Chapter 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 was our spot. 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 near either 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.
“Yeah.” I took another drink. “Not sure I fucking blame him either.”
The wind shifted, bringing the smell of pine and wet stone up through the window.
I remembered Jupiter leaning out of this exact window, hair whipping around her face, pointing at Cassiopeia and telling me I had the attention span of a goldfish after catching me staring at her ass.
That was before I’d tasted her. The night I’d lost my heart to her entirely.
I dragged a hand down my face. My knuckles were still split from training with Eris this morning.
Eris had been hammering at the heavy bags in the combat hall before dawn every day since she left, and the rest of us had learned to leave him alone about it, because the alternative was Eris taking a swing at one of us and someone ending up in the infirmary.
Our trip to Imperium hadn’t made anything better. Actually it made things ten times worse. It was clear that Jupiter had moved on and was done with us. Those Stardust fuckers had her in their sights and she didn’t seem reluctant enough.
Draco had started disappearing for whole afternoons, no one knew where, and nobody had the stomach to ask.
But I always found him up here at the end of the night, staring at the stars.
Percy and I drank. Percy and I smoked. Percy and I sat in the wreckage of our common room night after night, agonizing over our choices.
The only thing we’d done right in weeks was the mission in Jersey.
The Assembly had tossed us a Class Four like a bone to a starving dog, probably hoping we’d get ourselves killed and solve their political problem.
We’d torn through it in under seven minutes.
Percy had opened it up with a strike that had split its skull down the spine, and I’d finished it while it was still twitching.
Eris had laughed while he killed three more, making twenty copies of himself and converging all at once like a deranged maniac that only wanted carnage.
Draco had been the one with enough presence of mind to notice the last bane skulking at the edge of the breach, and we’d bagged that one alive, wrapped it in containment wards, and dragged it back to the caves below Dominion for training.
A gift for ourselves. Something to beat on when the need got bad.
The need was always bad.
“My father called again,” I said. “Third time this week.”
“Mine too.”
“Mine’s threatening to pull my funding if I don’t ‘fix the situation.’ Like I can just—“ I stopped. Swallowed. “Percy’s father sent him a letter. Like an actual letter. Addressed it to ‘Percival Callahan, Failure of the Nightfall Shield.’”
Draco’s mouth moved in what might, once, have been a smile. “Charming.”
“He did tell me that Melissa and her father have officially been exiled and their magic was bound, so there’s that.”
“Good.”
“Yeah.” I rolled the bottle between my palms. “Doesn’t bring her back.”
“No.”
The first week after Jupiter had gone, the vultures started circling before her flight had even landed. Axis candidates I’d never noticed in four years had suddenly been everywhere. Waiting outside our quarters. Slipping notes under the door. Cornering us in hallways.
One had the audacity to ask me, to my face, when we’d be “opening the position.” I hadn’t hit her.
I’d wanted to. Percy had, instead, told her in a voice that had gone absolutely flat and absolutely quiet, that if she or any of her power-chasing friends approached us again, he’d see to it personally that they were reviewed for manipulative conduct.
Word had traveled fast. The corridor outside our quarters had been empty for two weeks now.
People crossed the courtyard to avoid us.
I tipped my head back against the cold stone of the window frame and stared up at the rafters of the tower.
Somewhere up in the dark, a bat was moving around and scratching at something.
The ceiling next to the massive skylight was painted with the old constellation map, faded and flaking off, and I could just make out the serpent where it wound between Hercules and Scorpius.
Ophiuchus. Her sign.
I stared at it until my eyes burned.
“I felt something,” Draco said suddenly.
I rolled my head sideways against the stone to look at him. He hadn’t moved. His eyes were still fixed on whatever he wasn’t seeing.
“What?”
“Last night.” He took a slow pull from the bottle, swallowed, set it down on the sill between us. His fingers stayed wrapped around the neck. “Through the bond. Something came through.”
I sat up straighter. The cold that had been numbing my spine suddenly felt like a blade pressed flat against it. “From her?”
“Yeah.”
“What do you mean, something. She’s been locked down like a fucking vault. I can’t even feel her breathe. What came through?”
