by Jenna Black
“Sorry to keep you waiting,” Anderson said, making no attempt to sound like he meant it. “The weather delayed us.”
Cyrus’s smile broadened. “No worries. Mark and I managed to keep ourselves entertained while we waited.” He reached out to pat Mark’s shoulder, and I doubted it was an accident that his hand landed right near the hickey. “You remember Mark, don’t you?”
Anderson nodded, but Blake shook his head.
“I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said. He sounded ruefully amused. Either he was a good actor, or he wasn’t even a smidge jealous. I wondered if he’d noticed that he and Mark resembled one another. He didn’t try to shake Mark’s hand, and Mark didn’t offer.
“Can I get anyone a drink?” Cyrus asked, playing the gracious host.
“Don’t be more of an ass about this than you have to be,” Blake said. “We’re not here to make friendly.”
Cyrus sighed dramatically. “When did you become so serious all the time?”
Blake stiffened, and his eyes narrowed. “When you—”
“Blake,” Anderson said mildly, but that one word was enough to shut Blake up.
Score one for Team Evil. They’d managed to provoke us, and they hadn’t even had to work at it very hard. Blake shut up as ordered.
“Will you sit down, at least?” Cyrus asked. “Or would that be too civilized?”
“We’re here because one of your Olympians attacked one of my people,” Anderson countered. “I’m not feeling terribly civilized.”
Interesting how Emma had suddenly been transformed from Anderson’s ex-wife into “one of your Olympians.” I wondered if this meant Anderson was officially over her.
Cyrus sighed again. “Understandable, I suppose. Why don’t you tell me what happened.”
“I already told you on the phone,” Anderson snapped. He’d been willing to put up with Cyrus’s feigned friendliness the last time we’d talked, but apparently that was not the case today.
“So you did, but I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Nikki.” He turned an unusually grave look toward me. “I’d like to hear it in your own words.”
Anderson raised no objection. I didn’t particularly want to talk about my abduction to anyone, much less Cyrus and his pet. I didn’t want to relive the memory, and I was also afraid I’d let too much emotion show. Showing Olympians signs of weakness was a recipe for disaster. Not to mention that I didn’t like the feeling that I was tattling, and that I was afraid the consequences would be dire. However, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of choice.
I tried to remain as impassive as possible as I recounted the events of the day before. It’s hard to keep the emotion out of your voice when you’re talking about your own death, and especially about a deranged woman’s plan to bury you alive and leave you to suffer eternal torment. I could hear the occasional quaver in my voice, and there was nothing I could do to control it.
Cyrus made sympathetic faces while I spoke, but I couldn’t help noticing that Mark seemed to be enjoying the story. There was an eager glint in his eye, and he even licked his lips like a dog looking forward to its meal. I decided Cyrus had creepy taste in men.
There was a long silence after I finished my story. I took a moment to glare at Mark while Cyrus frowned thoughtfully.
“I knew she was unstable when I invited her to join us,” Cyrus finally said. “I could hardly blame her after what my father did to her. I thought that perhaps her moods would even out over time.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Anderson agreed grimly. “But her actions yesterday tell me she has been irrevocably altered. The Emma I knew died years ago when your father raped her and drowned her in that pond.”
Anderson was keeping control of himself, but there was no missing the fury behind his words, and something about the look in his eyes raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Whatever it was, Cyrus saw it, too, and his face lost just a little of its color. If he knew what Anderson really was, he’d be curled up in the fetal position.
“I am not my father,” Cyrus reminded Anderson. “And you won’t have to go medieval on my ass to get me to honor the treaty, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He looked over his shoulder at Mark. “Go fetch our other guest, will you?”
There was a visible flare of excitement in Mark’s eyes as he nodded and then hurried from the room. It occurred to me that he might have been present for reasons other than to try to make Blake jealous. Like maybe Cyrus planned to give him Emma’s immortality. The fact that Emma was already a “guest” in Cyrus’s house did not bode well for her.
Anderson and Cyrus stared at each other, and the tension in the room was so thick it was hard to breathe. I wanted to say something in protest of what I feared would happen, but the atmosphere was so oppressive I couldn’t find the courage to speak.
Moments later, we all heard Emma’s voice raised in annoyance. “I’m getting really tired of being jerked around!” she complained, presumably at Mark. “I could have—”
Both her voice and her footsteps faltered when she stepped through the library door and saw our little gathering. Her eyes darted from me, to Anderson, to Cyrus, and she seemed to shrink in on herself. There was something naturally fragile looking about her, though perhaps that was just because I knew how badly she had suffered when she’d been Konstantin’s prisoner. No matter what she’d done—or tried to do—it was hard for me to forget that she’d been a victim.
And maybe, in a way, she still was. I didn’t like it when Anderson made excuses for her, and I didn’t think she’d ever been a truly nice person. But today, when she hadn’t been expecting to see Anderson and me and therefore had obviously not bothered to dress to impress, or even put on makeup, I could see more plainly than ever that she was still suffering. Even if she brought some of that suffering on herself. Her face was gaunt, and her clothes hung loosely on her thin frame. Her eyes were red around the edges, as if she’d been crying when Mark had come to get her. I remembered Cyrus telling me she had nightmares every night. Yesterday, I had almost suffered a fate similar to hers, and I wondered if I’d have all my marbles if someone had dug me up ten years from now.
