She wrapped her arms around herself, one hand clutching the waterskin to her breasts while the other gripped her bare waist. The darkness that had been emerging in his eyes fell away as they dropped to her body, as he saw the way she was holding herself, and his expression softened in a way that she hated because it made her feel weak.
He thought she feared him touching her because she had been abused.
She didn’t correct him when he backed off, when he lowered his wings and furled them against his bare back, and dipped his head.
“Very well, I will not touch you.” He twisted at the waist to look at the narrow tunnel and then around the cavern, his gaze seeking something. “But let me escort you away from this place.”
She weighed up the pros and cons of accepting his presence.
If he was lying, he could be leading her to another cage, as males had before him. If he wasn’t lying, and was here to help her, and guards came after her, then he could prove invaluable in a fight. Pleasing her father seemed important to him. Important enough that he would do whatever it took to protect her?
She eyed the sword sheathed at his hip and then him. He was a warrior. The god of death. The thought of killing turned her stomach, but he had been born for it.
She drew down a breath and sighed it out, resolve flowing through her as she met his gaze.
“You may escort me.” She pivoted on her heel, seeking a tunnel that would be big enough to accommodate him as she made a few changes to her plan.
Find the one who had killed her brother.
Have Thanatos kill him.
And then convince the god of death to turn against his king.
Chapter 4
Thanatos wasn’t sure he was making progress with Calindria. He had tried to walk beside her in the tunnel and she had turned on him, had forced him to walk behind her instead.
Thirty feet behind her.
She turned skittish and jumpy whenever he moved any closer to her than that, cast fearful looks at him that wrenched at his insides, stirring the guilt he couldn’t shake. According to what her brothers had learned, she had been captured and killed by a necromancer.
That foul breed had come from his loins, although he’d had no choice in the matter. A demigoddess had defeated him in battle many centuries ago and had held him captive. She had attempted to seduce him many times over the course of his captivity, had resorted to drugging him when he had resisted her, and in the end, it had worked. She had stolen his seed and used it to form a new breed within her wretched womb.
Necromancers.
If he had been stronger, perhaps Calindria would never have been captured, would never have been killed.
Perhaps she would have never been similarly abused.
He cast his gaze down at his boots, unable to bring himself to look at her as his dark thoughts and his memories weighed him down, attempting to break his spirit. He mustered his strength and shored up his walls, purged the heaviness that infested him and focused back on his task.
Getting Calindria out of this realm.
It was going to be harder than he had anticipated. He couldn’t teleport with her and he couldn’t fly with her, not without touching her.
He lifted his gaze and looked at her again, studying her as she sipped her water and led the way. She had courage, but then that was something she had never lacked. None of Hades’s children were weak, fearful fools.
But none of them were as dark as the female marching ahead of him either.
She exuded darkness as if she had been moulded from the same clay as her father, had not even a trace of her mother in her.
When he had known her as a child, she had been like her mother. Sweet. Bright. Dazzling almost. Now, she was the opposite of the girl he had known. She was darkness, calculating and distant, her heart closed off to everyone.
He could understand why.
He had emerged from his own captivity a different male.
Untrusting. Cruel. A hardened warrior who had shunned everyone, preferring to be alone.
She huffed and stopped, and so he stopped too, keeping the distance between them steady. When she lifted her right foot and brushed stones from the sole of it, guilt churned his stomach again and he despised the feeling and how often it bothered him when he was around her.
But couldn’t shake it.
Whenever he looked at her, at the small crudely made sky-blue bandeau that barely covered her breasts and the matching tiny shorts, and her bare feet, that guilt returned. He hadn’t thought to bring clothes or supplies on his mission, hadn’t considered she would be in need of anything despite the fact she had been held for centuries.
Because part of him hadn’t believed Keras when he had said she was grown now.
That still felt impossible when he looked at her. As a soul, she shouldn’t have aged.
But then, he had the feeling she wasn’t a soul. He wasn’t sure what she was, not yet, but he was determined to unravel the mystery of her.
“When we leave this mountain, I will find a way to get you back to your family.” His words weren’t well met.
She set her foot back down and glared over her shoulder at him, fire in her blue eyes. The black dirt that streaked her face made them appear brighter, and the feral edge to them warned him to keep his distance. She looked like a warrioress when she scowled at him like that, a fierce female who didn’t need any male to fight her battles for her.
She looked like a wild creature, a dangerous goddess despite her petite size.
Shadows flitted across her face, adding a ring of crimson around her pupils, a flare of the darkness he could feel in her.
“When we leave this mountain, I will be finding whoever killed my brother,” she spat and started walking again.
Thanatos stared after her. “Whoever killed your brother?”
She didn’t slow, just kept striding on ahead. His frown deepened as he noticed how she reached for the black spikes of rock that jutted from the ground or hung from the ceiling of the tunnel, how she leaned on them for support as she passed them. She was tiring, but he got the impression that if he demanded she rest for a while, it would be met with the same black look she had given him a moment ago.
