by April Zyon
That had her laughing. “Daddy always called me the Ghost, because I could get in and out of anywhere that I wanted. He said people tended to gravitate toward me, but when I wanted to, I could shift and change and disappear right before a person’s eyes. He taught me, though, so I guess that’s to be expected. Silly man.” She brushed a tear from her eyes. “God, I miss him,” she whispered in her sorrow.
The silence around her was thick. So much so she looked around to see all the men staring at her. Even James and Mik were staring at her, as they’d apparently returned in time to hear her words. Though from the look on Mikhail’s face, she had a feeling he wasn’t all that surprised by the words, unlike the men sitting around her. James, though, looked annoyed, and it was all directed at Mikhail.
“What? I do, you know. Miss him. I miss my mom, too. I miss them both so much.” She rubbed her hand over her chest and the ache she felt there. “Is it a surprise that I miss my parents?” She had no idea why they were so quiet, but she figured they weren’t used to dealing with emotions.
“It’s definitely not because of that,” Victor said softly. “We know you miss them, and we understand it completely. But that whole bit about your old man calling you the Ghost needs to be repeated, and seriously expanded upon in excruciatingly perfect detail, sweetheart.”
She felt herself blushing, suddenly finding her the floor very interesting. But it didn’t seem like they were going to be dissuaded, so she took a deep breath. “Occasionally, Daddy had me work on a couple of things for him in private. Protecting the backs of his favored teams. That’s when he gave me the moniker. The CIA picked me up shortly after, but Daddy still had me come in a time or two. He called me his Ghost. Said there was only one person better, and that was Reaper.”
There was muttering, and a couple guys whistled in an awed way, but Mikhail only stared at her. Then he tipped his chin up. Skirting around James, he came up onto the deck silently and moved inside. Victor shot her a look of concern and lifted a brow in question.
What the hell had she done now? She stood and followed Mikhail into the house. Once she closed the door, she looked at the man standing stiffly in front of her. “What did I do now? Have I broken another rule or done something else that has you angry with me?” Angrier, she meant.
“Ares, get your ass down here, now.” He never took his eyes off her as they stood there in the low lighting of the kitchen. “Ares, I’m not even kidding. You get down here and tell her exactly what’s going on. Now.”
“Are you okay?” she asked. What was his deal? There was no one on the team named Ares. “Is he another member of the team that isn’t with you guys?”
“Oh, now that’s just hurtful.” The words were a low rumble, like a mountain shifting directly behind her. “This is what happens when people stop believing in us. They think that because they no longer believe, we just up and vanish into the cosmos. Silly humans. No, I’m not a member of their team, even though I should be.”
Kas whirled on her heels, her weapon drawn and cocked in an instant without even thinking about it. “Who the hell are you?” she stated asked in a quiet and deadly tone. Oh, she would kill this man if he so much as twitched. She had no reservations about that at all. “How did you get in here?” Her hand never wavered, and her gun never lowered. Why the hell wasn’t her so-called protection there with his weapon drawn as well?
“Because he knows I’m no threat to you, pun’kin,” the big man said with a grin. “I’m Ares, like the blond semi-lethal wonder over there said. By the way, I was in the middle of something, Mik. We really need to discuss boundaries later.”
“I’m sure whatever, or whomever, will wait. Being the God of War has to have some perks,” Mikhail said in a dry tone.
Tipping his head back, Ares laughed, a booming sound. “You do have a point there. Now you could shoot me, which would only be a waste of a perfectly good bullet and would mildly annoy me, or you can put it away, Kasper.”
“Pun’kin. That’s what my aunt calls me,” she whispered with a frown. “Let me touch you.” She would see if he was telling the truth about being a god or if he were just batshit crazy. “If you want me to put my weapon down, touch me or let me touch you. Then I might not put a bullet between your eyes.” She was grateful for her abilities. Kas had no idea where they’d came from, but she was glad she had them right now.
