“Go back where?”
“To Neurovance.”
“Why the fuck would I ever go back there?”
Because it’s yours.
It should have been yours and Seb’s.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Do you really just want to let Luke run rampant with your tech?”
He narrowed his eyes at me and pursed his lips.
“I’m not letting him runrampant.I blew it up. It’s gone.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
It wasn’tgone.
It was severely damaged, yes. But, despite the fact that we’d more or less gone dark while here to avoid Luke tracking us down, NOVAhad been doing her best to safely keep us up to date with news from the outside world.
According to NOVA, Luke had survived the explosions, and he’d made several announcements reassuring the world that the Neurovance campus would be back up and running in a few years.
He was calling the event a terrorist attack, and though we suspected he’d wanted to have a tantrum about it and pin the entire thing on Jay, he had no proof. Not only had Jay worn his mask the entire time he was on campus, minus those few minutes when he kissed me in my room, but NOVA had selectively scrubbed the surveillance footage, so that the only viable shots of Jay living on campus were the ones when he was being tortured.
Even more serendipitously, despite Luke’s claims that he would get Neurovance back up and running quickly, most of his investors had pulled their funding almost overnight, including DARPA. According to NOVA, without Jay or me, investors like Doctor Caspian Grey no longer believed Luke had a viable product, even if he managed to get the campus repaired.
But still. The Neurovance name was worth billions of dollars, and at leasthalfof that rightfully belonged to Jay. It felt cosmically unfair that he was being forced to walk away from his legacy like this.
Unwilling to just let it go without some sort of a fight, I pressed a little harder.
“You don’t have any desire to try to expose him at all? To take back your birthright? To make Neurovance into what it wassupposedto be? A brand thathelpspeople?” I asked softly, and Jay flinched.
His dad had always wanted memory tech to be used to help people heal. He’d never wanted it to be twisted into this awful thing that Luke had turned it into. It was why Luke had him killed.
We both knew it.
So staying here, hidden in the mountains… it was letting Luke win, and I just wanted to make sure Jay was really okay with that before I gave up on the idea of revenge.
Suddenly, Jay was in front of me. I tilted my head back to look at him, and he stared right back, his mouth a hard line.
Slowly, he raised his large hands to cup my face, running his thumbs reverently across my jawbone and making me shiver.
“The onlydesireI have, Milo, is to stay here with you.” He leaned down and pressed his forehead against mine. His minty breath tickled my lips as he closed his eyes and let out a shaky sigh.
“I don’t give a fuck about Neurovance. I don’t give a fuck about Seb, or Luke, or Doctor fucking Grey. All I care about isyou.So no, Milo. I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to doanythingthat might risk you. I just want to stay here and love you, forever.”
My heart was pounding, and I sucked in a sharp breath as he pressed his lips against mine, kissing me so slowly and deeply that my knees almost gave out.
“Is that okay, Milo? Will you let me? Will you let me stay here and just love you?” he breathed, and I found myself nodding, unable to deny him anything while he was holding me in his trembling hands and showing me his most vulnerable parts.
“Of course I will,” I replied shakily, “I just wanted to make sure that was actually what you wanted.”
He didn’t respond. Instead, he made a sound so broken and full of yearning, I regretted ever bringing up Neurovance in the first place.
“Thank you…” he hummed, kissing me over and over again.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you…”
