Chapter 15
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
PERCY
Three weeks later
Three long fucking weeks of training, of drills, of Malakai barking orders at the ten of us in that underground chamber until my muscles screamed and my magic ran so thin I thought I ran out of it entirely.
Three weeks of learning how to move as one unit, of figuring out which of Stardust’s techniques meshed with ours and which ones crashed and burned.
Three weeks of eating meals in the dining hall with my new brothers, of living in close quarters with them, feeling them in my head at all times.
I’d spent the flight from New York bracing for the worst. For the cold, for the damp, for the shit-ass food, for the way Imperium students looked at you like you’d tracked mud through their kitchen.
I’d braced for Stardust, for the five men who’d already wormed their way into Jupiter’s heart while I’d smashed it to pieces.
But Imperium wasn’t as bad as I’d convinced myself it would be. The academy sat on the First Crossing site like it had grown out of the earth itself, the stone walls warm even in the rain, the wards humming through the foundations. It was a beautiful institution, as ancient as the Aelari species.
The training was brutal, but it was the kind of brutal I welcomed.
At Dominion, I’d been going through the motions for years.
Here, every session with Malakai or Tala or one of the other elders pushed me past whatever I thought my limit was and then kept pushing.
I hadn’t felt challenged like that since I was eighteen and first learning to channel my magic.
And my father, the fucking bastard, was three thousand miles away, and the silence was glorious.
No lectures about the family legacy and my responsibilities and the weight of the Callahan name.
For the first time in twenty-six years, Charles Callahan wasn’t breathing down my neck.
I slept through the nights now. I ate without checking over my shoulder.
I walked the corridors without the constant hum of dread that had lived in my chest since I was old enough to understand who and what my father was.
But it wasn’t all easy. Not by a fucking long shot.
Not with Jupiter’s constant presence. So close, and so, so damn far away.
Every single day. Every meal, every training session, every walk between buildings, every time I turned a corner and found her laughing with Lucas or leaning against Rowan’s arm or letting Theo fix her hair.
She was everywhere, and she was beautiful, and I couldn’t touch her.
That was the deal I’d made. Professional.
Civil. Show her through action, through restraint, through every single day of not reaching for her, that I was worth forgiving.
That I’d changed. That I wasn’t the man who’d accused her of manipulating us, who’d let his father’s poison rot the best thing that had ever happened to him.
I meant it. I still meant it. But Christ, it was killing me.
Still, I was in my own private hell every day as I stared at her, memorizing her face.
The way she looked when she was concentrating, her brow furrowed, her lower lip caught between her teeth.
The way she looked when she was laughing, her head thrown back, her silver eyes bright.
The way she looked when she was tired, dark circles under her eyes, her hair falling out of whatever she’d tied it back with that morning.
Every version of her was a version I wanted to memorize, to hold, to press my mouth against and never let go.
Her scent of pear and honey followed her in every room she walked through. I could smell it on the sofa cushions she’d been sitting on. I could smell it on the training mats. I could smell it in my own goddamn sheets now, though she’d never been in my room.
I wanted to bury my face in her hair. I wanted to pull her into my chest and feel her heartbeat against mine. I wanted to kiss her until neither of us could breathe. I wanted to—
No. It hurt too much to imagine the things I really wanted to do to that woman. Instead, I burned inside.
It was hard watching Phoenix, Lucas, Theo, Rowan and Jamie with her.
How close they were, allowed to touch her.
How Rowan’s hand would settle on the small of her back when they walked through a doorway.
How Lucas would find any reason to brush against her.
How Theo would pull her hair out of her face when it fell across her eyes during training, his fingers lingering a half-second too long.
How Phoenix would carry her when she was too tired to walk, his massive arms cradling her like she weighed nothing.
How Jamie would sit beside her in the common room, their shoulders pressed together, his voice low and steady in her ear.
I knew they were fucking her too. I wasn’t stupid.
