The second heartbeat went silent. Percy’s warm pulse muffled itself behind the same wall. Two presences, gone.
“Percy.” I stumbled toward the chair and grabbed his forearm. “Don’t do this. Not you. You said you’d stay. You promised me.”
He stood. My hand was still on his arm, and he looked down at it. At my fingers wrapped around his sleeve. His jaw clenched once, twice. Then he peeled my hand off, gently, carefully, as if handling a bird with a broken wing.
He set my hand back at my side and stepped past me without a word.
My legs gave out.
Lucian caught me again and held me up. His hands moved from my arms to my shoulders, supporting my weight, and his face was inches from mine.
“Please.” I grabbed the front of his shirt. Fisted the fabric the way I used to when I pulled him in to kiss me. “Lucian, don’t. Don’t break it. Please don’t break it.”
He stared at me with those stormy eyes. I waited for the mask to slip.
But it didn’t.
“I reject you, Mira Maxwell.”
His hands released my shoulders and I crumbled. The floor met my knees, then my palms, and the third heartbeat slammed shut behind a wall so absolute that the silence in my chest was deafening.
Three bonds. Gone in under two minutes.
I stayed on the floor, palms flat against the hardwood, forehead pressed to the cold grain, and I couldn’t make a sound. The pain wasn’t a scream or a sob. It was an absence. A void where threeheartbeats used to live, and the void swallowed everything, my voice, my breath, my ability to process the fact that I was on my knees in a house that no longer belonged to me.
Lucian’s footsteps. Solomon’s. A pause near the door where Percy’s breath caught once before his boots joined the others on the hardwood.
The front door opened. Closed.
I stayed on the floor.
Time passed.
The afternoon gold deepened to amber to the gray of early evening, shadows stretching across the floorboards until the room was more dark than light.
The phone rang in an empty house with no one left to answer.
They said my father orchestrated everything.
And the men I’d given everything to, the ones who’d promised me the world, who’d held me through pain and desires, forever marking my skin, had just discarded me. The way everyone in my life eventually does.
The knock came at seven.
Thiago stood in the doorway with concerned expression and worried eyes.
“Mira?” He stepped inside, scanning the room. I don’t know how he entered.
He found the empty coat hooks where three jackets used to hang. The cleared surfaces and the absence that lived in every corner. “What happened? Where did they go?”
I looked at him.
“They left me.” My voice was hollow. “They’re gone.”
Thiago’s arms wrapped around me. The hug of a parent comforting a child. Warm, encompassing, the kind of embrace I’d spent years imagining.
“Then come home with me,” he said into my hair. “Let me take care of you.”
I closed my eyes and couldn’t find it in myself to move away. I don’t know what to believe but I didn’t have anyone anymore. Again. Like always.