He started after her, determined to get to the bottom of what her mission of revenge was, because it sounded a lot like she thought her twin was dead.
And that unsettled him.
“Calistos is alive.” He caught up with her in only a handful of long strides and fell into step behind her, maintaining his distance.
She halted and looked at him, her blue eyes wide. “Calistos?”
He nodded. “Your twin. Calistos. He is alive. All of your family are alive.”
She frowned at him, a wary and calculating edge to her gaze, and then shook her head and backed away. “Do not lie to me, god of death. I saw him die.”
And he saw in her eyes she truly believed that.
“I know what I saw,” she spat and kept moving backwards, placing more distance between them, rousing a feeling that she was going to run again.
If she did, he would have to run to catch her. He couldn’t use his wings in such a cramped space. Not that it would be a problem. She was tired. Her pace had been slowing over the last mile or so. He could easily catch her.
But stopping her would mean placing a hand on her, and he didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to put her through the torment of having a male’s hand on her without her consent.
“I know what I saw,” he countered and resisted the urge to advance on her, sure she would run if he did. “Calindria, your brother is alive. I fought beside him in a war just four years ago. I saw him no more than a lunar cycle ago. Calistos is alive.”
“Liar!” She hurled that word at him, so fiercely he flinched. “I knew I should not have trusted you.”
Her gaze darted left. She was going to run.
He braced himself, his muscles coiling tightly as he prepared to give chase and, gods forgive him, grab her.
“I know what I saw,” she hissed, that corona of scarlet shimmering around her pupils again. “My brother is dead and my family abandoned me.”
“Gods,” he uttered, shock sweeping through him, followed by disbelief when he saw in her eyes that she believed that. There, in the depths of them, beyond the shadow of darkness, pain shone faintly. Buried deep. Cold rushed through him as he pieced something together, hollowing him out. “Calindria… your mission of revenge. Tell me it is not against your family.”
“And what if it is?” She threw each word at him like a barb, a dangerous edge to her expression as she glared at him, as if daring him to attempt to stop her.
The resolve in her sapphire eyes had him shaking his head, had him feeling like a fool.
Because she had been playing him well.
Now, her acquiescence made sense. She had agreed to him escorting her because she had been intending to use him, to fashion him into a weapon she could wield. He growled and bared his teeth at her, darkness pouring through his veins, surging like white water as he thought about her manipulating him like that.
Some of the fire in her eyes abated, and he sensed a ripple of fear in her as he closed the distance between them, as his chest heaved and the urge to reach out and grip her throat in his bare hand, to grasp it tightly and teach her to never attempt to manipulate him again ran rampant through him.
“Thanatos,” she murmured.
And just like that, the darkness rushed from him.
He stilled and stared at her, cursed himself as he saw the way she held herself, how small she looked as she curled inwards. The look on her face cut him to the bone, the way her brow furrowed and fear danced in her eyes slashing at his soul.
He backed off and tamed the darkness, pulled back on the reins and drew it back under control.
Thanatos shoved the fingers of his left hand through his thick hair, clawed the black strands back and fought with himself, wrestling with the thoughts that twisted and tangled, trying to unravel them and find the beginning of one that would make her believe she was wrong about her family.
“They never abandoned you, Calindria,” he husked, miles away in his thoughts, chasing those ribbons to their endpoints, seeking the right one. He needed to buy himself time to find the way to convince her, so he let his mouth do as it pleased. “Your family are the ones who sent me to find you. I have been searching for you for four years.”
Her brow puckered. “And how long have I been missing?”
He did her the courtesy of looking into her eyes so she would see he was speaking the truth, because he knew this wasn’t going to be easy for her to hear. “Five hundred and seventy years.”
She reached out and gripped a stalagmite as she breathed, “Gods… six centuries.”
Her eyes searched his.
“I’ve been a captive for six centuries?” The shimmer of light in her blue eyes didn’t last. Her face slowly darkened again, her gaze narrowing on him as he sensed anger rising within her, couldn’t mistake it for anything else at this distance. The realm muddied his senses, but not when he was as close to her as he was now. Rage lit her eyes. “They let me rot in a cell for six hundred years?”
“No.” Thanatos held his hands up between them when she looked ready to lash out at him, unleashing her anger on him. “They did not know where you were.”
“A convenient excuse,” she barked and spun on her heel, giving him her back. “Perhaps they thought I would forget what they did if they left me to rot for so long.”
She cast a withering look over her shoulder at him.
“Perhaps they are the liars and you a fool for believing them. They sent you on an errand when they surely would have come themselves if they truly wanted to see me, to set me free.” She stormed away from him and he let her go, waited for the distance to grow between them and his mood to level out before following her.
Because he was not a fool.
