by Aimee Carter
* * *
The labor progressed so quickly that I barely made it out of the bathroom. Calliope gave me nothing to help, no medication or words of encouragement, and though Cronus remained by my side, he said nothing as my contractions grew closer and closer together. They had to know the others were coming. There was no other reason to force the baby out like this, and I couldn’t imagine Calliope giving up the chance to make me hurt as long as possible, not unless it was dire.
I refused to scream. Even in the final moments of labor, as the baby ripped through my body, I clenched my jaw and pushed through the pain. Since I’d become immortal, the only thing that had hurt me was Cronus, and apparently giving birth was another exception. My body was doing this to itself, and immortality wasn’t going to stop it.
The moment the baby left me, I felt as if my heart had been ripped from my chest and now rested in Calliope’s arms. She straightened, and a lump formed in my throat as I saw the wrinkled, bloody little child she cradled. “It’s a boy,” she said, and she smiled. “Perfect.”
Somehow, despite the words I’d whispered to him, the hours I spent feeling him kick, the months I’d spent carrying him, he had never felt completely real. But now—
That was my son.
That was my son, and Calliope was going to kill him.
She didn’t need any tools to cut the cord or finish the rest of the messy birth; in the blink of an eye, everything was clean, and the baby was wrapped in a white blanket. As if she’d done it a thousand times before, she embraced him and stood, leaving me alone on the bed.
“Wait,” I said in a choked voice. I was exhausted and drenched in sweat, and despite the pain, I struggled to get up. “You can’t—please, I’ll do anything, just don’t hurt my son.”
His wails, so tiny and helpless, filled the room, and my heart crumbled. Every bone in my body demanded that I stand, that I go to him and save him from the life that awaited him with Calliope, but I couldn’t move. The harder I struggled, the more I froze, and the more my body ached.
She looked at me, her eyes bright and full of malice. She was enjoying this. She was reveling in my pain. “That’s not for you to decide, dear Kate.”
On the edge of my vision, I saw Cronus shift. “You will not hurt the child,” he said, his voice low and full of thunder. “That is not a request.”
For a moment, Calliope’s eyes narrowed, and my heart leaped into my throat. She was going to challenge him. Use my son to prove her dominance—that she was the one in control.
But she wasn’t, and she knew it. And for the first time since I’d heard of the King of the Titans, I was grateful for him.
“Fine,” she said in an annoyed voice, as if she were only letting him win because she wanted to. We both knew the truth. “I won’t kill him.”
Relief swept through me like a drug, pushing away the agony of dreading his death, and I released the breath I’d been holding. Because of Cronus, he would live. “Can I—can I hold my son? Please?”
“Your son?” Her arms tightened around the baby, and a mockery of a smile curled across her lips. “You must be mistaken. The only child in this room belongs to me.”
Without another word, she walked through the door in a cloud of victory, leaving me empty and utterly alone.
She wouldn’t take his life—that meant there was still time. But how long would it take before she got tired of obeying Cronus and killed the baby just to watch me bleed?
I had to get to him. I had to save him. Even if Calliope didn’t touch a hair on his head, the thought of him being raised by that monster, twisted into something black and beyond recognition as the innocent child he was now—if my time in the Underworld had taught me anything, that kind of life was infinitely worse than the peace of death.
Desperation clawed at me, tearing me up from the inside out, and I slowly turned to face Cronus.
His queen. My life, my choices, my freedom for my son’s.
“Please,” I said, hiccupping. “I’ll do anything.”
He brushed his cold fingers against my tearstained cheek, and this time I didn’t move away. “Anything?”
The words were like knives on my tongue, but I said them anyway. “Anything,” I whispered. “Save him and—and I’m yours.”
Cronus leaned toward me, stopping when his lips were only inches from mine. “As you wish, my queen.”
I swallowed. Fire spread through my body, leaving burning heat in place of the aches of giving birth as Cronus healed me. It was worth it. Henry would understand, and somehow, someway, I would find a way to unite him with the baby.
I sat up, dizzy with hope, and touched my flat stomach. Somehow Cronus had returned my body to the way it had been before I’d become pregnant, and the missing swell of my belly and chest was disorienting. Why not leave me with the ability to feed the baby? Because he knew it wouldn’t matter? But before I could say a word, the world began to shake.
“What—” I started to say, gripping the edge of the mattress, but something in the corner caught my attention. The sky through my window was bathed in an unnatural golden light, and around us the entire island quaked violently.
“I will return, my dear, and then we shall be together,” said Cronus. He pressed his cold lips to my cheek, and in an instant he was gone, but I didn’t care.
In the distance a black cloud approached, sizzling with lightning. Though Cronus himself couldn’t escape the island, it passed through the barrier the council had created as if it were nothing, and I spotted the silhouette of a man on top of it. Hope swelled within me, and I didn’t have to see his face to know who the dark figure was.
Henry.
You can keep reading Kate and Henry’s story right now!
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ISBN-13: 9781488080838
THE LOVESTRUCK GODDESS
First published as part of THE GODDESS LEGACY anthology by Harlequin TEEN in 2012.
This edition published in 2017.
Copyright © 2012 by Aimée Carter.
All rights reserved. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher, Harlequin Enterprises Limited, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and ™ are trademarks of the publisher. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and in other countries.
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