“Juniper?” The mocking edge is missing from Torin’s voice.
Unease ripples around the room, the faintest stirrings that things are not happening the way they expected. When Archer moves toward me, his brow furrowed, Roman blocks him from taking another step closer.
I angle my head so I can’t see any of them at all, even out of the corner of my eye.
Garrison glances at them, and then nods. “The bond breaking can happen whenever you want. If you want it to happen today, it will happen today.”
Another stretch of brittle, stunned silence weaves around us.
“I can have someone pack your?—”
Before Garrison has finished speaking, I’m already shaking my head. “I don’t want to take anything with me. I just want to go.”
“Then now it is.” Garrison gestures to the open doorway, and I walk toward it.
“Stop, Juniper.”
Torin’s order tunnels into me. My footsteps stop, my mind turns syrupy, and Ihatethat their bite has power over me.
A grunt, followed by the heavy thud of something falling, rings out from behind me.
When I turn around, Torin is flat on his back, out cold.
I’m too shocked to do anything but stare, wide-eyed.
Kylian’s voice vibrates with fury as he stares my scent matches down. “She’s leaving. If one of you tries to give her another order, you’ll be eating through a straw. The next one won’t be eating at all. Or breathing.”
Garrison puts his arm around my shoulder and walks me out of the library. I want to fight him.Thatis the power of an alpha's order on an omega.
Distance helps.
As we leave, I hear Kylian telling them to be at the downtown Council building for the bond breaking. If they don’t attend, they will be forced to.
“Are you sure you have nothing you want to take?” Garrison asks me as he leads me past Veronica in the entryway, who watches me with wide, shocked eyes and one hand covering her mouth.
I try to smile at her, wanting to thank her for everything she did for me, but my lips are trembling, and my eyes are blurring with tears.
“This place has taken more than enough from me,” I whisper. “I just want to forget.”
Chapter 14
Callum
“She left.” Archer stares down at the piece of paper with instructions for the bond breaking at a Council building in the city.
I haven’t read a word of it. Neither has he. My fingers clenched around it when Roman, the white-haired beta, thrust it at me with a growled order not to be late.
It’s been ten minutes since I passed the piece of paper to Archer and helped Torin up from the floor once he regained consciousness. He has a black eye and a dark scowl on his face, yet I feel like I’m the one who was knocked out.
“She wasn’t supposed to leave,” I say, struggling to make sense of how wrong this all feels. None of that surprise interview had gone the way I thought it would.
Juniper didn’t argue with us. She wouldn’t even look at us until we pushed her to. It’s as if we stopped being anything to her at all. I never realized that all the time we were busy shutting her out of our lives, she was shutting us out of hers.
But quietly.
There were no doors slammed. No objects flung at our heads. No threats or attempts to slip into our beds. Just a quiet admission that we didn’t want her, so she no longer wanted us.
This wasn’t supposed to hurt. This was supposed to be when we won.