I could feel the shift in her energy through the bond on certain nights.
A warmth, a softness, a bloom of something that tasted like satisfaction, and then nothing.
A wall, slammed down so hard it was like a vice clamping shut around my skull.
Every night, without fail, the moment something started, the bond went dark and cold and silent, and I was left alone in my room with the ghost of whatever she was feeling and the knowledge that it wasn’t for me.
I couldn’t prove it. Not really. But I had a feeling—a sick, gnawing feeling in the pit of my stomach that she didn’t want me, Eris, Draco and Aiden to feel the pain of having to feel her pleasure with the others.
Mercy. She was giving us mercy, and every night I lay in bed and hated her for it and hated myself for needing it.
Three weeks of training, and today was my turn in the archives with Jupiter. Alone.
The Nexus chamber was cool and dim, the air smelling of old paper and stone dust and something faintly metallic that I’d come to associate with the artifacts.
The restricted archives were three levels below the main library, accessible only through a spiral staircase.
Jupiter had been down here every single day since the bonding ceremony, reading through old Ophiuchus documents, learning everything she could about portal travel.
She always needed at least one of us present.
The texts were dangerous, written in the old language.
She used what she learned from them to practice opening small portals right there in the room.
Tiny ones, barely big enough to fit a hand through, but enough to test the principles.
Enough to make the hair on my arms stand up every single time.
Today was my turn.
I found her already there when I came down the stairs, sitting cross-legged on the stone floor with a leather-bound tome open across her lap.
Noodle was draped over her shoulders, his tongue flicking lazily in the air.
The lantern she’d brought down cast warm light across her face, catching the silver in her eyes, the curve of her jaw, the dark fall of her hair where it pooled on the floor beside her.
She looked up when she heard my boots on the stone. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
I sat down across from her, leaving a careful distance between us, close enough to reach her if something went wrong, far enough that we weren’t touching. The same careful distance I’d been maintaining for weeks. The same careful distance that was slowly driving me insane.
She went back to reading. I pulled a book off the shelf behind me.
It was something about Aries combat techniques in the early post-Crossing era, and opened it to a random page.
I didn’t read a single word. I couldn’t.
My eyes kept drifting back to her, tracing the line of her neck, the way her lower lip caught between her teeth when she concentrated, the faint crease between her brows.
The silence stretched. It was always like this between us now.
We were trying to be civil. I could feel her trying.
I could feel the effort it cost her, the way she had to consciously soften her voice when she spoke to me, the way she held herself a little tighter, a little more guarded, when one of us was in the room.
She was still hurt. I could feel it through the bond, even with her walls half-up. It was a low, constant ache, dulled by time but never gone. I’d put that there. Me and Aiden and Eris and Draco. We’d put that ache in her chest, and no amount of careful tiptoeing civility was going to erase it.
I wanted to fix it. I wanted to crawl across this stone floor and put my hands on her face and tell her I was sorry until the words lost all meaning. I wanted to kiss the hurt out of her mouth. I wanted to—
“Percy.”
Her voice pulled me back. She was looking at me, one eyebrow raised, and I realized I’d been staring.
“You’re not even reading that.”
I looked down at the book in my hands. It was upside down. I turned it right-side up without comment. The corner of her mouth twitched, and then she caught it and pressed her lips together, and the almost-smile died before it could fully form. My chest ached.
“I found something,” she said, turning the tome around so I could see the page. The text was written in Drakon glyphs, but the illustrations were clear enough. A diagram of a portal, drawn in meticulous detail, with annotations in a cramped hand that I couldn’t read.
“It’s a portal construction method,” she said, her finger tracing one of the diagrams.
I set my book down and leaned forward. The diagram showed a series of small circles arranged in a spiral pattern, each one connected to a central point by a thin line. The annotations were dense, packed with symbols I didn’t recognize, but the concept was clear enough from the illustration alone.