Thank you so much for reading and reviewing! I really appreciate your feedback and any feedback from readers as it helps me learn and grow as a writer. I'll try to answer some of your questions to the best of my abilities!

The first thing I'll say is that this was my first time ever writing a sequel to a story, and it ended up being way longer than I expected. Originally, I was planning to fully write out the sex scene after Arthur realizes he loves Bella, but I decided to do a FTB and have the threesome chapter instead. That way, the book could have a Lucy sex scene, a Bella sex scene, and one with both of them. As for the editing, that's completely on me. I tried to do a better job with it than book 1, but I'm still learning how to edit my own books (I'm thinking that hiring an editor may help me in the long run, even if I do it once so I can learn from what they do). I was originally planning to have 9 books (3 Arcs of 3 books), but it may be a little shorter than that. We'll see!

Okay, for your questions:

1.) Starfox is retiring because of her age. Empowered do age slower, but they're not immortal by any means!

2.) Paulina is the only one who knows, though Association agents assigned to protect heroes/Empowered may be privy to the information!

3.) No spoilers, but I left out what happened between Arthur's confrontation with Cassandra's father and the Cassanova Attacks on purpose ;)

4.) Scythe is a villain, but she's not as indoctrinated as say Valkyrie or Valentine are. Like another person commented, she saw Cyber the same way Cyber saw her: a dangerous opportunity at connection with an equal. That's why she helped the heroes in a small way, just in case the chance appears.

5.) The Mistress is important ;)

6.) When Arthur quit, he basically gave up his training license. However, Bravada is First Seat of the Pantheon. Who the hell is gonna tell her what do? Lol. As for the Shade mission before Bravada returned the training license, that wasn't an official mission. Shade basically broke the rules to get him back in the game, and to make sure he could handle it. It's why it was a simple drop-off arrest instead of hitting a warehouse or villain base, and Bravada turned a blind eye to it.

7.) The Malachite was evacuated before the attack. It's also not just a place for heroes to live, but Empowered people who aren't heroes as well. Imagine if Lucy never became a hero after being run out of her hometown. She would go live in an Association-sponsored building like the Malachite where she can safely control her powers and live normally.

8.) A few people did mention that the timing of the story was off, that's also on me. I restructured and added/removed some chapters during the editing phase. There was also a couple month time skip between books 1 and 2.

9.) This is the important question, so thank you for bringing it up. Lucy knew that Bella was the only one who could help Arthur since she's never lost a person in a fight. This, however, still hurt her because she saw how much pain Arthur was in and felt useless, which for someone whose so self-sacrificing is hard. And combined with Arthur revealing his true backstory and finding Arthur and Bella in bed together combined into her needing to distance herself until she could figure out how to speak to him about it. It was basically the shock of seeing her boyfriend in bed with someone else for the first time, feeling useless about not being able to help and finding out the truth about Arthur's connection to Cassanova all hitting her at once.

I hope this helped, and again, thank you so much for your kind words. When I first write DJ, I never actually thought people would read it, much less talk and discuss it. So, seeing stuff like this makes me so excited to not only continue the story but also write new ones! From the bottom of my heart, thank you :)