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CHAPTER TWELVE

They didn’t return that night. By the next afternoon, I was in a panic. Nikolai thought I was overreacting. He said he’d have felt it through the pack bond if anything bad had happened, especially to Tennyson, since he was the alpha. But none of us had felt it when my father had killed the Ellis pack, so that didn’t reassure me.

“I mean, it’s a big ask,” he said. “She’s probably just hard to convince. Like, if someone asked me to melt myself into my evil twin, I’d need some pretty sweet compensation.”

I glared at him. “ I ’m not the evil twin. She is.”

“Potato, tomato,” he said, with a shrug.

Where ARE you? I asked Tennyson for what felt like the thousandth time. I knew he didn’t want Other-me to intercept anything he might say to me, but a quick “we’re all fine” couldn’t hurt, surely.

They finally got back just before midnight. I stormed out to meet them as soon as I heard the helicopter ready to give them a piece of my mind, but they both looked so pale and exhausted that I couldn’t be mad at them. I didn’t question them until they were safe inside with a hot cup of tea.

“We have her,” Tennyson said, finally.

I stared at him, waiting for more. He sipped his tea. I glanced at Althea. She sipped her tea. Were they actually trying to drive me crazy?

“It didn’t go well,” Althea said finally.

They exchanged a look.

“Nuh-uh,” I said. “I don’t want the edited version, tell me everything.”

Tennyson sighed and set his teacup back in the saucer. “She didn’t come to the meeting point. We had to go get her.”

His words took a moment to sink in. “You went to my father’s compound? How did you know where it was?”

All sorts of theories were flying around in my brain. Spies? Double agents? But if we had someone on the inside, we’d have known that the bugs were found before Althea had her vision. We’d have known a bunch of stuff.

In the end, it was the guilty look on Tennyson’s face that made me guess the answer.

“She spoke to you, through the bond,” I said. The thought of it was like a gut punch. It was almost worse than if he’d been cheating with her. Our bond was so special, so intimate . The idea that he’d shared that with her – not only shared it but kept it from me, it was worse than anything else I could imagine.

“I don’t know how she did it,” he said, picking his tea back up and staring into the cup. “It was after the third or fourth time I had sent her the address. She said just shut up, already . I knew immediately it wasn’t you; it felt completely different.

“I wasn’t sure what else to do, so I stuck to the plan and continued to send her the address every hour. After a few more times, she said she couldn’t leave the compound to meet us, then sent me some mental images of where she was and a rough map of her location.”

He took a sip of his tea and began to speak again, but I held up my hand.

“I just need a minute,” I said.

I took some deep breaths. This was bigger than just Tennyson and me. Everything between us, that had to take a backseat. I needed to know what had happened so that we could plan our next move. I couldn’t let my feelings get in the way.

“So, you kept sending her the location every hour, was that just for my benefit? So that I wouldn’t clue in that you were communicating with her and mess up your plans?”

Okay, I couldn’t let my feelings get in the way after this .

“Lucy, it wasn’t like that,” Althea said gently.

“You were in on it?” I started to put things together. “That was why you talked me out of going? Because you knew they were secretly talking and had changed the plan to a raid on my father’s compound ?”

“Yes,” she said calmly. “It was my idea to keep it from you. Don’t blame Tennyson. I thought it was too dangerous for the two of you to get so close to your father, especially when he had the home ground advantage. I knew that if you knew what we planned, you’d insist on coming. And I know that because he’s your father, you feel that he’s your mess to clean up, but this is bigger than just the two of you, bigger than your family. You have your part to play in this, and it’s too important to risk you on something that someone – anyone – else could do. It was the safest option, and I stand by it.”

“Right,” I said. There was a lot to unpack there, and I wasn’t in the right headspace to do it. We were getting off track. “Sorry, so you were saying, you had the location of the compound.”

Tennyson nodded. “She continued to feed me information, which helped us to get into the compound virtually undetected.”

I raised my eyebrows at the “virtually”.

“We only took a small team, less than we’d planned for the initial meeting point. Just Althea and I and four others. We got in, waited for the guards’ shift to change so we could steal some uniforms, which let us have access to most of the compound. It was all going well until…”

“Until you found her and realized she was using you for her own ends and had no intention of doing what you wanted,” I finished. That was what I would’ve done in her situation. Maybe if I’d known their plan, I could’ve told them that.

“We knew that was a possibility,” said Althea. “You don’t need to look so smug.”

“At any rate, she gave us the slip, and without her to navigate, we soon became lost in the labyrinth of passageways. Her escape tripped the alarm, which led to our discovery.”

“Was anyone hurt?” I asked. “Any of our people, I mean.”

They both shook their heads.

“Everyone is fine. We lost a couple of people for a few hours, but they made it out safely.”

“And Other-me, she got away from my father?”

“We caught up with her not far from the compound. She’d tried to steal one of our vehicles, but she can’t actually drive, so she ran it into a tree. After that, it was easy enough to get her back to the manor.”

“Where she’s under the heaviest guard imaginable,” Tennyson added.

I doubted that meant much. If she wanted to get away, I was sure she could.

“You told her about the ritual?” I directed my question toward Althea. I was angry with them both, but the betrayal from Tennyson felt so much more personal. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to look at him ever again.

“She wasn’t interested,” said Tennyson.

“She laughed in our faces,” Althea added.

“You explained what would happen if we don’t do it?”

“Of course,” said Althea. “But she did make us a counter-offer. Two options, actually. We can give her the lodestone, and she goes back to her own world before our world has a chance to fracture, or you could merge with her , making her the primary consciousness.”

I thought about it for a moment. If she went back to her own world, that would stop Althea’s vision from happening, so our world would be safe. I’d be powerless, and it would be much more difficult to stop my father, but not impossible. Probably.

But then, we’d leave that other world vulnerable to an even more powerful Other-me. The people we’d left behind there didn’t deserve that. Mrs Spencer, everyone else’s counterparts. I thought about how Other-Tennyson had hugged me as I’d been leaving, speaking for the first time just to thank me.

No, I couldn’t do that to them.

The other option was no better. I didn’t want to be stuck as an idea in the back of her mind, or whatever form I’d take after the merge. And putting my own feelings aside, it was still the same problem, but doubled. If I merged with her, she’d have the same power – maybe even more – and access to both worlds.

“You’re not actually thinking about this, are you?” Tennyson asked.

It was so tempting to make a snappish reply. Something about how he should like it if he had both of us in the same body, but I just didn’t have the energy for it. Fighting with Tennyson was too much of a distraction. This type of thing was the reason we’d decided to cool it in the first place.

And deep down, I understood the reasoning behind what he’d done. Deep, deep down. Althea had been right. I’d have acted exactly how she’d said, for those exact reasons. It didn’t hurt any less, the idea of Other-me using the soul bond with Tennyson, but I could see why they’d kept the plan change from me, at the very least.

“I need to at least consider it,” I said. “But I can’t see how her options would be any better than doing nothing.” I glanced at Althea. “What do you think? Do you think either of these options would end any better than your vision?”

She shook her head. “Honestly, it seems like it would probably go the same way, only with her instead of your father.”

I sighed. “You know I need to talk to her.”

“It might be best to do it over Zoom,” said Althea. “We don’t know how badly the feedback will be.”

That made sense. Plus, I wasn’t sure I could stop myself from punching Other-me in the face if I saw her in person.