Page 6 of Sweet Obsession

Instead, he crosses the space in two large steps and hauls my torturer off me, picking him up by the back of his shirt and flinging him away. “What the fuck are you doing?”

The man hits the wall, but manages to keep his feet. “Getting answers.”

“Absolutely not.” Poseidonroarsthe words. “This is not what we do. This is not who we are, Polyphemus. Thiscannotbe who we are.”

The man—Polyphemus—stammers, his face gone waxy. “Poseidon, I—”

“Get out.”

In the back of my mind, I expect my tormentor to keep arguing. To bluster. Maybe to get a little stabby with Poseidon himself. Grief makes people do strange things, and Triton was only killed a couple weeks ago. Not nearly long enough for this man to process the death of his sister.

But he doesn’t. He wilts as if Poseidon has ripped out his spine with his words. The knife drops to the floor and his voice turns almost pleading. “I thought this was what you needed. I thought you just didn’t want to command me to do it. I didn’t know—”

“You know nothing!” Poseidon is still roaring, the walls practically shaking with his fury. “If I want you to do something, I will give you an explicit order. You’ve worked for me long enough to know that. Now get out of my sight.”

My torturer flees. Everything hurts—every breath, every minute movement of my muscles. I stare at my unexpected savior, watchingthe fury sweep out of him, draining away as quickly as it arrived. I swallow painfully. “I think I’m going to pass out now.”

Poseidon gingerly places his knee on the mattress next to my hip. “I’m sorry.”

I must be suffering from blood loss, because there’s no way that one of the Thirteen just apologized to me. Impossible. Absurd. “I’m your enemy.”

“You are.” He produces a key from somewhere and unlocks the cuffs binding my wrists to the top of the bed. “This is going to hurt. I truly am sorry.” I don’t have a chance to ask him what he means when he wedges his arms under my body and lifts me, cradling me to his chest. I don’t think I’ve been held like this since I was a child, and maybe not even then. But there’s no space to enjoy the strange moment of care. My entire body screams in protest. Maybe I scream in protest. I can’t be sure.

Poseidon shifts off the mattress…and everything goes black.

4

Poseidon

The last thing I expected upon arriving home to check on the prisoner was to find Polyphemus straddling him, a knife in his hand and covered in blood. Later, I’ll berate myself for misjudging one of my people so thoroughly, for not noticing how grief had turned his moral compass flexible in a way that I don’t fully understand. Later, I’ll worry about how angry I was and how close to fully losing control. Right now, I have an unconscious Icarus in my arms, and my hands are covered in blood.

The sensation is sticky and makes me want to scour my skin with sandpaper, but I muscle past the response as I shoulder my way into the bathroom and carefully lay Icarus in the tub.

He’s too pale, his light-brown skin gone waxy and his beautiful face standing out in stark lines. Like this, I can clearly see the dark circles beneath his eyes that suggest he’s had more than a few sleepless nights in his past.

That matters less than the cuts streaming blood. Panic threatens to derail my logical thought process, but again I muscle it down. One does not work in a shipyard without knowing how to deal with wounds in a crisis. Granted, I’m not particularly familiar with knifewounds, but the premise remains the same.

I hurry to the cupboards under the sink that house a first aid kit. But, even in the midst of all this, I can’t help pausing to scrub the blood from my hands. I know it’s a lost cause, but the compulsion is too overwhelming. Ihaveto give in once in order to release the pressure enough for me to be able to think. To help him.

If I were going to let him die, I would have done it on the docks. He’s under my protection, which means it’s my responsibility to get him back into fighting shape. Or at least back into consciousness.

It takes longer than I would like to clean his wounds. Long enough that they have mostly stopped bleeding by the time I’m done. There are a dozen long cuts, but none of them are deep enough to require stitches. It means Polyphemus intended pain and not death; I don’t know if that’s better or worse.

I’m going to have to deal withhim.

Except…it feels wrong to leave Icarus in the tub like this. He needs rest to recover, and he’s not going to get that here, sticky and shivering. I can’t very well take him out when his lounge pants are soaked in blood—and there’re the sheets and mattress to attend to. There’s so much fucking blood.

I grip the edge of the tub and force myself to take several steady breaths. Inhale, one, two, three. Exhale, one, two, three. On the third round of this, I feel slightly more in control. Slightly.

The pants have to come off. I can wrap him in a clean blanket to keep him warm while I deal with the bed. That is the sequence of events that makes the most sense.

It sounds great in theory until I have my fingers on the band of his pants and the reality of sliding them down his body hits me. He’snot wearing anything underneath them. Even if he were, I’d have to take those off, too. There is something inherently wrong with seeing him naked while he’s not conscious and aware. I recognize that nurses do it all the time, but I’m hardly a medical professional. And he’s so damn pretty.

Frustrated with myself for wasting time, I still grab a towel and drape it over his hips. It’s awkward business working his drying pants down his body and keeping the towel in place, but I manage to do it. Barely. I try very hard not to notice how smooth his skin is. I’m mostly successful.

Next is the blanket. I find a spare, unblemished one in the closet and take the time to tuck it around him, angling his body so it’s between him and the cool porcelain of the tub. Through it all, he doesn’t make a sound.

Am I wrong about the severity of the wounds? They’ve bled a lot, but they’re not bleeding anymore. Surely he just passed out from shock. Surely he isn’t…dead.

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