Darling glanced at her. “You want to pile on here with your opinion against me, too?”

Zarya shook her head. “Not at all. I totally get why you did it. I just wish I’d punched a couple of them for what they said about you. It seriously pains me that I didn’t. Can I please go back and break on them?” She started back for the building.

Smiling, Darling caught her against him and turned her around to keep her moving forward.

Damn him. It wasn’t fair that he got to pound on them when she was the one who really wanted a piece of their hides.

“We all get why he did it,” Syn said. “There’s not a one of us who wouldn’t have done it had it been our better half they insulted. Honestly, I’m only surprised you kept him from killing them.”

Nykyrian put his arm around Kiara. “Me, too.”

“But,” Ryn inserted, “it doesn’t change the fact that it was a political blunder on an epically stupid scale.”

And by the time they made it back to the palace, the extent of that blunder was making itself known. The gerents had called a press conference the moment they’d left the CDS, and were using videoed outtakes of the fight to show Darling attacking Giran for what appeared to be no reason whatsoever.

Darling cringed every time Zarya pulled up a feed to view it. If I’m not deposed over this, I’m banning all mobiles from the meetings from here on out.

The commentator smirked at the camera. “As everyone can clearly see, the new governor is out of control. We have reports that he drove the League High Command out of the meeting and threatened to go to war with them, as well as his own gerents. Senator Giran has been released from the hospital. According to witnesses, he was blindsided by the governor for making a passing comment to a friend that had nothing to do with politics. The governor and his staff have refused to take any of our calls or to comment on the matter in any way…”

Zarya shut the newsfeed off. She couldn’t take any more of their one-sided slant. Dear gods, the journalists didn’t care at all about the truth. They only cared about persecuting an innocent man.

Darling lay on his bed with the heel of his hand pressed against his jerking eyes. Wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, he held a bloodied cloth in his other hand from the nosebleed that had finally slowed down.

She crossed the room to sit beside him on the bed. “I’m so sorry, Darling.”

He removed his hand from his head to pin her with a grimace. “Sorry for what?”

“Causing this awful mess. I should have stayed here and let you go alone.”

Darling hesitated at the catch in her voice. The last thing he wanted was for her to think that any part of this was her fault when it wasn’t.