“Gods, Skyla,” he said against her lips, “I love being inside of you. I don’t even care that you had to seduce me at the start to get us to this point.”
She gripped his face with both hands. “I didn’t seduce you, Orpheus. I didn’t have to. That connection you kept asking me about is real. All I did was fight it. Way longer than I should have. Believe me. I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.”
“Ah, gods, Siren.” His eyes darkened and he lowered his mouth and kissed her again, this time as if he couldn’t get enough. His thrusts picked up speed. She lifted her hips to meet him, wrapped her arms around his muscular shoulders, slick with sweat and flexing with his movements.
She knew his release was coming. She could feel it growing with every press and slide and groan and thrust and retreat. She lost herself in the feel of him—hard and hot and so very thick. And when he arched his back and his entire body quivered over hers—inside hers—she let herself go.
For the first time ever, she let everything she’d worked for, every disappointment and heartache along the way, every long lonely moment in a life that never should have been, finally go. And as he collapsed against her, as his head slid into the crook between her neck and shoulder and his hot breath washed over her flesh to tighten her nipples all over again, she ran her fingers over the damp skin of his shoulders and told herself there was no going back. Not for the order. Not for Athena. Never again for Zeus.
Not even when the King of the Gods sent her sisters to kill her, which she knew he would undoubtedly do soon.
Chapter 25
That connection you kept asking me about is real.
Images swam behind Orpheus’s closed eyelids as he hovered on the edge of sleep. Images that blended with Skyla’s words and refused to let him rest. Her standing in the chaos of that concert the night he’d been looking for Maelea. Protecting Ghoul Girl with that magical bow and arrow when she thought he was there to harm the girl. The way she’d kissed him after she was pulled from that avalanche. Covered in sweat in the Underworld, comforting his brother. The last few hours alone in this bed, as she’d used her body and voice to enrapture as she had from the start.
His daemon was gone. He didn’t know how, but he couldn’t feel it anymore. Not even a rumble of awareness. Something in the back of his mind said its absence was somehow linked to Skyla, but he didn’t know how that was possible. All he knew was that for so long he’d lived by the push and pull of that daemon. To be free of it…it was like no other feeling in the world.
Save being inside Skyla.
That connection you kept asking me about is real.
Her image flickered again behind his eyelids. And though he knew he shouldn’t be this content when his brother lay floors below, haunted by horrors Orpheus didn’t want to imagine, he couldn’t stop feeling alive any more than he could stop the steady thump of his heart.
And yet…
Something niggled at the back of his mind. The images shifted like billowing smoke, taking shape in different forms. Skyla again, only dressed differently. Speaking…more formally. Telling him…Telling him what?
Just as the first time they were together in this room, a kaleidoscope of images, all centered on her, cycled through his mind. Only these were clearer. The sounds growing louder. Playing like scenes from a movie. Until the great climax. And the moment the curtain was parted and the wizard finally revealed.
He jerked out of bed, a reflex of muscle and mind and complete and utter shock, and hit the floor with a thud that echoed through his bones. But the physical pain was fleeting. The emotional pain, the lingering torment, the years of torture, consumed him from the inside out. And betrayal, like a hot, sharp knife, sliced through what he thought had been a heart.
Skyla peered over the side of the bed, her hair rumpled, her eyes sleepy, her lips still swollen from his mouth. “Are you okay? What happened?”
Orpheus breathed through his nostrils to remain calm. But inside a firestorm had erupted and the blaze was consuming him in a flurry of flames for which there was no relief.
“Orpheus?”
“You knew they were coming. You left me there to die.”
“What?”
The past, a past he hadn’t remembered until just now, zipped across his mind. And the why and how and that connection he’d been feeling finally made sense. “We argued and you left. And they came in minutes later. The Sirens. Your Sirens. The ones you sent.”
She eased up to sitting, tugged the sheet around her. A wary look passed over her features. Features that were still as beautiful as he remembered. Even now, over two thousand years later.
Two thousand years. Holy fuck.