Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

“Doesn’t look like she’s here,” Rome surmised, his amusement growing with each word. “Where to next?”

My snort of annoyance acted as an answer, until my brain had a chance to catch up. “If you’re not going to be helpful in this situation, maybe you could … like, give me a bit of space. Everyone is staring and you’re ruining my cover.”

The breath knocked out of me as he stilled and locked those unnatural eyes on me. His irises were even more gem-like than usual. They were almost glimmering, and it made me uneasy, for just a moment. I had never been able to afford rare things before. Or glittery things. Not that I was considering purchasing Rome’s eyes … because that would require some kind of underground, organ-harvesting group of eye-collectors and I wasn’t sure I could handle any more secret groups or secret meetings after the dweller uprising.

“That’s the only reason you wouldn’t want my eyes harvested?” Rome grunted, a little disbelieving.

I shrugged. “Like I said: they’re staring. Maybe if you were dissembled into little packages or something, they wouldn’t be staring and I’d be able to carry out a full sleuth mission uninterrupted.”

“The other students aren’t staring at me, Willa.” The blunt words were just so Rome.

He never wasted his breath, and he didn’t particularly like to chase me down the tangents I often entertained. For a long time, I had considered myself a burden to him and his brothers, but we’d reached a turning point recently, after he declared that he wanted to keep the soul-link. I was pretty sure that we were friends now.

Large hands wrapped around me as he pulled me close to his chest. “What I actually said was that you are ours. I’ve claimed ownership of you, Willa Knight.”

I wanted to shove against him. Maybe kick him in the shins … but I knew that either option would be both futile and painful. Instead, I started calling him every curse I could think of, which had his huge chest shaking with laughter in no time.

Far more gently than I would have expected, he pushed me back to arm’s length. “We’re yours also, you know that. This isn’t a one-way thing.”

Oh. My. Gods. He had never said anything like that before. That was almost … sweet.

I let out a shriek as he tossed me over his shoulder and took off. “Don’t get used to it. I have a limited supply of that, and I just used up all of it to get you to stop looking at me like you want to stick a fork in my eye.”

“Put me down, you giant pain in my ass!”

So much for stealth-mode. My shrieking alone was enough to draw the eye of every single dweller in the kitchen area we had just entered. Rome ducked his head so that both of us weren’t clobbered by the large rack of cast iron pans hanging from the ceiling, before he continued to deftly manoeuvre through the room. We broke out into a garden outside, and passed through it, into another one.

“I know where your dweller-Emmy is.” His words penetrated through my annoyance, and mild panic.

“It’s Emmanuelle now,” I said, all snooty like.

“I don’t care,” he replied smoothly. Which didn’t surprise me at all.

The Abcurses weren’t big on giving a crap about dwellers or sols. Which made sense, since they were gods.

Without my link to them, I would die. If I died, I would maybe become a Beta god of Chaos, which would give the current main god of Chaos a lot of power—power that he would most likely use to take over Topia, the world of the gods; and Minatsol, the land of mortals.

“It’d just be better all-round if I didn’t die.” I must have muttered the last part out loud without realising it, because Rome ground to a halt and lowered me down to my feet.

“No dying,” he growled.

I was about to quip something back at him, but it died off when I finally noticed where we were.

“This is where Emmanuelle is?” I took a step closer, the freaky eyes of the god-statues most definitely following me.

Rome shrugged, before he pointed across to a sol hurrying toward the Sacred Sands arena. “I’m sure enough that I would bet that guy’s life on it.”

I followed the sol for a beat, before turning back to Rome. “So you have no idea, and you aren’t sure at all.”

He tilted his head to the side and hit me with that smile again. The one which should have been banned anywhere near a Chaos sol, or Chaos dweller … or whatever I was now. The point was, if he didn’t stop looking at me like that, Chaos was going to start happening. That was the only explanation for the tight pressure suddenly assaulting my chest.

Just when I was sure I couldn’t take another moment of it, Rome gently shoved me along the path, and we were walking beneath the statues of the gods outside the temple. Just like the last time, I could feel prickling across the back of my neck, and I had the same sensation of being watched. One of the statues was … paying attention. My first guess would have been Rau, the Chaos god, but he wasn’t the only god who was now paying attention. It could have been Abil, the Trickery god—and the father to my Abcurses—or even Staviti. Sure, Staviti was the great Creator and probably had a really busy life making new flowers and other things, but for some reason I felt like he might have been very interested in all of this new stuff going on between both of the worlds.

Cyrus. His name brushed across my mind, and with a heavy shove, I locked it back down again. The Neutral God … was an enigma, and I didn’t have time for one of those.

Rome led me along the same path we had taken to the secret dweller meeting last time, and we were both silent as we descended the stairs. This time I managed to stay on my feet, which was a bonus. Low voices filtered through to me the moment I landed on the lower level, stepping out into the darkness.

“How did you know she was here?” I murmured, knowing his god-hearing would pick it up.

His voice was as low as mine, his breath brushing across my cheek as he leaned down. “We’ve been keeping an eye on her for you, she’s been seen around the temple a few times.”

My heart warmed at those words, because I knew how much they would have hated ‘lowering’ themselves to spying on a dweller.

He then straightened, and his hand wrapped around mine, lacing our fingers together as he started leading me. Ever since I had been hit with the curse from Rau, my senses had become heightened, and when Aros and Coen had stirred the Chaos into exploding out of me, my senses had improved even more. This meant that I could see where we were going just fine, but there was really no need to tell Rome that. Most probably he held my hand so that he wouldn’t trip and fall over. I was the one doing the guiding, so I needed to keep holding his hand just in case he had any accidents.