He turns back to me, half his face in shadow. The other half is bronzed, battered, and beautiful. “And you were getting far too pretty and grown up to stay in my care.”
His voice gives nothing away. Neither does his expression, but my heart starts galloping like someone just hit it with a whip. When I begged him to run away with me, did he want to?
“From birth, you were spoken for,” he adds quietly, as if reading my thoughts. “As am I.”
I swallow. Ares and Aphrodite. Thanos is Ares. If the legends are true, Aphrodite is the only one of the Gods who can stand him. I don’t know why. He’s powerful, protective, and discriminately violent. In my eyes, perfect.
I glance at Griffin. The man I married. The father of my child. From birth, you were spoken for.
Griffin has always felt so right. I love him. I had no hope of resisting him, even though I tried. He’s always saying I was made for him, meant for him, but from the shocked and almost stricken look on his face, I think he’s more focused on my obvious adoration of the God of War and on my running into another male’s arms than on the fact that he was right about us all along.
I step back from Ares. Whatever romantic feelings I had for him are long gone, leaving only the reality that for the first fifteen years of my life, he saved me every time I truly needed it. He also let me get hurt. A lot.
A sliver of pain pricks my heart. And he let me walk off, alone and utterly devastated by my sister’s death, without seeming to care what happened next.
Ares looks at me sharply, his wide brow furrowing.
My nostrils flare. Is he reading my thoughts?
“How are you feeling now?” Selena’s voice is back to being like a mist-cloaked stream on a spring morning—slightly lilting, cool, mysterious. It soothes me.
I glance at my belly, as if the still-flat surface should reveal something of note. “Fine. I guess she’s over her outburst. Or sleeping.”
“Good.” Selena very pointedly inserts herself between Ares and me.
Does she think Thanos would hurt me?
The God’s tawny eyebrows slam down. The same glinting, bluish-green eyes I remember from my childhood flare with anger, but now, tiny bursts of light skip along their power-bright surfaces. “Lightning bolts on Olympus, woman! What do you think I’m going to do to her?” Ares growls.
Selena shrugs, looking him up and down with visible distaste. “Squash her? You’re not exactly delicate.”
“She used to fit in the palm of my hand. I bounced her on my knee and tickled her. If I didn’t crush her then, there’s no chance of my doing it now.”
So that just exponentially increased the weird factor of my one-time crush. In my defense, it didn’t develop until later, along with breasts and hips.
I glance at Griffin again. His jaw is bulging so much that it looks like he’s trying to break his own teeth, but I appreciate his silence. Maybe he’s still absorbing all this. Maybe he’s overwhelmed. I know I am, and I grew up with these two.
Ares roughly shoves Selena aside to get a clear view of me again. I’ve never seen anyone manhandle Selena, and it startles a gasp out of me. But with the ease of an Amazon warrior, she recovers her lost ground and then retaliates with a hard hit of her own. Ares lowers his head, getting ready to charge. Selena shifts her balance, magic swells in the air, biting at my skin, and I see a clash of epic proportions coming that could knock us all into the next realm.
“Stop!” I cry, jumping between them. These two are the closest I’ve ever had to a real mother and father, despite both my parents still being alive, and it’s surprisingly painful to see them at odds. It’s probably not a good idea to get between them when they’re angry and primed for a fight, but if there’s one person in this world I don’t think either of them will hurt—at least not on purpose—it’s me.
“What in the name of the Gods is going on?” Piers demands.
I snap my head around to glare at him. In fact, we all do.
“I thought he was the smart one.” Ares gestures impatiently toward Piers. His words probably make Griffin bristle even more. I don’t know. I don’t look.
Okay, I look. Griffin appears to be more intensely worried than angry. He’s frozen in place and keeping Kaia behind him, looking like he’s not sure what to do—something I know must not sit well with him.
“You. Summoned. Me.” Ares’s drawn-out, mocking tone calls into question Piers’s vaunted intelligence. “Now I have to take someone off to endless war. Very. Good. Plan.”
The God coats each word in layers of sarcasm, but I see no humor anywhere. In fact, I feel sick again.
Piers lifts his arm and points at Selena. “Take her!”
Selena makes an incredulous sound. Part laugh. Part snort. I hardly hear it because blood roars in my ears, and something inside of me snaps. My relief was so potent, so profound. But now that reassurance has been ripped away again, and it’s all Piers’s fault.
I lunge at Piers so fast he doesn’t see me coming. My fist hits his nose. While his head is still snapping back and crimson beads are flying through the air in a perfect, gory arc, I get behind him and smash one foot into the back of his knee, ignoring the flare of pain just hitting my knuckles now. The leg buckles, and he drops.
I have no idea how I moved so fast. It’s unnatural, like a blur. I don’t stop there. I slam the flat of my hand down between his shoulder blades and send him sprawling face-first into the dirt. I checked myself at the last second, a tiny shift. If I’d hit him any higher, I might have broken his neck. Part of me wonders why I didn’t.
Power springs from deep within, snapping and rolling through my veins. I feel it connecting every part of me. Blood. Flesh. Bone. My hair vibrates at the roots, rising on a tide of unchecked magic. Lightning webs down my arms. It bursts from my palms and chars the ground at my feet. The earsplitting crack of thunder seems to come straight from the hollow in my chest and shatter outward, annihilating what little restraint I have left.
Piers twists and looks up at me. His eyes widen. His jaw drops. I see him through a haze of magic—his shocked expression, his broken nose, the sudden fear in his eyes.
My ire grows, swelling along with my magic. He chose the wrong Magoi to cross. I am descended from Gods. I have ichor in my veins. Olympian power. He’s a threat to me, to my family, to all the people I love. I’m about to lose control all over him, and frankly, I don’t give a damn.
CHAPTER 4
I pounce on Piers, ready to do some serious damage, but Griffin grabs me around the waist and drags me back. I wrench in his hold. Violence pumps through my veins like liquid fire. Lightning coats my entire body, and the magic storm jumps to Griffin, crackling around us both until we’re lit up like a pair of blazing torches.
I snarl. Stupid, unpredictable magic. Now it works? Earlier would have been better!
“Hold, Cat.” Utterly immune to any magic that could harm him, Griffin is like a grounding rod, and all that deadly, flashing power crashes straight down. The ground under our feet begins to smoke and stink.