He finally turned his head. His hazel eyes were bloodshot, sunken, the skin under them so bruised he looked like someone had taken a fist to his face. But there was something else in them too. Something raw and half-crazed that I recognized because I saw it in the mirror every morning.
“She had an orgasm sometime around midnight.” I stopped breathing.
“It was powerful. I couldn’t get a full read on her.
Her emotions, her thoughts, her surroundings, nothing.
The wall was still up. But that—that came through.
I don’t know how. Maybe she lost control for half a second.
Maybe the pleasure was too big to hold behind the wall.
I don’t fucking know. But I felt it, Aiden.
I felt her come, and it fucked me up so bad I had to walk the grounds until four in the morning just to remember how to breathe again. ”
My hand tightened around the bottle until the glass groaned. “Say that again.”
“You heard me.”
“Say it again.”
“No.”
I shoved up off the sill and paced two steps away from him, then two steps back, because there was nowhere to go.
The tower was too small. The campus was too small.
The fucking ocean wasn’t big enough. My magic flared under my skin without my permission, gold light crackling along my knuckles, spitting where it hit the air.
“Who,” I said.
“Aiden.”
“Who, Draco.”
“I don’t know. I told you. I couldn’t get a read on her. I got the physical—just that, just the feeling—and then she slammed it shut again so hard I got a nosebleed.”
“A nosebleed.”
“Yeah.”
I laughed and I dragged a hand through my hair and yanked until my scalp stung because I needed the pain to stay on the ground.
“Maybe it was her,” I said. “Maybe she was by herself. Maybe she was—“ I couldn’t even finish the sentence because who the fuck was I kidding?
He shook his head. “No.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do.”
“How?”
He looked at me, and his face was the bleakest thing I’d ever seen. “Because for just a split second, in my head, I saw a pair of green eyes, and I knew it’d come from her. Then it was gone.”
I turned and drove my fist into the nearest flat surface and the stone split the skin across three of my knuckles and I felt the bone in my ring finger crunch.
I didn’t care. I hit it again. The gold magic in my palm flared so bright I saw white.
A piece of mortar cracked loose and skittered across the floor.
“Aiden…”
A third time. My blood was smeared on the wall now, dark crimson against the pale stone, my whole arm shaking, and Jupiter’s face was behind my eyes.
I hope you feel me under your skin—
“Aiden. Stop.”
Draco’s hand closed around my wrist. His grip was weak compared to what it should have been, but I let him pull my arm down because I couldn’t do this again, couldn’t have another bone snap and another night in the infirmary and another round of Percy staring at me across the common room like I was something he’d scraped off his damn boot.
I sagged against the wall. My forehead pressed into the cold stone. I was breathing like I’d run up the side of the tower instead of climbed it.
“Which one? Which one of them?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t fucking tell me you don’t know, Draco—“
“I don’t know.” He let go of my wrist and sank back onto the sill. He looked like he might fall out the window. “But it wasn’t a stranger. Whoever it was, she knew him. She wanted him.”
Stardust.
I saw them all over again like I was watching a film.
Lucas Bennett with his hand on the small of her back.
Rowan Nightingale leaning down to put his mouth against her ear on the dance floor, close enough that I’d felt the heat of her blush through the bond.
Phoenix, the big one, watching her from across the ballroom with an expression I hadn’t been able to read at the time but could read now, oh, I could read it now.
Any of them. All of them. One of them.
A member of a rival shield with his hands on my axis. On our axis. Touching her somewhere in the dark.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“Aiden.”
“Whoever he is. I don’t care which one. I’m going to pull his fucking spine out of his body.”
“You’re not going anywhere or doing anything.”
“The fuck I’m not.”
“Aiden, we aren’t allowed within five hundred miles of Imperium anymore.
The Assembly pulled us home with a fucking leash.
If you get on a plane tonight, you lose your designation, your rank, your family name, your funding, and what’s left of any chance we have of ever getting her to look at us again. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you.”
“Do you?”
“I said I hear you.”
He exhaled, then picked up his beer and drank half of it in one go, and when he lowered the bottle his hand was trembling so badly the glass chattered against the stone.
“It was one of them,” I said. “I know it was.”
“I know.”
“We did this.” I pressed the back of my head against the stone and closed my eyes. The tower.
“I know.”