Emma drew herself up and raised her chin in a semblance of dignity, but it wasn’t very convincing. She looked tired and scared, and I wished like hell she’d come out of that pond with her mind intact. I suspect her marriage to Anderson would have ended anyway, and it probably wouldn’t have been a nice breakup—if there is such a thing—but she might have had a chance at a decent life. But as it was, there was no room in her heart for anything but bitterness, jealousy, resentment, and fear.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Please do come in, my dear,” Cyrus said, gesturing her forward. “We have something very important to discuss.” He was smiling his usual pleasant smile, but his voice came out uncharacteristically flat.
I glanced at Anderson, wondering how he was taking all this. He wasn’t looking at Emma like the rest of us were, was instead staring straight ahead. His face was a stony mask, and I didn’t know what emotions that mask hid.
Emma obviously sensed the dangerous undercurrents in the room. She stood rooted in the doorway and turned a beseeching look on Anderson. When she saw him facing forward, refusing to look at her, she recoiled as if he’d slapped her.
Apparently, she was taking too long to follow Cyrus’s orders, because Mark suddenly gave her a shove from behind, propelling her into the room. The shove was so violent that she tripped over the edge of the rug and landed on her hands and knees with a cry of surprise and pain. Neither Anderson nor Cyrus objected to the rough handling.
Emma scrambled to her feet and whirled on Mark. “How dare you,” she snarled. I suppose she was trying to go on the offensive, but the shrill edge in her voice detracted from the attempt. She had to know the jig was up.
“I’d ask the same question of you,” Cyrus said, and Emma reluctantly turned to face him. The little darting glances she sent over her
shoulder said that after what had just happened, she didn’t like having Mark behind her.
“What are you talking about?”
“Did we not have a discussion the other day in which I specifically forbade you from taking any hostile action toward Anderson or any of his Liberi?”
Emma blinked as if in surprise. “Yes. And I specifically told you I hadn’t done anything.” Her lip curled in distaste as she looked me up and down. “Whatever that bitch might have told you.”
I’d have been more outraged, both by her attitude and her denial, if I didn’t fear she was a hair’s breadth away from a death sentence.
Cyrus grunted in exasperation. “And I believed you. Right up until I found those drafts of the letter you wrote in my father’s name on your computer.”
“Those weren’t mine!” There were twin spots of angry color on her pale cheeks now. She certainly could put on a convincing righteous indignation act. “Someone used my computer to write them, but it wasn’t me. Maybe you should have a word with your daddy about it.”
Cyrus rolled his eyes. “Yes, that makes perfect sense. He broke into your house to use your computer to compose a letter that he then took to a FedEx to email. All because he’s batshit crazy enough to blame Nikki for his misfortunes. Strangely, that sounds rather more like you than like him.”
“I don’t know who wrote it or why. All I know is it wasn’t me.”
“You hired a hit man to kill Nikki and bury her in the woods where no one would ever find her,” Anderson interrupted, the rage in his voice enough to make Emma flinch from it.
“What?” she shrieked, looking back and forth frantically between Anderson and Cyrus.
“You gave Erin to your new friends just to spite me,” Anderson continued, taking a step closer to her. He looked intimidating enough that she took a step back. “But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You had to drive the dagger in deeper, so you had to destroy Nikki, too. Just because in your sick, twisted mind you decided she was the reason our marriage fell apart. But it was you, Emma. You’re the only reason, the only one to blame.”
Tears glistened in Emma’s eyes. “I loved you,” she said in a scratchy whisper. “And you loved me, too. Until she came into our lives.” She reached out toward him briefly, then snatched her hand back as if to deny the gesture. “I could see from the moment I went back home that she’d already taken you from me. You were perfectly happy to let the monster who . . . who defiled me run free because you were too wrapped up in your new love to care.”
Sometimes I wondered if Emma inhabited the same reality the rest of us did. Until I came into her life, she’d been chained at the bottom of a pond, continually drowning and coming back to life. How she managed to twist that into her vendetta against me I’ll never understand.
“I loved you,” Emma repeated. “And you abandoned me.”
If Emma’s tears affected Anderson in the slightest, he didn’t show it. His face was stony and ice cold. “You’re the one who did the leaving.”
She shook her head. “What good would staying have done?” She was still sniffling, but there was a hard glint in her eye, a reminder of the ugliness that had settled into her soul. She was genuinely hurt by Anderson’s perceived desertion, but she was also really, really angry. At him, at me, at Konstantin, at the world in general. “I had no desire to watch another woman parade around my home like she owned the place. Like she owned my husband.”
I almost interjected a denial, but countering paranoia with logic was a pointless endeavor.
“I’ll admit I loved you once,” Anderson said. “But I don’t love you anymore. You are nothing to me.”