Pursuing her too closely right now would only stoke her anger and he needed to calm her down, needed to convince her that he wasn’t lying to her.
“What makes you believe your brother is dead?” He kept pace with her, curious about the answer to that question.
“I saw it.” She didn’t look at him, just kept marching forwards, rounding a bend in the tunnel.
He lost sight of her, tracked her with his senses until he had navigated the bend himself, easing his wings between two spires of rock. She stood at a fork in the path, her head switching back and forth between the two tunnels. One sloped downwards, the other up. Which would she choose?
“Tell me what you saw and I will tell you what I know of your brother, and what he saw.” That earned him another glare.
“You will tell me lies.” She looked back at the tunnels and muttered under her breath. “This entire realm is one of lies. This god of death is no doubt one of them.”
“I am no illusion.” The urge to reach out and take hold of her arm was strong, but he denied it. While touching her might go some way towards making her believe he was as solid and real as she was, it would also frighten her.
She cast another black look at him and then picked the left tunnel. Down it was. He thought perhaps she had chosen it because it was the smaller of the two and she either hoped to lose him or was punishing him for being a liar.
He added determined to her growing list of new attributes as her voice echoed along the tunnel.
“I am not interested in being reunited with my family. They abandoned me and I despise them. I want only their heads.”
That would not do. He frowned at her back as he ducked, dodged and eased his way along the cramped tunnel behind her, sensing how deeply her anger ran, and how dark her belief that her family had abandoned her and her brother was dead had made her.
How was he meant to make her believe those were the lies and that he spoke the truth?
Her family were moving all the realms to bring her back to them.
His thoughts spiralled down a dark path, an unwanted memory surfacing, unleashing another irritating wave of guilt. This time, it wasn’t anything to do with Calindria that made him feel that wretched emotion—it was something he had done.
The very same thing she was doing.
He had closed himself off just as she had, brought up walls to keep others out, thinking he was protecting himself from further hurt by shutting out his family—his twin brother.
But gods, he regretted drifting apart from Hypnos now. Regretted how his actions had altered their relationship. Damn near killed it. Hypnos had always been the one he was closest to and had always been the one guaranteed to have his back. His twin had been there for him in the bad times as well as the good.
And Thanatos had destroyed that.
He looked at Calindria, focused on the darkness he could feel in her, and where it had come from. She hadn’t had someone like Hypnos in her life, hadn’t had her own twin in her life, for a long time now, and it was clear it had taken its toll on her. When he had seen her as a child, she had been filled with light, and now there was only shadows and darkness.
Only anger.
Rage.
Bitterness.
He thought about how he had been long ago too, how his teasing back then had been from the heart and not just for show, a tool he used to keep people at a distance, disarming them and stopping them from seeing the real him. He thought about how, despite how serious he had always been about his duty, he had always been able to kick back around Hypnos and lower his guard. Hypnos had never judged him like the others. His twin had never seen him as the cold, ruthless bastard who hated everyone, who carried out his duty without a shred of mercy or feeling.
Instead, Hypnos had seen the toll it had taken on him, had buoyed him up whenever he had been low, and had always had time for him.
It struck him that he and Calindria were more alike than he ever could have thought possible. They were both twins, both shared a bond with the other half of them and had been close to them, and now they had both drifted apart from their sibling—him because he had chosen to, and her because she’d had no choice.
“Calistos is alive,” he said, needing more than ever to convince her of that, because if one of them could end up being reunited with the other half of their soul, he wanted it to be her. He didn’t know her story, didn’t know the trials she had been through in her captivity, but he knew deep in his heart that she deserved the light of having her twin back in her life more than he did.
“You said that before.” She ducked around another low hanging spike of rock that resembled a row of fangs and made it look as if she was walking into the mouth of a dragon.
“I mean it, Calindria. I do not know how to convince you of it.” He sighed and trudged after her, starting to feel he was fighting a losing battle and only getting her away from this realm of lies, as she called it, and getting her to her family would convince her that he was telling the truth. “Calistos is alive. Your family never abandoned you.”
She scoffed, but said nothing.
Thanatos knew why.
Because they were the same in another regard too.
He too found it easier to hold on to hate, to continue treading the dark path he had made for himself, than admit he was wrong and turn back.
She broke out into a cavern, tipped her head back and looked around her, kept moving forwards. Always moving forwards. Her step didn’t falter, not even when something chittered in the gloom, and something else answered it. If it hadn’t been for the way she had looked at him from time to time, he would have sworn she feared nothing.
She was as much a warrior as her brothers, as her father.
And it impressed him.
He had thought he would be carrying a whimpering, sobbing maiden home to Hades, but here he was trying to corral a spirited, brave woman and he was beginning to feel he was trying to capture the wind, had set his mind on an impossible task. Gods be damned, she was going to do whatever she wanted to do, regardless of how hard he tried to make her do as he wished.
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