any news?" I asked, quickly changing the subject to Gigi.

"Not yet," he replied. "There were a few theories a warrior suggested."

He gestured for me to follow him.

I was relieved to get away from Verity’s wing.

The longer I stood there, the more likely Ragnar was to think about what I might have been doing while he was out there suffering.

I hoped he believed my lie.

It sounded convincing, didn’t it?