Page 133 of For the Love of the Gods

Dominic

Rose was smiling at me.

Even in this shitstorm, with so much unresolved and so much on the line, she was smiling. At me.

I was still in somewhat of a state of disbelief. Yes, she’d smiled at me before. I’dmadeher smile before. But it had been so few hours since everything came out.

So little time before we had to go back to reality. I would have preferred to keep Rose locked away for a week, then spend another week walking around every public place I could find, Rose by my side, grasping onto my upper arm. Puffing my chest out like a beast of the plains.

I wasn’t entirely adverse to the idea, but Rose would give me shit for it. Even though I was pretty sure she secretly liked it.

She would try to hide the same smile she was giving me now, her cheeks flooded with a blush. All I’d done was add, “oh, by the way, I love you,” to the end of my sentence, and her lips broke into such a devastating smile I almost said it again.

I shifted a little in my seat, both at what that blush and smile did to me and because I was imagining Pine beating the shit out of me for sleeping with his sister.

I tucked the memory of Pine away for later. That was for another time, when we weren’t expecting Adrian and Lukas and the whole calvary in our formal dining room any minute now.

Belen, our new chef, had put together a spread of fruit and a million pastries that honestly looked the same to me, but I wasn’t about to tell him that. Raiden’s husband wanted to scale back the amount of time he spent at the restaurant he worked at in the Upperworld now that he and Raiden were seriously talking about starting a family.

It was somewhat ironic, that the same excuse Rose had given to justify Mary leaving was what brought Belen into our home. But it gave Rose a break when she didn’t want to cook or didn’t have time and it gave us another friend under our roof.

I grinned slightly at Raiden huddled with Belen in the corner, his right hand moving passionately as he talked.

“When do you think Adrian will be here?” Rose asked, just as I wrapped my foot around the leg of her chair and pulled her a little closer.

“Not a minute past eleven,” I said. Adrian was one punctual motherfucker. Always keeping appearances. “Lukas on the other hand will probably show up thirty minutes late.”

“That drives Daphne crazy,” Rose said, not even recognizing that she’d used present tense. I didn’t point it out, because it would pull a sad wave into Rose’s eyes that I was not about to witness.

It was only ten, but we were down here because Rose didn’t want to tell the story anywhere in the house she liked. The formal dining room was fine, she’d said, because we never spent any time there.

And that her father had loved their dining room.

I already had plans to find his soul and drag it to Tartarus, if it wasn't already there, but I had a feeling those plans would be expedited by the end of the conversation.

I jerked my chin up once Raiden caught my eye, gesturing for him to give us a second. When we were alone, Rose looked like she wanted to fold in on herself. I placed a hand on her shoulder, then smoothed it down her back.

She looked up at me with those sad eyes, the ones I absolutely hated to see, and began.

“Odell was underplaying it. My father’s training methods weren’t just effective, they were brutal. I think after my mom died he lost any shred of soul he had and became obsessed with his power. And which one of us would follow him.”

I had to fight like hell not to break Rose’s stare. “He broke our arrangement soon after that. And then he made us train. I don’t remember much else from those years. I was eight when my mom died and the next ten years were just…a blur. It got really bad once you took over. He’d scream and scream at Pine that he was a fool for staying friends with you.”

Rose dropped her gaze to her lap and I looked away. I had to. I propped my elbow up on the table and pressed my forefinger under my nose and my thumb under my chin.

“When I turned 18, my father decided it was time for one of us to succeed him. He went to us both individually to try to bait us into killing the other, but we just went right to each other instead. So he…”

Rose blinked back tears and I plotted murder.

“He had been forcing us—me, specifically—to fight prisoners for a while. I resisted at first but he would just threaten Pine. He was still stronger than us at that point. One day he’d asked me to meet him in the dining room for breakfast. I went because I had no choice but to say yes. He must have slipped something in my tea because the next thing I knew, I was in the training room, and this prisoner was coming at me with a knife. I tried to knock him out but he just kept coming and coming at me and my father was screaming at me that I was weak and a disappointment.”

I grabbed Rose’s hand and squeezed.

“I just…snapped. I grabbed the knife and twisted it on him and plunged it into his heart. I turned towards my father and said something likeare you happy now? And that's when I heard it. Heard my brother say my name from next to me. I turned and the knife was still there and he was choking on his own blood. He was…he was gone by the time I dropped to my knees to catch him.”

Tears were threatening my own eyes now.

“I brought him to the Fates, trying to get them to bring him back. They said no, of course. But that’s when the favors started. The one thing they did do was cut my father’s thread. One day he seemed fine and the next he was a sickly gray version of himself that didn’t live to see another sunrise. I went back to the Fates every day for a week until I realized that it hadbeena week.”

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