By now, the other two Imperium shield teams had finished sweeping the perimeter. They marched past the wreckage of the ticketing kiosk, their armor covered in darkmatter ash and their expressions dripping with absolute disdain.
“Get your shit under control, Nightfall,” one of the upperclassmen muttered as he walked past Percy, not even bothering to hide his disgust. “You’re embarrassing yourselves and endangering the rest of us. This is a combat zone, not a bloody soap opera.”
Percy’s jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth might shatter, but he didn’t retaliate. He couldn’t. The shame radiating through our bond was suffocating.
“Jupiter!”
Theo and Jamie, the only two not fighting, rushed to my side. Theo dropped to his knees. “I’ve got you, sweetheart. Jamie, help me lift her. On three. One, two, three.”
I bit back a scream as they hauled me to my feet. My ribs ground together with a sickening crunch, the bone scraping against tissue. But the moment I was upright, the intense, burning itch of Aelari healing kicked into overdrive. I could literally feel the bones knitting themselves back together, the torn muscle fibers weaving shut beneath my skin. It was exhausting and nauseating, but it was fast.
“I’m okay,” I gasped, leaning heavily against Theo’s solid frame. I coughed, spitting a glob of blood onto the ruined floor. “I’m healing. Just get me out of here.”
“Transports are waiting at the north exit,” Jamie said, his vivid green eyes darting toward the Nightfall Shield, who were currently being held back by Lucas, Phoenix, Rowan, and Draco’s kinetic wall. “Let’s move.”
We bypassed the standoff entirely, heading for the shattered glass doors that led out into the damp, freezing London night. The air outside was thick with the wail of mundane police sirens and ambulances, held at bay by the Assembly’s localized illusion wards. The rain had started to fall, a steady, icy drizzle that washed the ash and blood from my boots.
“Jupiter, wait! Please!”
The desperate shout echoed over the rain. I didn’t need to look back to know they had broken through Draco’s barrier, or that Draco had let it drop once we were moving. The heavy thud of their combat boots slapped against the wet pavement as the Nightfall Shield rushed out of the station after us.
Theo and Jamie immediately stopped, pivoting to shield me, but I pushed past them. The physical pain of my healing ribs was nothing compared to the absolute, volcanic rage erupting in my soul.
I turned around, my boots splashing in a puddle, and marched straight toward them. I didn’t stop until I was inches away from Percy’s face, staring up into the dark eyes of the man who had once been so safe.
“Fuck off back to America.” Percy flinched, but I didn’t stop. I got right up in his face, then turned my furious glare on Aiden, Eris, and Draco too. “I don’t want you here! Do you understand me? You ruined any chance you ever had with me. There is a fuckingreasonI left! I crossed an ocean to get away from you! I wasn’t playing some silly game. I loved you. And you disrespected me in the most disgusting, degrading way imaginable. You threw me away like I was garbage, and you cheated on me! I don’t care if in your fucked up head you thought we were broken up. We never even talked about it! I never got to defend myself before you went off and fucked someone else!”
“We didn’t fuck anyone!” Percy practically begged, reaching for me. He stopped himself just short of touching my arms, his hands trembling in the air between us. “Jupiter, I swear to God, we never slept with any of those women.”
“I felt you!” I roared back, the memory of those agonizing nights flashing behind my eyes.
“You felt us trying to convince our bodies to want them!” Percy shouted, his voice cracking. Tears were mixing with therain on his face. “I wanted to get you out of my fucking head so badly. In that moment you were a traitor. I thought you were manipulating me. I thought… I thought if I could fuck you out of my system, I might be able to breathe again. But I couldn’t. Not that I even tried very hard. None of us could do it. We probably wouldn’t have even gone through with it even if our bodies had let us, which was impossible, because all I fucking wanted was you. Ionlywant you. Even when I thought you betrayed us, I tried to come up with reasons why I could forgive you. I told myself I had to make you hate me if I ever had a chance of getting past it. But every time I closed my eyes, it wasyouI saw. Every time they touched me, it made me physically sick. Fuck, Aiden couldn’t stop puking every time a woman came close to touching him! Eris spent three days in the infirmary after Melissa tried to kiss him and he puked his guts up all over her and refused to eat.”
I glanced at Eris, who was glaring at Percy before looking my way.
“It’s true, lass,” Eris stepped forward, his eyes so hollow and utterly haunted. He looked like a ghost of the man I used to know. “I can’t eat. I can’t sleep. I can barely string two thoughts together without hearing your voice. We’re dying without you.”
“That is not my problem. Your inability to function without the bondyoubetrayed is not my burden to bear! And right now, with how angry I am, your presence in my life is a massive fucking liability. You distracted me in there! You almost got me killed!”
Aiden let out a strangled sound at that, taking a step back and gripped his hair. He was breathing hard, and Draco had to place a hand on his shoulder to steady him. For just a microsecond, something inside me wobbled.
“I am telling you to leave,” I said, dropping my voice to a trembling whisper. “Go back home. Go back to Dominion. Ideserve to feel peace, even if it’s temporary. I have fought for my sanity every single day since you destroyed it, and I am not going to let you ruin it for me now.”
“I just want to fix it,” Percy pleaded, softer now. “We just want you to love us again.”
I let out a harsh, bitter laugh, taking one step back. “Maybe I fell for you too fast. Maybe I allowed the emergency axis bond to warp my perception of you and make me think I was in love.” I looked at each of them, letting the coldness seep into my soul. “Maybe all I really felt for you was desire, and I was just stupid enough to mistake it for love.”
“No,” Aiden snapped, shaking his head, water dripping from the long golden strands. “No, baby, don’t say that.Wedon’t believe that. You know that’s not how this went down.”
“What do you really know about me, Aiden? What do any of you actually know about me? You believed I was a sociopathic mastermind based on a few fake messages. What do you even love about me, aside from the fact that I get your dick hard?”
Percy opened his mouth, the rain plastering his dark hair to his forehead. He was scrambling for the words, reaching for some perfect combination of syllables that would magically erase the last month and a half of my life.
I didn’t let him find them. I didn’t want to hear whatever desperate excuse or hollow declaration of love he was about to weaponize against me. I turned my back on him, my boots splashing heavily in the freezing puddles, and started walking toward the waiting armored transport.
“Jupiter, wait!” Percy yelled. “Fuuuck, please!”
I heard the heavy, frantic splash of his boots, followed immediately by the others. They were running after me. They actually thought they could just chase me down and drag me back into their suffocating gravity.
