by Addison Fox
Although he didn’t apologize, Ajax did have the decency to look contrite.
“Now, as I told you a few minutes ago, have patience. And as for Wyatt—well, Ava’s uncle has his uses. He hasn’t exactly been the doting uncle for thirty-two years. He needs to work his way in and make it seem plausible.”
“I don’t like him.”
“I’m not surprised. No one likes him save that prim idiot mother of his. Couldn’t see his faults with a magnifying glass. But . . . you know how mothers are with their oldest sons.”
“Fine. I need to eat again and then I’ll get back to the museum.”
Satisfied his focus was back where it needed to be, she purred at him. “Later. Right now I find I need a bit of a diversion this afternoon. And it’s got the side benefit of giving you that energy boost you’re looking for.”
Ajax’s blue eyes shifted in an instant from stubborn and belligerent to long and lazy. “What did you have in mind, my love?”
“Over there. The chains.”
His eyes darted to the manacles hanging by chains from the wall. Within moments, he was naked, heading toward the manacles without hesitation. He snapped his wrist into one, then held out his other hand for her to lock it up.
“You really are my kind of man.”
He shot her a cocky grin in return. “You really are my kind of woman.”
That hum that played under her skin every time she looked at him, every time she touched him, buzzed a little louder as she sashayed toward him. With a quick snap, she locked his wrist, shooting a mild bolt of electricity through it for good measure.
He didn’t scream, just closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. With deliberate movements, she ran one bloodred fingernail along the underside of his cock where it stood proudly against his stomach.
As his grunts and groans echoed around the chamber a few minutes later, she couldn’t hold back the laughter.
The sweet, sweet laughter.
How glorious that he was hers.
How splendid that he used to be under Themis’s command.
Brody’s heart fisted in his chest when he found Ava in his room, weeping in a curled ball on his bed. She’d said little through their debriefing to Grey and even less during an early dinner. He couldn’t honestly say the tears were a surprise after the last few days.
It was his reaction to the tears that caught him off guard.
The backs of his eye pricked with moisture and his throat grew tight. He’d been so focused on her physical safety, this evidence of her emotional distress was a sucker punch to the gut.
Without saying a word, he walked to the bed, lay down and curled himself around her, his body absorbing the shaking sobs of her much smaller one.
“Tell me why you’re crying.”
“I’ve been thinking about Lorna.”
Fierce waves of anger pummeled his system, heating his bloodstream with the need for vengeance. “She set you up, Ava. She set all of us up. You could have gotten killed.”
“I know. Really I do.” He watched as she traced a repetitive pattern into the silk of the bedspread. “But I can’t help it. Can’t help feeling horrible pity at what she’s dealing with in her son’s illness. He’s a little boy, Brody.”
“But she made the wrong choice. Her son’s illness is a horrible thing, but she made a terribly bad choice.”
“I know.” She continued with the pattern, swirl after swirl imagined in the smooth fabric. “What will happen to her?”
“Kane stayed behind to erase her mind. He’s also found a resource to help her son. An above-board research facility that can help him with his illness. It doesn’t change the fact that she’ll have to pay for this.”
“More balance.”
“Yes.”
They lay in silence, the moments spinning out like Clotho’s thread.
Ava’s voice was quiet long minutes later. “Is it really as simple as all that?”
“As what?”
“Choices. We make them every day, for good or for bad.”
“I believe it is.”
Choices. He’d made many in his ten thousand years of living. As his mind drifted back to earlier times, one choice stood out above all others.
“They used to call me Brody the Meek.”
“Wh-when?”
“Before Themis. Before my transition to life as one of her Warriors.” At her silence, he continued his story, his mind flashing through the thousands-year-old trip in a matter of moments.
He shoveled straw from the corner of their hovel, the action useless as a cleaning technique. All it did was churn up dust and move dirt around their small cottage.
“Brody, dear, help me knead this dough.”
His mother’s tired eyes pleaded with him as she placed a hand on her lower back.
She was pregnant again. He’d long stopped believing the babes would survive. It was as if they knew there would be no joy for them in this life. Except for him and his older brother, none of the other seven children his mother had brought into this miserable world had lived.
He had no doubt the next season would find the eighth who chose the same path.
Yet year after year, his father forced himself on her along with any number of women in their village, both willing and unwilling.
His mother touched the sensitive area around his eye as he moved to the table to help her. “You mustn’t anger him so.”
“I was asleep, Mother. I said something in my sleep I have no idea of and he called me weak. I know I’m not Ajax, not the son he favors, but I can’t control my dreams.”
Ajax; it was always Ajax. The perfect son, adored by his parents as well as every other person who looked on him. Was he the only one who knew the truth of his brother’s harsh, punishing fists and cruel tongue?
His mother brushed a hand over his cheek, her touch soft despite the calluses that covered her fingers. “I know, darling. I know.”
This latest beating had been particularly unjust. Asleep one minute, slammed to the wall with his father’s hand at his throat the next, Brody hadn’t even had a chance to throw his hands up to protect himself in his sleep disorientation.
