Page 58 of A Girl and HER Prince
“That came from axes, picks, and hammers. Slaves and prisoners of war had to burrow their way through here.” In Samos, the slaves had only been able to dig thirty centimeters a day. He stared up at the high ceilings. “Who knows how many men and women wasted their lives away down here, never seeing the sun again?”
She made a mournful cry. “How sad.”
As civilized as they liked to believe their world was today, these human exploitations were still going on, possibly in his own country. And his father expected him to actually bring these lands to heel?
The thought overwhelmed him, so much that he couldn’t move any farther. “Here is good,” he said. There was a nice big floor calling his name and he lowered down, leaning his back against a rock, his knee against the wall. Livvy helped him sit, fussing over him. He could scarcely believe she had it in her—his angel was freezing, and in that swimsuit? Yeah, this cave didn’t exactly provide any creature comforts.
She shivered, all while trying to hide her discomfort with a determined twist of her lips. She wasn’t fooling him.
“Livvy? Come here.”
She nodded, kneeling next to him. “I just want to check these injuries.” Without giving him any warning, she pressed her icy fingers into his stomach. He sucked in his breath, hoping she didn’t see how much that hurt. “I’m going to…” Livvy sneaked a peek under the makeshift bandage around his lacerated stomach.
He tried to steady his shaking hands over the flashlight to help out his little Nightingale, feeling awkward, but this had to be done. “I think it’s stopped bleeding,” he said. “It’s not so bad. The cut down there just sliced the skin, really.”
“The cut?” she repeated. “Is that what you’re calling it?”
What else? The wound? The slash? He hadn’t been in a sword fight! He shrugged. “It’s not the worst… uh, gash I’ve got, I’m trying to say. But the one on the forearm? The knife pierced all the way to…”
She made a sound of distress, and he abruptly stopped. Growing up under his father’s strict rules taught him when to shut up about his woes. He stared at her instead. She ran a finger over his skin to assess the damage. Her thick hair had escaped the rest of her ponytail and hung over her face in a soft cloud of midnight. She might as well be Aphrodite, for how stunning she was. Hers was the kind of beauty that just got better the more she fretted over him.
Her teary gaze swept up from his stomach to his eyes. “This will need stitches,” she said.
Now she was looking far too worried. He quickly got to work to undo the damage. “I hope you’re good with a needle,” he said with a laugh, “and men screaming like little girls.”
Her mouth firmed. Apparently, that didn’t mean she was amused, and still… he was arrested by the redness of her lips.
“The last time I had stitches was when I stubbed my toe on a dolfly board.”Oh great!And now he was jabbering out of nervousness.
Whydidshe have to be so lovely?
Obviously, he must not be in too much pain to notice that. In fact, he couldn’t think of anything else. Someone had said Aphrodite was blonde… was that Virgil? Homer did too. Well, they were wrong. She had dark hair.
Livvy’s brow furrowed, which finally brought his attention to what she could possibly be fussing over. “What is it?”
“There’s some kind of mark on your stomach…” she said.
He glanced down, seeing the familiar indentation of his family’s crest branded into his skin. “That looks like my ring,” he said.
Her eyes snapped to his at the same time his heart froze. Well, that said it all. The assassin had punched what felt like brass knuckles into his stomach over and over. That had been his ring.
Deedee was behind this.
Chapter Nineteen
No! Livvy sucked in her breath. Deedee was not their culprit. Her friend wasn’t some coldblooded murderess. She might be angry at Venice, but she’d wanted to win him back, not kill him!
“Was this all about revenge?” Venice asked.
“Deedee wouldnotdo this,” Livvy said. She knew saying it aloud would make her seem like an accomplice, but she didn’t care. The truth mattered. “She was mad, sure, but… she told me she was giving her ring away.” Immediately, her suspicions flew to Achilles. “She gave that ring to Achilles.”
“Achilles?” He scoffed. “We’re like brothers. He’d never hurt me.”
“Neither would Deedee,” she said. He didn’t look convinced and she struggled to get through to him: “They were together the most last night. Shehadto give it to him.”
“So you don’t actually know that he has the ring?”
“No, but didn’t you see them flirting?” Livvy argued. “And they were together just as long as we were.” Her cheeks warmed at what they’d managed to accomplish in that short amount of time.
