Page 5 of Invoking Ruin

His arm tightens around my shoulders as we duck into the shop. “Your job does suck,” he comments. “I was hoping to at least have you for the weekend.”

I sigh. Him and I both. “Next time I return, I promise I’ll be able to stay longer. I just have a bit of a business… loose end to tie up.”

He grumbles under his breath, but he doesn’t argue. There are few customers in the shop, and it takes just a few minutes to get our cones. Hazelnut for me, pine nut for him.

“I do mean it,” I tell him as we pick our favorite table by the windows. “After this, we can spend some quality time together.” I slide my feet under the table, until I can hook one behind his.

He grins at me over his gelato. The lick he gives the dessert borders on obscene.

My thighs clench. He knows it, too.

“I could come with you,” he offers. “I could take a vacation.”

Any mortal girlfriend with nothing to hide would jump at such an offer. If I were going to a regular old city, I might have let him tag along with me, despite the risk. I’m a fool for this god.

But there are no answers for me on a mortal path. They lie either in Olympus, a mountain I have been banished from for thousands of years, or in the Underworld, which is also likely on high alert for my presence, but it is far from impenetrable.

If I want to find people willing to help, Tartarus might have the answers I seek.

“Next time,” I say. “When I get back, we’ll go somewhere gorgeous. Just the two of us. No work involved.”

Hopefully, by then, I’ll have somewhere to take him.

My words are sweet and flattering, but I don’t put any of my divine power behind them. I’m very, very good at coercing mortals and gods to leap at a bad idea. With him, I keep from digging those claws in. As though letting him have the illusion of free will is absolution for my many other crimes.

Maybe it is. More likely, I can’t be absolved. I just know compelling him while he’s in this weakened state is a bridge too far.

I need to be able to look him in the eye at the end of this.

He nods and goes back to his gelato cone. “Can I pick the destination?” he asks, with a wicked grin.

I lean forward, biting back my own grin. “What did you have in mind?”

“Oh. I haven’t decided,” he tells me with another salacious lick. I feel every stroke of his tongue between my thighs, even though he’s not touching me. “Some place warmer, where I can see you with far less clothes. Or somewhere cold, where I can keep you nice and close.”

The blush creeps its way up my cheeks, and just for a moment, I allow myself to believe this is real. That his desire is for the real me, for Atê, not for Vita.

It’s a pleasant dream.

“Cold or warm, I'd be interested in either. As long as you are just as close, or just as naked.”

“I thought that would be a given,” he tells me.

I know it’s anything but.

We finish our gelato, and begin the long, winding path back to his apartment. At the bottom of the stairs, he pulls me in, mouth slanting over mine. I taste the sweetness of his gelato and the richer flavor of the wine—a drop of it always upon his lips—and moan. My fingers bunch up in his button-down shirt, dragging its hem free from his trousers.

He groans in response, grabbing at my long hair as he drags me in closer, letting me feel his desire for me pressing against my stomach.

It evokes memories of firelight, of dancing. Things I can never, ever forget.

“Come up to my place tonight,” he whispers against my lips before sucking the bottom one between his teeth.

He knows, even before he trails kisses down my throat, that I’ll say no.

It’s another of these limits I’ve imposed on myself. I remember my sister’s words to me, when I revealed that I was harboring a confused Olympian:

Hopefully, you haven’t done anything to him to make him hate you.

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