“Funny. I don’t recall giving you permission to go through my closet.” Zeus steps behind me and pulls me into him. It’s a simple, unguarded motion, and my brain kicks into high gear. Remember this. There might not be many of these moments left. My heart races, but I’m being paranoid—I’m being foolish. He doesn’t bring people here, but he brought me. There’s no reason to think this will end.
“I didn’t have permission,” I admit. “What are you going to do about it?”
“Nothing,” he whispers. “Yet.” And then he picks me up and takes me to the bed. Zeus tugs the shirt over my head, leaving me bare from the waist up, then eases me against pillows with great care. It hurts. I feel like I have incipient wings. But there’s nothing, honestly, nothing more I want in the world than to stretch out on soft covers and let him have his way with me.
I’m not sure what his way is—not here. For the moment he’s working the pants down over my hips, and then the silky underwear, and then I have nothing on at all.
When he’s finished with the clothes, he stacks them on a chair next to the window and comes to sit on the edge of the bed.
It’s only then that he lets out a long breath, eyes lingering on mine. Zeus reaches out a tentative hand and strokes my hair away from my face. His fingertips trace a path over each cheekbone.
There’s a sheen over the gold in his eyes.
I have never imagined Zeus crying.
He doesn’t cry now, but I close my eyes against it anyway. It’s too much to look at. Too much to feel. I still don’t know what happened to his building, in the end, and I have the sense that we’re in the eye of the storm.
That something else is coming.
But for now, nothing bursts through the door. He left James waiting in the lobby without a backward glance. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the place is surrounded with people I can’t see.
Doesn’t matter now, not when he’s guiding the back of his fingers down each side of my neck.
I have never imagined Zeus being gentle. It’s happened before in a perfunctory sort of way, but never like this.
He works his way down over my breasts, over each rib, over the plane of my belly. Over my hips. The outside of my thighs. Lower, to my knees, my shins, my feet, my toes. When he tests those with his fingers, a feather-brush of a touch, a sob escapes me.
Because.
He’s making sure nothing is wrong. Something is still wrong—my back is still healing—but for all his money and all his confidence, he hasn’t been sure that I’m really all right.
“Almost done,” he murmurs, and this is a lie if I’ve ever heard one. Zeus is not going to be done with me any time soon. He rolls me over onto my belly, tucking a pillow under my arms, and arranges my hair so it’s not falling in my eyes. Then he repeats this process on my shoulders. Every notch of my spine. Back down until he’s assured himself of every inch of me. I let tears spill from under closed lashes while he does it.
It’s like being splayed out on an altar in some holy building. I don’t bring people here, he said. This is private worship. My mind wanders back through his rooms, all sunlit and comfortable.
“This place is you.” I don’t mean to say it out loud, but now it’s out there in the open. Zeus’s hands are down by my ankles. “You made yourself into a house.”
“A theater,” he corrects. “It was abandoned, and now it’s mine.”
He was abandoned, and now he’s mine.
More tears. I’m so tired, so floating. The pills they gave me at the hospital are no joke. They’ve made a mockery of my inhibitions, at least now, when we’re behind closed doors. His closed doors. “Your brother came to the hospital?”
“He did.”
Questions come hard and fast and I pluck one out of the river of my thoughts. “Was the doctor kidding when she said you were dangerous?”
“What do you think, sweetheart?” There—there’s the man I know. “Was she kidding?”
“No.” My mind turns this over. “But she meant that you were more dangerous than usual.”
“I was out of my mind.” His voice drops to just above a whisper and it cuts into my heart, a million knifepoints. “I was out of my fucking mind.”
“Because of Olympus?”
“Because of you.” I press myself against the covers. The pad of his thumb travels a lazy circle around the bone of my ankle. He’s just holding it. If he tightened his fist he could drag me across the bed, and I like the thought of that. I like the thought of being consumed by him. “They were taking you away from me.” There are fractures in his voice. Fractures in the shape of a broken heart.
“Your brother—”
“I’m not sure why he was still in the city,” he muses. “He tackled me like the crazy bastard that he is.”
I can imagine that scene. “How is the hospital still standing?”
“Because he didn’t fight fair, sweetheart. He gave me one of his painkillers.”
I’ve stopped crying, but only because this is the most fascinating story I’ve ever heard. “And you took it?”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
I can’t help it—I laugh. “You always have a choice about everything.”
“Not that.”
“And then what?” Another circle around my ankle. “You were high and cooperative?”
“I might have been high, but there’s no way of knowing, because it took me out completely.”
“One pill?”
“One.” His tone has turned thoughtful. I’ve heard all the usual rumors about Hades. But when Persephone said that he has an extreme sensitivity to light, I still didn’t know what she meant. Not truly. This piece of information joins the others. Zeus’s brother is in so much pain that even one of his pills is enough to level Zeus, who is a match for his size. I don’t know how he does it. The dull throb in my back is already driving me crazy.
“And it took him to stop you from getting to me?”
He moves his hands again, up toward my knees, and higher. “There’s no one to stop me now.”
My legs open for him and I hug the pillow. Sparks, flying. All of me is so desperately greedy and alive that by the time Zeus’s fingers meet my private flesh I’m wound tight enough to moan.
“Ah,” he says, pushing two fingers into me. I’m so slick there’s no resistance, only a familiar stretch. “You’re very wet, sweetheart.” A hot breath on the curve of my back. “Is there something you need?”
“A kiss,” I breathe, and he freezes—a heartbeat—and then he laughs.
Then he turns me over and teases my clit with his lips and his teeth until I come all over him in a burst of pain and pleasure and relief.
4
Brigit
I wake up sometime in the afternoon, still naked but tucked under covers that are so fresh and clean and un-hospital-like that I could die. Except I’d like to avoid that, very much. The first breath I take feels almost normal, but the second—
Ouch.
The door to the bedroom opens and Zeus comes in with a glass of water and a pill bottle, which he pops open with one hand. “Can you sit up?”