Ares eyed her curiously and grinned. “You are so going to regret it, but go for it.” He held a hand out to her, palm up. “Be ready to land on your ass with what hits you. At least put the safety back on so you don’t ruin my second favorite jacket.”
“I’ll take my chances.” She reached out to put her hand in his. What she saw shocked her. She felt her eyes roll back in her head and felt darkness trying to consume her. Her ears began to buzz and throat felt constricted. Her eyes closed and there was the slightest of hums of voices around her when she felt arms catching her, but honestly, she wasn’t sure. Not with the darkness taking over and unconsciousness claiming her.
When she came to, her weapon had disappeared and she was gasping. “What the ever-loving name of fuck?” Holy shit, he was telling the truth. And her aunt. A tear slid down her cheek. All her life, her aunt had lied to her.
“You should tell me everything.” Her vision wavered, her whole body felt electrified, and she knew in that moment life was never again going to be the same.
Ares gently eased her into a chair, and Mikhail moved in with a glass of water and handed it to her. “She didn’t lie. We can’t lie. We can bend the truth, and be creative with it, but we can never outright lie. Artemis loves you, always has, and always will. Don’t forget that.” He shot Mikhail that had the other man moving around the table to sit on her other side, while Ares pulled a chair up to face her.
“I am the God of War, Ares. What you got hit with was only a small fraction of my memories. I knew what they would do to you en masse, so I only gave you a piece of the last eight hundred years. You’re not ready for it all, believe me. Even I don’t like delving into some of what’s in my own head. No reason to give you nightmares, on top of all my other sins. You are the descendant of Apollo. By way of a few humans along the line, but that’s where your ability comes from. I can tell you the truth about your birth parents if you want, or Mik can, since he also knows, but he only recently found out, so he only knows the bare minimum on the details.”
“They gave me up. I wasn’t worth keeping,” she whispered, and swallowed. Hard. He was telling the truth. All of it. “I don’t need to know about them. They didn’t want me. My real parents are in the ground, and nothing I did could have saved them.” She once again brushed a tear away. “I loved them. Are you or Aunty A the reason that they adopted me?”
“Artemis ensured you were placed with a family who desperately wanted a child, and who would look after her in a way befitting a descendent of the gods. We never interfered beyond that small nudge to have them choose you. Every decision they made in regards to you was their own, with no influence from any of us. Their love for you was their own. Their devotion to you as their daughter was their own. Everything they gave to you was because that is what they wanted. Artemis was only a part of your life to keep watch and ensure no danger came your way. She’s the one that asked the team to come look after you. The team, and your brother.”
Kas began to cry then, great sobs heaving from her body. They had loved her. It wasn’t forced upon them. After several long minutes, she looked up and brushed her eyes. “I don’t have a brother.” She swallowed again, feeling ill, and kept doing that so she didn’t heave up on the god’s shoes. “I was an only child,” she said softly.
“You were your mother’s only child, but the man who fathered you had another family. You have a brother—a half-brother, that is. One who didn’t know anything about you until I told him just prior to this operation. He doesn’t deal well with unknowns, or surprises, or well, much anything, honestly. He’s pretty simple when you boil it down.”
“I’m thinking a fifty-cal round is going to hurt even a god, Ares,” Mikhail growled.
“He also tends to get a little testy, too.” Ares rolled his eyes dramatically and clicked his tongue.
Kasper looked at Mikhail. She couldn’t look away. “You” was all she could say. “He’s telling me you’re my brother.” She understood now that this man hated her because his father had fucked her birth mother and created her. “Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked with her tears freely flowing. “I understand now why you dislike me as much as you do.”
“He doesn’t dislike you, Kasper. He’s mad, but at his father, not you. Mikhail always reserves judgment on people until they prove themselves one way or another to him. He’s been trying to come to terms with this for about twenty-four hours now. That’s exactly how long he’s known about you, and about what his father did.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said to Mikhail, not Ares. “I hate that you had to learn like you did. I don’t know what else to say to you.” Kas looked back at Ares. “If you’re a god, why do you have a mortal team protect—” That was when it clicked. “The white marble, the leather, the swords. They were trained and touched by the gods themselves, weren’t they?”
