Total pages in book: 98
Estimated words: 92659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 92659 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 463(@200wpm)___ 371(@250wpm)___ 309(@300wpm)
I don’t have an answer by the time I reach the arches leading to the lower city. Which is a damn shame, because they’re not empty any longer. A familiar shape separates himself from the shadow of the one nearest me, arms crossed and blue eyes furious.
“Where the fuck were you?” Charon grits out.
Oh shit. I’m in trouble.
5
CHARON
I do not, as a general rule, lose my temper. A year ago, that might have been different, but I’ve seen too much shit since then to allow my emotions to get the best of me. That doesn’t stop my fear and anger from damn near swallowing me whole at the sight of Eurydice walking toward the lower city across the Cypress Bridge.
I fight to keep it under wraps, but it slips through my fingers like the fog that blankets the ground around us. She nearly misses a step when she notices me, but I can see the exact moment when she decides to power through this on bravado alone.
She lifts her chin in a move I’ve seen Persephone do a hundred times and marches right up to me. “What are you doing here?”
“No.”
That trips her up. She blinks those big eyes at me. “What do you mean ‘no’?”
“No, you don’t get to go on the offensive, when you’re clearly in the wrong.” Some of my anger seeps into my voice, and I can’t stop myself from continuing. “You know it’s dangerous to be out by yourself, let alone to be on this bridge. Over this bridge. You, of everyone, know it’s dangerous. Why the fuck are you out here without an escort?”
“Zeus is dead.”
“Zeus is alive and living in Dodona Tower.”
She thins her lips. “He’s not the same and you know it.”
Yeah, I guess I do. I’ll never be a fan of Zeus, regardless of who holds the title, but even I can’t deny that this one is miles better than the last. I won’t allow her to distract me with semantics though. “And you know damn well that he’s not even the biggest threat out there right now. Everyone is a threat.”
A year ago, she would have burst into tears at my harsh tone. Six months ago, she would have flinched and apologized immediately. Tonight, she doesn’t do either. She steps closer and pokes me in the chest. “I am not a child.”
“You keep saying that, and then you act like a foolish teenager.”
She pokes me again. “No, fuck that. I will suffer the overprotectiveness from my family and Hades. Not from you. You took me to Minos’s party. You trusted me to hold my own there.”
Yeah, I did, and I regret the fuck out of it. I thought it was a safe enough adventure for her to experience, to tag along on my fact-finding mission. Her delight at accepting the invitation was worth the ass reaming I got from Hades and Persephone over it. Or so I thought.
Then people ended up in the hospital, and Hephaestus ended up dead.
“I regret that.”
Her shoulders fall a half inch and then hike back up. “No. You don’t get to do that. You are the only person who’s looked at me and seen someone beyond a victim in waiting. You don’t get to take that back. It’s cruel.”
She’s right, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s trying to distract me. I hate that it’s working. The last thing I want is to hurt this woman. I’ve been twisting myself up in knots to ensure I don’t make her uncomfortable. So, yeah, I might regret the danger she was in at the house party, but I don’t regret how she came alive there in a way I’d never seen.
None of that matters in this moment though. Not when she’s being reckless and trying to cover it up. “Where were you?”
“Where were you?” She’s still in my space, her spiced perfume taunting me as much as the warmth coming off her body. “I texted you earlier and you didn’t answer.”
Guilt flares, threatening to hijack my anger. Going behind her back to talk to her ex without her explicitly asking me to was a shitty move, even if I did it with the best of intentions. Mostly. There may have been part of me that wanted to get a look at the man, to search for a hint of what it is about him that holds Eurydice captive, even a year and a fucked-up betrayal later.
He’s attractive enough, even more attractive than his brother Apollo. Their father is Swedish and their mother is Korean, and while they both have her coloring, Orpheus favors her more clearly than Apollo. He’s almost pretty, but the year of suffering has sharpened that beauty into something else entirely. His black hair was always longish, but now it reaches his shoulders in a careless fall of silk. The biggest change is in his dark eyes. He still has enough charisma that I was caught off guard, but the loss there called to something I refuse to look too deeply at.