But Luca was right. I wasn’t the only member of House Avus paired with someone from House Lynx.
“Milo,” I breathed as understanding dawned upon me. My wide eyes drifted up to where Luca stood, watching me and waiting. “You can’t be serious. He and Isla failed the Second.”
”What your illustrious cousin lacks in strength, he makes up for in title.”
I shook my head slowly, thinking through the ramifications of Raghnall’s demands. Nascha wouldn’t do it, would she? Milo was the golden son, the favorite, the Heir. She wouldn’t sell his future to a weak little redhead just to beat Cosmo at his own game, would she?
Without a word, I got to my feet.
“Don’t do this, Olympia,” Luca said and something flashed in his eyes as I turned away from him.
I shouldn’t have come here. I shouldn’t have called him like that. It was a door that should have remained closed.
“Don’t just leave again,” Luca pled with me as I strode past him to the door. “Can we at least talk about it? You never even came to talk about it. After everything we went through, everything between us, you just—"
“A clean break, Luca,” I snapped, interrupting him as I whirled to face my former partner in the threshold of his grandfather’s office, a place neither one of us was supposed to be. “We promised.”
“But why?”
“You know why.”
I glared at him. How dare he pretend he didn’t know the rules just as well as I did. How dare he act like he wasn’t aware there were only three options once you found yourself paired by the Geist. Win, marry, or ignore. That was it. We’d been taught those options since birth. We hadn’t won and marriage wasn’t an option so I’d had to cut him off. It was our only choice.
“We could be friends, Olympia,” he tried and I did my best to ignore the pain in his tone.
“No. We can’t.”
“Do you really think I’d use you like that? Do you really think I’d betray you and your whole House? You know me, Olympia, better than anyone else. Can you honestly look me in the eyes and claim to believe me capable of that sort of betrayal?”
I shook my head and backed away, stepping into the darkness of the hall. Then I did what I always did, what I’d done for so long I hardly realized I was anymore; I fled. Because Luca was right. He wouldn’t use me to get closer to my family only to discover and exploit our secrets. Someone had. Long ago, betrayals between partners of the Major Houses were common.It’s why the cut off rule was established in the first place. But Luca wouldn’t. I knew that truth in the depths of my soul, knew it with every fiber of my being, knew it in the heart I’d thought had already shriveled and died, but it didn’t matter. Because letting him in would be a risk and he wasn’t worth that. I wasn’t worth that. No one was.
So I left him standing alone in his grandfather’s office and I ran from the House, sprinting through the back door and into the night before I could think to hide myself in the shadows. Then I made my way to the stairs. Before I could even think about what I was doing, where I was going, I’d descended to the Second and was standing right in front of their house.
The lights were on inside. I could see shapes moving around in the living room from the street. Two women, two men. One of them threw their head back laughing and another joined in. They were happy. How were they happy? Did they not miss her? Did they not mourn her absence in their lives every second of every day? Did they not feel the sting of her loss with every movement, every moment?
“Don’t just storm away from me, Wolf,” someone hissed in the darkness.
My gaze snapped to the side, past the closed front gate of the Bexley home and to the house next door, a modest brick construction with windows shuttered tight. The door was open, swinging shut with a silent snap, and on the porch stood a young woman with strawberry blonde hair and freckles up and down her nose.
Her hands were on her hips as she called out quietly to a man in a long coat and oversized combat boots who seemed to have just stormed out of her house and made his way onto the street.
“I’m not doing this with you, Veronica,” the man hissed. His voice was low, raspy. It grated against my ears as I slid backaround the stairs to hide myself on the other side. “You had an assignment. You don’t get to bail now, after all this time.”
“They’re good people,” she snapped, stomping down the steps to approach him.
“So are we.”
I saw her glaring at him when I poked my head around the corner to look. To her credit, she didn’t back down when he glared right back.
“Fuck this, Veronica,” he finally growled. “You took a vow. You can’t just back out.”
“I’m not backing out,” she argued, defiant. “I just think there’s a better way to do this.”
“What better way?”
“You saw how that Harrison guy stood up to Cosmo at the Tenth, the way he disagreed with him in front of everyone. Maybe we could convince him—"
“He’s a blowhard, not a leader. We need the middle brother and you know it. Now, if you’re not up to the task, I know plenty of members who’d take up your post living up here in a cushy abandoned Second Ring house.”