Throat burning, he wheezed as his father’s fingers tightened harder on his windpipe. “Whimpering in your sleep, boy? You sure know how to live up to your name. You really are Brody the Meek.”
He tried to gasp out a “no,” but the word wouldn’t form. There was no air to utter even a sound.
He shook off his mother’s hand. “Go rest. He’ll be home soon and you’ll get none then.”
“If he finds me sleeping, he’ll give me more work.”
He placed a soothing hand on his mother’s back. “Shhh. I won’t let him. Go rest.”
If he’d done nothing else in this life, he’d worked to draw the beatings away from his mother, taking them on himself. When his father’s attention seemed to divert to his wife, Brody would do something to pull the ire to himself.
It wasn’t much, but in its own way it was as heroic as his beloved brother’s battle stories. At least he had the solace of doing the right thing for someone he loved.
He slid a glance to her distended stomach. Some burdens, however, he couldn’t take from her. “Go, now. Rest.”
He turned back to the bread, allowing the dough to slide through his fingers. With frightful precision, he used the soft matter to slam his fists, over and over, imagining his father’s face, then the perfect visage of his brother’s, as he did so. He was so engrossed in the imaginary beating, he never heard his father come in.
He never saw the fist coming as it boxed him over the ear, throwing him off balance so he stumbled and fell.
“Baking like a girl now, are we? I never should have left you to your mother’s influences.”
His father threw the wad of dough into the fire, the large mass falling over the logs in a great, oozing ball.
He looked up at his father’s large shape looming over him—broad shoulder
s, hamlike fists and a large, round belly from the ale he loved to swill. “She needed help. She is tired from the babe.”
A kick landed on his ribs, the pain ricocheting around his body like fire.
He was saved from another kick by knocking and hollering at the door. His father’s attention diverted as he moved across the small cottage, Brody dragged himself to the corner of the room, the walls at his back providing small comfort as he took stock of his latest bruises.
Before his father could make it to the door, it slammed open and three of the villagers streamed into the room. The one in the lead shouted orders as the other two followed behind, carrying the large, strapping body of his brother. An arrow lodged in Ajax’s heart and his eyes stared at the ceiling, sightless.
The noise had awakened his mother, and she waddled into the room with her hand at her back. At the sight of her eldest son lying dead on her table, she screamed in unison with his father.
“No! Ajax!”
Brody sat in that corner long into the evening. The stench of burned bread flooded the cottage from where the dough had lain in the fire. It mixed with the increasing stench of the open wound on his brother’s dead body.
His father hovered over him. “Go fetch the midwife, boy.”
“But it’s not time.”
For his impertinence he received another kick. “Go get her.”
In the half hour it took to fetch the Widow Stone from her cottage and return to his mother, the angel of death visited their cottage two more times, taking both the babe and his mother.
Later that night, it came for him, too.
Ava shifted in his arms so she faced him. Her hands reached up, the pads of her fingers smoothing over the bones around his eye before she leaned forward and kissed the path her fingers had traced.
“Oh, Brody.”
“My father went after me that night, determined to end my life for all the evilness he believed I caused.”
“He wasn’t right, Brody. He was broken.”
“And he was determined to break me.”
She pressed her lips to that same area above his eye, murmuring to him. “But he didn’t.”
“No. He didn’t.”
He hadn’t thought about those days in so long. Hadn’t wanted to remember either his weakness or the days after. But now, in the telling, he saw it through new eyes, and with a new vision that held more confidence, more objectivity, more self-reliance.
As that new vision replaced the one he’d held for so long, much of the shame receded with it.
He’d survived. Thrived. Flourished. And he lived a life he was proud of. He was no longer Brody the Meek. He was Leo Warrior.
He had strength and power, and he used both for good. He was not his father. He did not beat up on the weak.
He was a Warrior.
“Themis found you after that?”
He tightened his hold on her, the warmth of her body seeping into his. “Yes. My father beat me and left me for dead in the fields outside our home. I was nearing my last breath—knew it with each horrible gasp as I tried to fill my lungs. And Themis appeared to me. She offered me a new life. Asked me to take up her battle for justice. I accepted.”
He placed a finger under her chin and tilted her face up to look at him. “I had a choice, Ava. We all have choices and I made mine. I wasn’t coerced and I certainly didn’t have any great faith my life would be that much better. But I had a choice and I made it.”
She nodded. “I understand.”
“I know.”
They lay there in silence, lost in the simple comfort each provided the other. Her voice, scratchy with her crying jag, whispered over his chest. “Why did she pick you? Many, many people live sad lives. Dismal existences.”
“She said I was a Chosen One. My inner core of goodness and light made me the right choice to take up her battle.”
“She called you that? A Chosen One?”
“Yes, Ava. We’re chosen for different things—called to different things—but we’re both chosen.”
“It’s an overwhelming responsibility. I don’t even know what it entails, but I already know it’s overwhelming. Absolute.”
