I shook my head. “No, that’s all. Thank you again.”
I headed for the door, the little bell jingling as I pushed it open.
“It was nice meeting you, Jupiter,” he called after me.
I smiled and waved automatically, then stepped outside. Three steps later, I froze. I never told him my name. I whirled around, ready to march back in and demand answers, but my phone buzzed again.
D: FIVE MINUTES! We’re by the fountain!
Reluctantly, I turned away from the shop and hurried toward the meeting point, mind racing. How did he know who I was? Was he from the Assembly? A spy from Dominion? Or just another zodiac who recognized the infamous Ophis?
I reached the fountain just as the group was gathering. Everyone was pleasantly tipsy, laughing and chatting as we piled into the vans that would take us back to Imperium.
“Get anything good?” Dani asked as we settled into our seats.
“A pendant for my mom,” I said distractedly, still thinking about the shopkeeper.
As the van pulled away from the village, winding through narrow country roads, I stared out the window at the passing landscape. The shopkeeper’s face floated in my mind, that sense of familiarity nagging at me.
And then it hit me like a truck. He looked likePhoenix. The same broad build, similar features, even that same warm, intense gaze, just older, without the dreadlocks. The family resemblance was striking now that I made the connection.
Was he related to Phoenix? An uncle, perhaps? I pulled out my phone, tempted to text Phoenix and ask, but stopped myself. This wasn’t something to discuss over text, and I wasn’t even sure what I would say. “Hey, I met your older doppelgänger in the village, he knew my name without me telling him, what’s that about—are you spying on me?”
Instead, I slipped the phone back into my pocket and fingered the small paper bag containing the pendant. Tomorrow I’d ask questions. For now, I had a beautiful gift for my mommy and a pleasant buzz from the cider.
12
Aiden
The constellarium was freezing,the kind of cold that sank into your skin and bones. I didn’t bother with my jacket anymore. The cold was at least something to feel that wasn’t her absence, wasn’t the raw, screaming hollow she’d carved out of my chest when she boarded that plane.
I climbed the last of the winding stone steps, two beer bottles dangling from the fingers of my left hand, a third already uncapped in my right. The trapdoor hatch was propped open the way we always left it now. I knew Draco was up here. I’d felt him climbing the stairs an hour ago through the shield bond.
The wide arched window at the east face of the tower was thrown open to the night, cold wind lifting the pale strands of his hair off his face. He sat on the low stone sill with one leg drawn up, the other dangling over a four-story drop he didn’t seem to register. His hazel eyes were fixed on something across the campus, or nothing, I couldn’t tell anymore. His mouth was slack. His hands rested loose in his lap.
This wasourspot. The place where I first felt her lips on me.
I wanted to burn the tower down.
“Move over,” I said instead. Draco didn’t look up, but he shifted a few inches along the sill.
I sat down beside him, set the two bottles between us, and pushed one of the cold ones into his hand. He blinked at it like he’d never seen a beer before. Then his fingers closed around the neck, and he tipped it against his mouth without uncapping it.
“Dude…”
He lowered it. Stared at the cap. Set the bottle down and picked up the other one, which was already open. He drank.
We sat in silence for a long time.
The campus spread out below us, lights burning in the dormitories. A pair of first-years were cutting across the quad toward the library, laughing about something. A world that kept on fucking turning like nothing had happened. Like we hadn’t exiled our axis across an ocean because we were too arrogant and too stupid and too fucking scared to ask a single question before we lit the match.
I took a long pull from my bottle. The beer was already warm in my hand. I hadn’t eaten today. I hadn’t eaten properly in days. Percy and I had smoked through half our stash on the common room floor this afternoon until the ceiling tiles had started to look like her eyes, and then I’d had to leave because I couldn’t take it, because even baked out of my mind all I could see was her face, her tears, the moment she’d said ‘I hope you feel me under your skin for the rest of your fucking lives.’
I felt her. I felt her every goddamn second.
“I talked to Lydia again today.” Draco didn’t answer. That was fine. I wasn’t sure I was talking to him so much as just getting the words out of my own head. “Caught her outside the dining hall. I just wanted—I don’t know what I wanted. A word. A fucking crumb. Anything. She told me to get fucked.” A humorless laugh spilled out of me. “Then Tye said if I came neareither of them again he’d crush my skull into itty bitty particles and flush them down the toilet. I think he meant it this time.”
“He meant it,” Draco said. His voice sounded like it hadn’t been used in a week.
