“I’m not in love with them.”
Shit. I nearly missed the beam, caught myself with the claws on my right foot as my right hand missed the handhold entirely.
Darius jumped up to the beam I had just abandoned.
Love? He loves me? After one day? And he tells me now? Not when he was buried inside me. Not when I was gasping and clawing at him, screaming his name. Now?
And love? Like real, honest-to-goodness love? How was that possible? My parents had known me their entire lives and barely remembered to send me a card at Christmas.
Leaping again, I overshot the mark and grappled for a hold on the beam above where I’d been aiming. Thank goodness the Titan’s arms were a lot stronger than mine. I pulled myself up and took a couple of slow, deep breaths. I could do this. I was not rattled and on edge simply because the sexiest man I’d ever met had treated me like a helpless child one moment, then told me he was in love with me the next.
Was this tightness in my chest anger? Anxiety? Frustration? Disbelief? Pain? I didn’t know, and trying to figure it out was making me shaky and distracted. I wanted Darius to love me, badly. I simply couldn’t accept the fact that the emotion came so easily to him.
Not even my own mother loved me. I was tolerated. A tool to make her look like a good parent. Sent to the best schools, the best universities. The best clubs. The best of everything. And not once had she attended a recital or award ceremony. No matter how hard I tried, she never cared. I finally figured out the problem; I was the textbook definition of unlovable.
Athena’s feet safely planted on the beam, I looked down. And down. I could see nothing in the darkness, not even Bantia’s and Ulixes’s lights. I felt like I was standing over an abyss that wanted to swallow me whole.
“Lily? Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. Try to keep up.”
Darius chuckled and I felt the tightness around my heart loosen a little. “Vega help us, you sound like Bantia already.”
The idea of being as strong, confident, and skilled as Bantia seemed to be, pleased me.
Moving quickly, I reached the top level of the structure, Darius arriving less than a minute behind me.
“What now?” I asked, looking around at…nothing. Stone. Beams. There was nothing here that looked like any kind of control, wiring or power source. Just rocks and darkness.
Darius stood next to me in his Titan, and we used our combined light to widen the viewable area. Still, I saw nothing.
“Team One? You see anything? We are at the top, and there is nothing here.”
“Stand by.” Ulixes voice sounded gruff and like he was nearly out of breath.
A loud boom sounded from below, and the structure we were standing on vibrated under our feet, then shook, shifting enough that I had to use my Titan claws to hold my position.
“We’re in,” Bantia said. Then I heard nothing but static. Both Ulixes’s and Bantia’s locator beacons disappeared from my sensors.
“Athena? Where is Team One?”
“Unknown. We lost the signal when they entered the compound.”
“Shit.” I glanced down. Way down. “Should we go after them?”
Darius was silent for a few seconds. The beams shifted beneath us again. “We need to get out of here. The whole thing is going to collapse.”
As if the beams were listening to him, a loud series of popping noises sounded from below.
Darius turned to the outer wall and fired a grenade that looked like a cannonball with claws. The sharp arms penetrated the wall several meters below us and stuck like Velcro.
“Take cover!” Darius yelled at me. I turned away from the blast, but there really wasn’t anywhere to go.
Darius’s Titan draped itself over my Titan’s back as the explosion ripped through the enclosed space. “Shielding up, Lily. Full body armor. Now.”
I wasn’t about to argue. Apparently Athena’s artificial intelligence had also decided that was the best course of action, because my canopy was now fully enclosed with Titan armor once more and I was blind except for my sensors.
The beams shuddered, collapsed about a meter, and clumped to a stop at an odd angle. The structure was not going to be standing for long.