“They were,” Ares said. “They were mortal, but they are more than that now. We don’t know exactly how much it’s changed them, except they are faster, stronger, have better reflexes, and we’re relatively sure they will live longer than they would have. All provided they don’t take a shot to the head. The DNA inside of them that was part of the gods they descended from activated when they were up there. It wouldn’t have if they hadn’t spent that time on Mount Olympus.” Ares pushed to his feet. “I’m going to leave you two to talk. I’ll check in tomorrow and see if you need me to pop round for another question-and-answer session. Have a good night.” With a small bow, the god vanished from their sight.
Kasper never looked away from Mikhail, until she took a deep breath. “I’m sure you have questions, don’t you? Or do you want to go back to being silent and ignoring me?”
“Only one question, really.” He shifted to lean his arms on the tabletop. “Did you have a good and happy life growing up with them? I knew your father and he was a good man, but I need to hear it from you, that you had a good life.” His voice still sounded like a growling rumble, but there was no ice to it like all the other times he’d spoken to her.
“I did. My parents were the most amazing people. I was loved. I never doubted that for a moment. They loved me, and I loved them. The only hardship in life was when they were killed. I know who did it, I just don’t know how to prove it,” she admitted. That touch to Donovan Swann had told her exactly who had a part in killing her parents, but she had no idea how to ensure that he paid the price for his crimes. Sure, she could simply kill him, and she knew how to get away with it, but then he would get off too easily. No, she wanted him to pay publicly, to be condemned and humiliated for his deeds.
“If you know who did it, we can help you with proving it. It might take a little bit of time, but we’ll find what is needed to take the individual down. We can even add in a little payback along the way with personal ruination, if you want.”
She smiled and nodded. “I would like that. I could have easily taken him out, but to be honest, I want him to pay. I want the world to know what he did. Can you help me do that?”
“I’m more of a ‘put a round to the base of the skull’ kind of guy, but there are others in the unit that are a little subtler. We’ll help you find what’s needed to make this guy’s life a permanent hell. It’ll give us something else to do while we’re here. Definitely required, because if they get bored too easily, the gods only know what will happen around here.” Mikhail sat, studying her in his unblinking way before releasing a breath. “James knows you’re my sister. He finally put the pieces together tonight, but the others don’t know. They suspect something is up, but it wasn’t my place to spill the beans. At least, not without you knowing ahead of them.”
“I thank you for that,” she said with a smile. “For telling me.” She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. “So we should tell them. If James knows, then it wouldn’t be long before the others know as well. It would be best coming from us, don’t you think?”
“Likely,” Mikhail said. She heard him drumming his fingers on the table. “We should go do that before they mount a rescue effort. No, I’m not kidding. I’m pretty sure they’re out there planning it right now.”
“Why? And who would they be rescuing? You or me?” She was teasing him, mostly. She could see the resemblance between them now. It was in his eyes. “Now I understand why you look so familiar. You have the same hair and eyes that I do. How could I have been so blind?” She was still reeling from touching Ares; she realized that by touching the god some of the previous memories she had pulled from others had been pushed into the darkest recesses of her mind. She couldn’t recall everything from James and Victor’s touches, and that bothered her. A lot.
“Most people don’t see what’s right in front of them until it’s pointed out,” he said. “And they would be rescuing you, of course.” Pushing to his feet, he slid his chair back into place at the table. “I’m the big, bad Wolf, remember?”
“Yes, that much is very true. All right, so then why don’t you and I go on out there and tell them the truth? We’ll blame the crying on Ares.”
“They wouldn’t buy it. They know I’m more likely to make someone cry than Ares. At least if Ares likes the person in question, he wouldn’t make them cry. Not on purpose, anyway. Though he did make you burst into tears, so in this case you can attempt to place the blame where it should lie, but don’t oversell it, either.” Mikhail pulled the door open for her and stepped back to allow her clear passage around him.
