Seduction (Curse of the Gods #3)

I forced myself onto my tiptoes, a brief flash of warmth brushing through me. Will. He had used my nickname.

I wriggled closer to him, desperate to get my point across. “If I lose you,” I started on a whisper, “any of you five, I won’t survive. My mother …” My voice broke, but I recovered. “My mother is killing me, but I’ll learn to live with it. I can’t lose you guys as well. I can’t lose anyone else.”

He dropped his arms lower before lifting me up, so that he could capture my lips. We were both a little out of control, and the kiss was hard and biting. His power licked across my skin, down my arms and across my waist where he was gripping me. The pain-pleasure thing was usually really enjoyable, but right now I had too much pain inside of me already.

I wrenched my mouth back, a salty taste on my lips as I stared up into his shadowed face. “Pain … I need less pain right now,” I tried to explain, and Coen seemed to understand. He dropped me gently to the floor, before pressing a more gentle kiss to my forehead.

“I’ll get one of the others,” he said, stepping back. I opened my mouth to protest, but he cut me off. “I can’t control my Pain around you tonight, but you shouldn’t be alone. Tonight, you need one of my brothers.”

He didn’t sound upset—which was a huge relief—but I knew that Coen was great at concealing his thoughts. Before I could double-check, though, he was gone, striding back toward the cave.

The agony was building inside of me again, now that I was back on my own, so I started walking. I headed toward the sound of water that I could hear through the trees. I expected Coen to send out Siret or Aros, since they were the happiest of the five brothers, and Aros especially had a power more suited to easing pain. What I didn’t expect was to see the same volatile duo that had been nominated to babysit me the night before. Rome and Yael appeared on either side of me as I walked, their profiles only just visible in my peripheral vision. They didn’t say anything, but kept pace quietly, until we hit the bank of the river that I had been walking toward. It was much bigger than I had expected, and the sound almost roared in my ears, a mist floating up toward my face.

“There must be a waterfall nearby,” Yael commented quietly.

It was the first thing that any of us had said, and the sudden sound of his voice shocked me a little bit. I stared toward the inky spill of water churning a short distance below me, and started to cry. It was gentle at first, but soon began to evolve into heaving sobs that crumbled me into a ball on the damp grass. Arms wrapped around me, holding me together as I lost myself to the grief, pouring it all out into the night until my tears ran dry and there was nothing left to give. I pushed myself away from the tangled embrace that I had ended up in—not because I didn’t want to be close to them, but because my skin was flushed, my face and neck were uncomfortably soaked in tears, and my hair was matted to the damp skin. Suddenly, I wanted nothing more than to tear the clothes from my body and submerge myself in the cool, churning water before me.

“Do you guys know how to swim?” I asked, taking another step closer to the water and feeling the bank give way a little beneath my feet.

“I don’t see how that question is relevant when we all know that you definitely can’t swim, which would mean that we’re definitely not going swimming right now,” Yael answered cautiously.

I almost smiled at the hint of trepidation riding his tone. My hands were already playing with the hem of my shirt, so it was barely even a conscious decision when I started to lift it. It was halfway up my torso when Rome spoke.

“It might be dark out here, Will, but we can still tell the difference between a black shirt and a whole lot of bare skin.”

“Oh good,” I answered, quickly pulling the shirt all the way off, and then slipping my fingers into the waist of the kickass fighting pants that Siret had made for me. “If you can see me, you can stop me from drowning.”

“Not going swimming.” Yael sounded disgruntled—as though he already knew that he had lost this particular fight.

“Want me to start crying again?” I asked.

He released a heavy breath, and I almost started to feel bad for him, until the breath turned into a curse as I slipped the pants the rest of the way down my legs and stepped out of both my pants and my boots.

“Maybe we should just let her get naked,” Rome said quietly. “It seems to make her feel better.”

Maybe he was right; maybe taking my clothes off did give me some weird sense of freedom. Maybe it was all a by-product of living a smothered, rule-bound existence, or maybe it was just my way of preparing for the inevitable naked accidents that came about as a result of my clumsiness.

“Don’t even pretend you’re doing it for her,” Yael snorted.

I ignored them both, stripping my underwear off and stepping away from the discarded items. I crouched down a little, trying to get closer to the water, but the dirt along the side of the bank wasn’t so much dirt as it was mud, and I didn’t so much walk down the short incline to the water as fall directly on my ass and slide down the short incline to the water.

“Now we actually have to go swimming,” I announced, as Rome and Yael cleared the slope-of-death and landed beside me in what I assumed would have been a lithe and graceful way, if I had been able to see it.

“Are you okay, Rocks?”

I wasn’t even sure which one of them had asked. It was too dark for me to see much of anything clearly, which was probably why neither of them had been able to catch me—the way they usually would have—before I went down.

“I’m fine,” I huffed out, as hands plucked me up and held me out so that I was dangling somewhat. They turned with me so that I ended up further out into the water, but facing back toward the bank. “I just have mud in places that mud should never be,” I admitted, as the hands carefully set me down again.

My feet were lowered into water this time, instead of mud. It was something they appreciated.

Yael chuckled, and judging by the proximity of the sound, he was the one to have picked me up. “We can fix that. Can you stand right here without falling over, drowning, stabbing someone or setting the forest on fire?”

“Not going to make any promises.” I sniffed.

I could hear Rome’s low laugh, then, and I turned to the side to try and make him out. It was dark, but he had been right about what he said before: it wasn’t too dark to be able to tell the difference between our arena clothing and the sudden expanse of bared skin as he swept his shirt off. I swallowed as I stared at what I could make out of the muscles lining his torso, and then I had to quickly blink and look away as he pushed his pants off and threw them toward the bank with his shirt and boots. Yael had taken a step back from me, and was pulling his clothes off, too … and now I was starting to realise why they overreacted every time I got naked.

It was … a lot to take in.