“You can’t do it,” he finished for her.
“No,” she whispered. “I don’t want anyone to die because of me. Casey, Callia, Zander…” She closed her eyes tight, opened them again. “I don’t want them to get hurt. And I don’t want anything bad to happen to the people of this realm or to the Misos, but I’m tired of doing the right thing for everyone else. I know it’s selfish, but all I can think about is what this will do to my family. To Elysia. To Demetrius. If we go through with this, Nick, it will kill Demetrius. Maybe not at first, but it will eat away at him until the man I fell in love with is gone. He already hates that he couldn’t save me from Hades’s contract on my life. He’ll blame himself that he couldn’t fix this too.”
“None of this is Demetrius’s fault.”
“It’s not yours either.”
No, it wasn’t. It was the gods’. And they were all nothing more than pawns in their fucking game.
He pushed from the chair, crossed to the couch, and sat next to her. Leaning forward, he reached for her hand, feeling how cold her skin was and the way her pulse jumped against his fingers.
Yes, she was growing weaker because of him. He knew that in his soul. And yes, he could tell that his touch had a positive effect on her. But he wasn’t convinced sex was the solution. There had to be another way. Something they’d all missed.
He cradled her palm against his and smoothed his fingers over the back of her hand, feeling her skin warm the longer he held her. And when he looked up into her chocolate eyes to ask if she felt it too, a jolt of familiarity shot through him. The same familiarity he’d felt when he’d been in Zagreus’s tunnels looking…into Cynna’s eyes.
“What is it?” Isadora’s brow dropped low. “Are you okay?”
He gave his head a swift shake, but the scars on his back were tingling again, and puzzle pieces were shifting around in his mind, trying to find a fit. “Yeah. I’m…I’m fine.”
She shot him a look that said she wasn’t quite sure she believed him, then sighed and looked down at their joined hands. “So what are we going to do?”
He really had no idea what they should do, but he knew exactly what he couldn’t do. “You know, something no one’s thought of is the fact those four Argonauts everyone’s basing this theory on were given their immortality. I was born with it, even if it’s taken this long to come out. That might not seem like a big difference, but in the eyes of the gods, it might be enough. No one truly knows if the same thing that happened to those Argonauts’ soul mates will happen to you.”
“I know. Theron, Zander, Demetrius… They’re all desperate, grasping for a solution.”
He knew that. Understood it. But he didn’t want to accidentally make things worse basing all this on a guess. He nodded toward their joined hands. “This helps, doesn’t it? My touch?”
“Yes.”
“Then we’ll continue to do this.”
She eyed him warily. “You’re going to sit here and hold my hand all day?”
“For several hours a day, if that’s what it takes. Whatever we can do to slow this thing down until we can come up with a different solution. Because there has to be one. I can’t come between you and Demetrius, Isadora. I might have tried once, but it was wrong of me. I know that now.”
Isadora stared at him for several long seconds, then quietly said, “You’re in love with her, aren’t you? The female you escaped with. Cynna.”
Nick’s heart picked up speed. And memories of Cynna bombarded him from every side. The way she’d tended his wound in Zagreus’s lair, the moment she’d freed him from his cell, the strength it had taken for her to put herself between him and his darkness at the colony, and, ultimately, the hurt in her eyes when she’d left him tonight.
He drew in a deep breath that did nothing to ease the growing ache in his chest. “Yeah, I am. Which is pretty freakin’ strange, because I’ve never been in love before.”
“It changes the way you see the world, doesn’t it?”
He looked into her eyes, for the first time understanding her. “It changes everything.”
“Then go to her.”
His brow dropped. “What?”