Page 17 of Psycho Gods

The past was alive, and it reached for me.

The king had never revealed to the realm that the lost princes had been found, because you couldn’t lead a powerful realm if you refused to acknowledge that anyone else but your brother existed.

You couldn’t play the political game of survival if everyone else was already dead to you. So the lost princes had stayed lost; we’d been nothing more than rescued humans living in a foreign realm.

We’d liked it best that way.

But over time, the king had grown disappointed because he thought I’d grow out of my issues. He’d thought John would help me change into someone different.

My twin loved me the way I was.

As a result, when Lothaire returned years later to take us to Elite Academy, the king made a horrible decision: he blackmailed Lothaire with secret information in exchange for keeping our identity a secret. Worst of all, he convinced Lothaire to let only one of us attend Elite Academy at a time.

The king claimed it was because he needed our abilities to run the realm.

He lied; it was a desperate bid to fix our crippling dependency problem.

The king pulled us aside and promised we could be reunited if we could prove we’d both formed a relationship with someone else.

What proceeded were the worst years of my life training at Elite Academy.

They thought I was John, and I never bothered to correct them because they didn’t exist to me. Not in any way that mattered. I let my twin do the socializing for both of us; it wasn’t for me.

In the beginning of my time at Elite Academy, I was alone in a sea of faces.

Desolate.

Unmoored.

Until a blue-haired boy with haunted eyes and a mouth dripping in sarcasm draped his arm across my shoulders and called me John.

I tried to ignore Aran, but it was impossible.

For some confounding reason, I wanted to help the pretty boy floundering to stay alive in the dark sea. My heart pounded wildly in my chest as a pipe was pressed against my lips and a joke whispered in my ear.

Aran refused to leave my side.

And for the first time in my life, I latched onto someone that wasn’t John.

I saw someone else.

The twin that refused to interact with anyone besides his brother was cured.

Months later, the king wept with relief and rejoiced with his family when we asked for Aran’s hand in marriage. Everything he’d ever wanted had come to fruition.

But when all three of us had been reunited, I’d immediately realized the king’s plan hadn’t worked at all.

I was no longer codependent with one person.

I was codependent with two.

It was like the oracle had prophesied that fateful day in the cave.

Her eyes rolled back in her head, and she spread her arms wide, the prophecy exploding from her lips. “The master number surrounds the lost princes. The strongest of them all; two will become three. Multiples of three are golden, you see. The broken soul leads them down a twisted path of darkness, but they will remain the three of three. Eternally.”

I didn’t need to smoke the blessed fumes at Delphi to confirm that Aran was the third from the prophecy.

I knew it in my soul.

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