Page 103 of For the Love of the Gods

“You’d know, wouldn’t you?” I shot back and thankfully, he took the tease in stride.

Lukas just raised his eyebrows and said, “Shut it and throw, loser.”

“You’re a child.” But I did throw. Two knives this time, hitting the head and chest of my target back to back.

When we were done, Lukas’s eyes thankfully lightening a shade, Max walked through the already open door and said, “We gotta talk, Rose.”

Lukas shooed me out, saying he’d go find Dominic for me, and let me follow Max.

“Dress Bandit is almost a closed case,” they said, assigning the name their twin forced upon the incident.

“Tell me everything,” I said through a laugh, walking down a hallway that smelled like Dominic’s cologne as we talked.

Chapter 27

Dominic

Today was a shit day. It always was, but this was especially horrible.

Eleven years without my parents and it still felt like it was days ago. The memories of walking into their room, of slipping in my mother’s blood, haunted me every day. But today, today they were all I could see when I closed my eyes.

My uncle was a blind idiot, consumed entirely by his need for power and paying no mind to simple fucking logic. He’d assumed that because the humans seemed to place weight on the age of eighteen, deeming that to be the culmination of adulthood, the same rules applied to the gods.

He thought that if he killed my parents before I turned eighteen the power would transfer to him. He was dead wrong. The second his knife had pierced my father’s heart, I’d been pulled out of my slumber to the power of the entire Underworld coursing through my veins.

That was the worst of it, waking up with the horrible premonition that my parents were dead. Waking up to power that should have been granted freely, knowing what I’d find when I left my room.

My mother had loved her brother, treated him with respect and kindness, and he’d used that to catch her with her guard down and end her life.

He’d paid with his life and his limbs and his sanity. I didn’t regret it, not for a second.

He deserved it.

If not for the years he stole from my parents and from me, but for the hell he put me through every year on the day they died.

But this, this year was worse. I normally forced Lukas or Adrian to get blasted drunk with me, trying and failing to cover the pain of seeing my parents' graves that morning.

Three years I’d been lucky, able to see their souls and talk to them. It never the same though, not as comforting as my mother's smile or my father's squeeze on the shoulder when they were alive.

I hadn’t seen them this morning, but I paid my respects as I always did.

That wasn’t why today especially sucked. Today sucked because I had the nagging, sickening, horrible feeling that I knew how to lessen the pain. And that feeling came with the image of long, dark brown hair and striking green eyes.

How had I gotten here?

To a place where I relied on Rose fucking Hades. Well, Pluto now, because I was the idiot who married her. She was supposed to be the equivalent of my uncle. Worthy of the same revenge because she had killed my best friend in the same way he’d killed my parents.

But no, I hadn’t even formulated a plan for revenge and spent most of my time with her in my grasp or in my space. And I hadn’t complained once. I’d even gone so far as to tell her that I didn't compare her to my uncle.

She was driving me insane. Every little look on her face had me wanting more, wanting to dive into her mind and figure her out. Every brush of her skin made me a hair's breadth away from snapping.

I was fucking exhausted, trying to justify the way she acted towards me, towards everyone around her, with the person who killed Pine and kept it a secret for a week.

There were two answers. One, she was the best liar and manipulator I’d ever met. Two, there was more to the story.

She was still keeping secrets, but then again had I really been pressing for answers?

Even that morning after we first slept together, I’d gone back to get answers out of Odell and had beaten the shit out of him instead. After I’d fucked her against the wall like an animal.

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