Emma gasped in a sob, covering her mouth with her hand as if that could somehow keep the sound contained. She was more than capable of crocodile tears, but that’s not what these were. For all the efforts she’d taken to hurt Anderson, both through Erin and through myself, I think there was always a part of her that clung to the hope that she would one day win him back. Maybe she thought that after she eliminated the “competition,” he would somehow fall in love with her all over again. She was already living in a dream world anyway, so what did one more delusion matter?
Anderson turned away from Emma and faced Cyrus. “I demand satisfaction.”
Those words sent a slash of cold dread through my chest. I’d really been hoping it wouldn’t come to this, no matter how obviously the signs had pointed to it. Emma had apparently been hoping the same, hoping his cold rejection of her love would be the only price she had to pay for her attempt to murder me.
“No!” she cried, her face going white. “Anderson, you can’t mean that!”
Anderson ignored her. I didn’t believe that all his love for her had disappeared so suddenly that no trace remained. What she’d tried to do to me was terrible, but though I knew he cared about me in an abstract sort of way, I wasn’t important to him. Considering how long he’d been alive—not that I actually knew how old he was, except that he was ancient—the time he’d known me was nothing more than a blink of the eye. Emma was important to him, and there was no way her attack against me had changed that. But whatever feelings for her lingered in his heart, he wasn’t allowing a hint of them to show.
“Are you sure that’s what you want?” Cyrus asked softly. There was what might have been genuine sympathy in his eyes, as if he, too, must be certain that Anderson was in dire pain despite the mask of coldness he hid behind.
“Anderson, please!” Emma begged. Tears were streaming freely down her cheeks now. “I admit I betrayed Erin, but the rest of it wasn’t me, I swear it.”
“Oh, so you’ll only admit to the one crime that Cyrus won’t condemn you for?” There was a hint of amusement in Anderson’s voice, but that had to be an act. Jesus, I hoped it was an act. “How very convenient.”
Suddenly, the room went black.
I don’t mean the lights went out. I mean it went black, as in a total absence of light. I’d seen Emma pull this stunt before, so I knew immediately what it was. She was a descendant of Nyx, the Greek goddess of night, and she had called this darkness to her, no doubt in a desperate attempt to escape. Adrenaline flooded my system as I remembered the darkness of death. I tried to focus on the sensation of breath going in and out of my lungs, proving to myself that I wasn’t dead.
I didn’t really think about what I did next, just acted out of pure instinct. I knew Anderson was going to lunge at Emma, or at least at Emma’s last known position. Now that he’d condemned her, he wasn’t going to risk letting her get away.
I stepped into what I calculated would be Anderson’s path, and sure enough, he plowed into me. We both went down in a tangle of limbs. I hoped he would think my interference was nothing more than an accident. Having him mad at me in his current state would be a bad, bad thing.
Emma’s most immediate threat was no doubt Mark, who’d been between her and the door, but I thought her chances of escape would be slightly higher if I delayed Anderson some more. He tried to get up, and I “accidentally” swept his legs out from under him as I rolled to my feet.
“Sorry!” I said as he went down again, knowing I’d given Emma as much time as I could afford to. If I tripped Anderson up a third time, there was zero chance he would think it was an accident.
Emma gave a high-pitched shriek that practically shattered my eardrums. There was a thud, and then the light reappeared, blinding after the total darkness. I blinked a couple of times to clear my vision.
Emma had made it about two steps into the hall before Mark had caught her in a tackle. She was flailing wildly and screaming as Mark hauled her to her feet and dragged her back into the library.
A very sane and sensible side of my brain told me there was nothing I could do and that I should stay out of it. Emma was a danger, to me, to Anderson, to the rest of his Liberi, and even to my loved ones. Because of her madness, I couldn’t say I felt she deserved to die, but I could say her death would not be unjust. I could even say I would
n’t be unhappy if she were dead. But I’d drawn my line in the sand when I’d refused to hunt Konstantin for Anderson. I could not condone killing someone for revenge, and that was all that this would be.
Knowing I would be fighting one hell of an uphill battle, I held my chin high and got between Anderson and Emma yet again.
TWENTY
“Can we talk about this a bit?” I asked. I hated how tentative I sounded, but Anderson was really freaking me out. I almost liked the emotionless machine he’d been last night better, though I supposed it was a good thing he’d let some of that out considering the destruction in the clearing.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” Anderson said, fixing me with his laserlike stare. “She broke the treaty. And she’s proven she can’t be trusted.”
“Anderson, please,” she begged, sobbing. “Please believe me! I didn’t do it!”
Anderson might as well have been struck deaf for all the attention he paid her.
“But I’m the injured party here,” I argued. “And I don’t think she needs to die.”
“Your opinion is duly noted.”
And ignored, obviously. I tried to think up some argument that Anderson might listen to, but Cyrus spoke up before I could.
“Actually, Nikki, you’re not the injured party here. I am. I gave her a direct order to leave you alone, and she disobeyed me. I can’t allow that.”
For the first time since I’d met him, there was cold steel in Cyrus’s voice. He’d dropped the friendly smile, and there was a predatory sharpness in his eyes. Usually, the only resemblance I saw between him and his father was in their coloring, but the look on his face now suggested they might be more alike than I’d guessed.
Emma seemed to realize there was no reaching Anderson, so she switched her focus to Cyrus.