“How do you know that?”
“Why else would someone want the power that comes with it?”
He had to acknowledge her point; acknowledge the truth that where power was sought, great power inevitably existed. “Perhaps it feels like it. The fear of the unknown often makes us feel overwhelmed.”
A myriad of emotions ran across her expressive face, captured in the lines of her forehead, the depths of her eyes, the curve of her lips.
Frustration.
Hope.
Fear.
Courage.
He saw them all, marveling at the depths of the woman who sat opposite him.
“Do you really think I’m the Key to the stones? That the prophecy was written about me? About my father?”
“Your reaction to the stones proves it.”
“But how?”
He’d puzzled through this ever since reading the prophecy. “There are five stones and five elements of the prophecy.”
She nodded, ticking them off on her fingers. “Death, life, love, sexuality and infinity.”
“The stone here in New York has to be death. The images you see have been too brutal. Too nightmarish.”
“And the London one has to be love.”
“Not life?”
She made a good point. All her visions around the London stone revolved around her mother, so it could be life-giving. But as horrible as the deadly images were, they made her feel so safe and so loved. “Maybe, but for now I’m thinking love.”
“Personally, I’d like to get my hands on the sex stone. Wonder what those visions are like. How much do you want to bet the French have that one?”
Ava’s laughter spilled from her. “You’re incorrigible.” He nuzzled her neck. “I try.”
As he reveled in the feel of her, the warm, lovely, amazing feel of her, he felt a subtle shift; he felt her drifting away.
“Are my kisses that bad?”
“Hmmm?”
Brody lifted his head. “My kisses. Are they that bad? You’re a million miles away.”
“I just remembered something I hadn’t thought about in years. My father kept journals.”
“Of his digs?”
“Yes. I tried reading one as a teenager, but after getting halfway through one I was crying so hard I finally had to give up. It was as if I could hear his voice on the page and this anger just welled up inside of me.”
He took a small lock of her golden hair and rubbed it between his fingers. She’d lived through so much and had dealt with such horrors at such an early age.
And she’d done it alone.
“That’s understandable.”
“Even now, so many years later, I can still remember how angry it made me as I tried to read the first journal. Why was he taken from me? Why did the other kids at school have their fathers?”
“You had a right to feel that way, you know,” Brody said gently, rubbing her back with a small, circular motion.
“I know.”
They sat there in silence for a few minutes, both lost in thought. “Do you think you can look at them now?”
“I think so.”
“Good.”
Ava’s gaze locked on his, a small light of mischief replacing the grief he’d seen only moments before. “You’d like to read them, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d love to read them.”
She smiled and poked him in the ribs. “Dig geek.” “Proud of it.”
“I wonder if I have the one from his last dig?”
“It’s worth a try.”
Ava traced a finger down the curve of his jaw, her mercurial mood shifting yet again as words spilled from her lips. “What if I’m not worthy?”
With slow movements, he took her hand in his big one, pressing a kiss to her palm. “Of course you’re worthy. Look at
what you’ve survived. Your mother’s death as a small child. Your father’s murder. Even these last few days. You’ve survived everything that’s been thrown at you—literally. How can you think you’re not worthy? Not strong enough?”
“But because of those things, I’ve spent the majority of my life actively avoiding everything. I checked out of life, Brody. How can I be worthy of anything?”
“Being chosen is a gift. And like all gifts, we choose if we wish to accept it or not. What came before the choice doesn’t matter. It’s what comes after.”
And as they sat there, the word he’d worked so hard to banish from his mind reared up again, unwilling to be silenced.
Mate.
She was truly his match. He’d spent thousands of years walking the earth. He had met ten times as many women and had always known their presence would be transient. And none of them, not even his sweet first love, fired his blood and filled his soul.
Ava.
His Ava.
Consequences be damned, he could no longer stand not having her, this woman he needed above all others.
So he’d make his choice. And he’d take what he could have. And the glory of being with her could carry him through the rest of his immortal life, long after he walked the earth without her.
“What came before the choice doesn’t matter. It’s what comes after.”
As Brody’s words ran round and round in her head, Ava felt each tumbler in the lock around her heart open and fall away. With a deep breath she leaned forward, her lips brushing lightly against his. “Choose me.”
It took nothing more than that.
His large hands reached up to cup her face, tilting her head so their mouths met fully; completely. As their breaths mingled and merged, his lush lips played over hers. With purposeful possession, his tongue parted the seam of her lips and met hers in a tangle of warm, wet need.
She gloried in the feel of him as he pulled her closer to sprawl on top of his chest. Without breaking the contact of their mouths, his hands moved over her in light caresses. From the top of her back to the base of her spine, he ran his fingers in feather-light patterns that teased her nerve endings and shot warm arrows of pleasure under her skin.
Light shivers formed in the patterns he traced over her back, creating sensitive frissons of need she was helpless to stop and responsive trembles that showed him how badly she wanted him.
