Page 28 of For the Love of the Gods

He released my arm dramatically. “Fine.”

I hurried down the hallway and around to the bottom staircase that I’d found in my explorations to lead to the gym, industrial kitchen, and staff offices. I could already hear the softboomof Lukas’s fist connecting with a punching bag in the gym. It was loud as hell, which meant he was pissed as hell.

I stepped into the room and under the vaulted ceilings. The walls were lined with equipment from precious ancient swords to more modern items like the punching bag Lukas was currently pouring his wrath into.

I walked up to him slowly, placing a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “How are you doing, Lukas?”

He turned, giving me the glimpse of just one eye. “No talking.”

“Okay. I’m here if you want to.”

“I know.”

I backed away, and he turned to face me. I wanted to say something about how pale he looked, but I shoved it down. Lukas was the Poseidon heir and normally split his time between his underwater and seaside palaces. It was summer, when the sun would turn his skin into a deep, tan brown. He looked like he did in the winter, which meant he was holed up in his deep sea home.

Red flag as far as he was concerned, but he got a pass. His fiancée Daphne, my best friend, had left him a few months shy of a year ago with no explanation. I would have never guessed she would leave like that. As far as I knew her arrangement was a good one.

She’d known about her engagement since she was six—one of the many godly pairings engineered to avoid a fight. I thought she was okay with it.

Even if Lukas and her were just friends...She trusted me enough to talk about her feelings for Lukas, so why not this?

I thought she would trust me with anything, until she disappeared without a word.

It hurt, she was the person I’d counted on most after Pine, and she just left.

Lukas was dealing with betrayal. He’d come to me panicked the day she left, convinced she would have at least informed me of her plans, but I had nothing to tell him. There was more to the story than I knew, because Lukas had turned into a distorted, angry version of himself since then. When things were dark, he would come to me and silently work the cobwebs out of his head through a fight.

I was game. I was trying to supplement my memories of training with good ones. And I liked Lukas. Even when swords clashed together or when he was angry, he never turned it on me.

That was the poison he chose today, as he walked over to the far wall and picked up a gleaming silver sword about three feet long. I spotted my blade, complete with a gold hilt, on the far end of the rack and grabbed it.

Wordlessly, we spared, the clanking of our blades the only sound in the room besides our heavy breathing. I didn’t realize how much I needed to work off some tension. I didn’t think it was one sided, but Dominic was never going to admit it.

We went at it for over an hour, until my arms felt boneless and my legs were burning. When Lukas stepped too far forward on a strike, leaving his side exposed, I had to pull back an instinctive kill swipe at the last minute. It offset my balance enough for Lukas to get the jump on me and kick my feet out from under me. The second my back hit the floor, I called it quits.

I looked up to find him smirking, clearly pleased with himself.

“Feel better?”

“Yes.”

I laughed. “Yeah, knocking someone on their ass will do that to you.”

Lukas cracked a smile, a tiny one, but a smile. Daphne would want him to be happy, wherever she was.

I decided to try talking to him again. “Lukas, we can talk ab—”

“Don’t.” He cut me off. Yep, seems about right where he was concerned.

“Okay.” I threw my hands up in surrender and he took one to help me up.

He re-racked the swords and thanked me, something he always did, and turned to leave. At least some of the cobwebs were tossed out. He made it to the door before stopping and turning over his shoulder.

“Rose?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a question?”

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