As she stepped around him, Kas didn’t touch the large man because she didn’t want to know his secrets. Once they were back out on the large deck, she took her seat again. The headache from earlier was starting to come back. “So what has everyone come up with? On what was going on in there. Were there bets laid on it?”
“We would never lay bets,” Victor said to her, bumping his shoulder lightly to hers.
“We were placing odds, though,” Gareth threw in helpfully. “Ow! What the fuck was that for?”
“I don’t know to what you are referring,” Mikhail said quietly.
“You punching me in the arm. Jesus, I can’t feel my fingers. You probably did irreparable damage. I am so ratting your ass out to Camilla when I call her tonight.”
“Who’s Camilla?” Kasper asked as she let James pull her into his lap. She snuggled up against the warm body of the man holding her. She didn’t know why, but it felt right, it felt real. She liked this sensation, though it led to actions she typically wouldn’t make at all. “And before you all start to have aneurysms, Mikhail just told me I’m his half-sister.” There, bomb dropped. She reached up and touched James’s neck once more. She needed to flood her body with the warmth of his truths and past instead of Ares. She knew, intellectually, that Ares had held back a lot of what he had endured, but it had still been a hell of a lot, enough to push lots of memories out of her mind. Even with the touch of her skin to James’s skin, she still was having a hard time replacing Ares’s memories with James’s.
“Subtle,” Mikhail muttered.
“He what?” someone squeaked.
“Sister?”
“I thought he was an only child?”
“Well, that explains it,” Victor said.
“Evidently, his father impregnated my mother. The biological one, that is. He’s my biological half-brother.” Strangely, she felt comfortable with these men in the space of just a very few short hours. “So now there are two of us.” She gave Mikhail a grin. “Who’s afraid?” she teased.
Pretty much every hand went up in the air at her question, except for Victor, James, and Mikhail. Mikhail gave an evil-sounding chuckle. “You two should be the mos
t afraid,” he said toward James and Victor. “Very afraid.”
“Why is it that they should be afraid?” She was curious what he would say. “I kind of like them, especially since they’re so warm and willing to cuddle up with me like this.” James squeezed her just a bit, and she smiled. “Unless they do something to hurt me, then you’ll never see them again.”
“Oh, I think I get where he’s going with this,” James said. “He’s cluing into the fact that he’s your older brother, or big brother as the case is, and we’re going to end up having the infamous talk. Only he doesn’t tend to say a lot with words. He’s more of an ‘actions speak louder’ sort of guy. Remind me to make sure the insurance is paid up later, Vic.”
“Absolutely. We should also ensure our wills are up to date, too.”
“Good plan,” James said. “See, no biggie.”
It dawned on her then why they were saying that, and she found herself blushing. She turned her face into James’s shoulder and began to giggle. Oh, lord. She wasn’t a giggler, but she couldn’t stop. “Oh God.” She had a big brother now. One who knew just what these two men wanted to do with and to her, and what she wanted to do with and to them. This was a little awkward.
“She’s pretty quick on her feet,” Gareth commented. “Not surprising, given she’s related to you, Mik. But I’m still ratting your ass out to Camilla. To answer your question, Kasper, Camilla is our, uh. Hell, what is she?”
“She’s our lover, and the only woman on the planet who could actually put up with the two of us for any length of time,” Mikhail said. “She’s a damn saint.”
That had Kasper smiling. “I like that. She’s your lover. I think that has a good ring to it. I think I like her already.” The men certainly did. All of them seemed to have a soft smile when her name was brought up. “I hope to be able to meet her one day.” Kasper had a feeling Camilla was the woman from the funeral.
Mikhail looked her way. “You’ll meet her soon, I’m sure. She’s not what one would call overly patient. She won’t stand for being stuck back at the house for too long without coming to find out what’s really going on. Ares was her guardian for a time, and she knows how to put the screws to him, so I’m sure they’ll both be popping in at some point.”
