I turned to face him. He was the angriest of the three. I could feel it even through the muted bond, fury vibrating beneath his stillness.
“This isn’t a discussion, Mira.” Solomon adds. “The decision is made.”
“Your decision.” The words tasted bitter. “About my bond. My body. My life.”
“We don’t owe you this. Our connection is done. We took you because you had nowhere to go,” Lucian said. His voice was measured. “Now the arrangement has run its course.”
“You pitied me.” The realization crawled up my throat. “This whole time... that was pity?”
Nobody corrected me.
“Even if it’s true,” I said, grasping. Bargaining. “Even if my father is what you say he is, that’s him. Not me. I didn’t know. I would never hurt you.”
Lucian’s expression didn’t change. “It doesn’t matter.”
“How can it not matter?”
“Because the risk is the same regardless of your intentions. We can’t afford the vulnerability. The bond has to end.”
“So I’m guilty by blood.” My voice is shaking now. “I’m being punished for a man I just reconnected with.”
Nobody answered. The silence was the verdict.
“I’m sorry.” The words ripped out of me and I hated myself for saying them. But the part of me that had spent years apologizing for being too much, took over. “If I did this to you, I’m sorry. Just tell me how to fix it.”
“You can’t fix what you are.” Solomon, again. Quiet enough to kill.
I flinched. The kind that came from years of hearing a version of that sentence.
You can’t fix what’s wrong with you, Mira. You’ll always be too much and not enough.
“Sol.” Percy’s voice. Barely a whisper from the chair, a warning or a plea.
“The bond rejection will hurt less if you’re not fighting it.”
The room went very still.
Solomon stepped forward. He met my eyes with a direct, unflinching gaze. Every wall he’d ever lowered for me had been rebuilt. Every crack I’d found in his armor had been sealed. His jaw was set the way it set when he was completing an assignment, and I realized with a nauseating clarity that’s exactly what this was to him.
A task to be handled efficiently.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
The first heartbeat in my chest stuttered. Solomon’s fierce rhythm, the one that had lived beside my own, went quiet. I gasped. My knees buckled.
“Stop.” The word came out strangled. I reached for Solomon’s wrist, grabbed it, gripped it. “Take it back. Solomon, please.”
He pulled his wrist free. A single, deliberate motion that removed my hand from his body and left it hanging in empty space.
Then he walked to the window and stood with his back to the room.
Percival spoke next. He hadn’t moved from the chair. His head was turned away, his face angled toward the bookshelf, and I realized he couldn’t look at me.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
His voice broke on my name. A splintering sound that didn’t match the words carrying it, and for one horrible second I thought he might take it back. His fingers were gripping his knees so hard the tendons stood out, and a tremor ran through his shoulders.
But he didn’t take it back.
