Chapter 5 #2
“The family put a dart through Draco’s window.
” I hadn’t planned to say it. I heard it come out of me and realized in that second that I’d been bursting with it.
“Maybe not you. Maybe not Reece, but it was Assembly-trained hands, and it was designed to bring her running back to Dominion. It worked, and two of my brothers nearly died as bait. So you’ll forgive me if the family’s obligations feel less binding than they used to. ”
“Be very careful, Percival,” my father said quietly.
“Don’t call this number again unless someone’s died. And if anything else happens to my shield—anything, a dart, a draft, a bad oyster—I will fly back across that ocean, and you and I will have a different kind of conversation. Goodnight, Dad.”
Through the door, I could hear Eris and Aiden arguing about the room assignments. Menial shit that didn’t matter. I stood in the dark a moment longer, waiting for the shaking in my hands to settle.
Inside, Draco looked up, violet eyes reading my face in one pass. He’d always been good at that. Had this irritating way of seeing right through people’s masks, especially ours.
“How did he take it?”
“Like a kick to the teeth.” I dropped onto the couch beside Eris, who wordlessly handed me the tea he’d made. I sniffed the tea, noting the strong scent of cinnamon and apple.
“I’ll have to hunt down that TA tomorrow and find out where we can get some decent fucking coffee around here. This tea shit won’t cut it,” Draco muttered, sniffing his own mug.
“Aye,” Eris said quietly. “What he said.”
Aiden didn’t say anything else for a while. But an hour later, passing his door, I saw him at his desk with a pen in his hand and three crumpled pages by his boot, writing something slowly, crossing it out, and starting again. None of us mentioned it.
We’d debated skipping the Great Hall entirely.
Draco had voted for unpacking, by which he meant sitting alone with a book, and Aiden had voted for the pub in the village, by which he meant drinking until his face melted off.
But hiding on the first night would have set the wrong tone, and I was done letting us hide.
So we walked into that vaulted hall with its five long tables and massive arched windows that looked out towards the sprawling forest, and the noise dropped away from us in a spreading circle, the way it had at Dominion after everything went wrong.
Hundreds of eyes. The whispers moving down the tables.
None of them fucking mattered, because my eyes instantly found Jupiter.
She was sitting with the Stardust Shield, Noodle draped around her shoulders and her hair loose down her back.
She was laughing at something the big one, Phoenix, had said, her whole face lit up, and the sound didn’t carry across the hall, but it didn’t need to.
I felt it in my gut. That was the cruelty of the bond. The punishment.
Eris breathed out slowly through his nose. “Steady, lads. This is about to suck.”
She’d have felt us come in the way we felt her, the thread tugging at both ends. Across all that noise, her eyes found us in the doorway, and the laughter went out of her face, and for a moment nothing in the world happened at all.
Then she nodded, and turned back to her table, said something, and the Stardust men closed around her. I marked the way the big Aquarius, Lucas Bennett, let his gaze rest on us a beat longer, unreadable behind his glasses, before he turned away too.
We ate at the far table where nobody bothered us. Some second year with more courage than sense asked Draco if it was true Nightfall had taken down a Class Five. Aiden pushed food around his plate.
“She looks too fucking good,” Aiden said at last to no one.
I made myself breathe through the familiar burn in my chest, the one that woke up every time the bond fed me a little of her light.
Six months ago I’d have taken that feeling out on a training dummy or a bottle.
That version of me had cost us everything, and I’d left him at Dominion with the rest of the wreckage.
We ate in silence, each of us trying desperately not to stare at Jupiter.
We were barely out of the hall, into the cloister where the rain had thinned to mist, when I felt her behind us, and all four of us stopped and turned.
She stood under the last archway with her arms crossed.
Noodle’s snake head lifted from her collar and regarded us with what I could only describe as disdain.
“Winters showed you my conditions.”
“Every line,” I said. “We’ll keep every one of them.”
“I know you will. Because here’s what happens if you don’t.
” She came a step closer. The mist beaded silver in her dark hair.
“This is my home. I built it out of nothing after your school and your Assembly and your families took turns burning down the last one. The men I’m with had no part in what you did to me.
My friends here had no part in it. If your being here costs me any piece of this life—one friendship—I will not fight you, I will not make a scene.
I will simply ask Winters to reverse the transfer. Do you understand me?”
“We understand,” Draco said quietly.
“Good.” Her gaze snagged on him then, on the shadows that hadn’t finished leaving his face, and for a fraction of a second something odd flickered in her eyes.
The memory of that night, maybe, before she shut it down.
“You’re still pale,” she said, in an entirely different voice, one she seemed to resent coming out of her own mouth.
“Whatever they gave you at Dominion for the neurotoxin, Theo can do better. He’s the best healer in this school.
Professional courtesy. Use it or don’t.”
She turned to go. And then, because she was Jupiter, and because no amount of armor had ever fully covered her, she stopped.
“The bond,” she said, with her back half to us.
“I still feel it too. You should know that. Every day, whether I want to or not. So I’m not doing this to punish you.
I’m doing this because the last time I trusted the four of you, I ended up getting hurt, and I promise you I’m never doing it again. ”
Then she was gone into the mist, and the four of us stood in the cloister like chastised children.