And the path to that was careful planning and using their brains more than their brawn.
He listened to everyone as they discussed what had happened, soaking up every theory and bit of information, filing them away to muse once he had some time to himself. Time he desperately needed.
“I can relay everything to Father.” Cal skimmed a hand down his forearm, over the blue ink script on the inside of it, his gift from Hermes.
One he could use to form a portal to any place he wanted to go.
Including the Underworld.
Keras nodded.
Cal dropped a kiss on Marinda’s lips and then gazed down at his favour mark. Behind him, a shimmering blue portal that rippled like water formed and he backed into it. It shrank and disappeared.
“I’ll make some food for us.” Esher’s blue gaze landed on Enyo. “Are you staying?”
She dipped her head.
Keras’s breath leaked from him, one he hadn’t realised he had been holding, and some of the tension melted from his body, lifting more of the weight off his shoulders.
“The house is beautiful,” she said with a slight smile at Esher, showing Keras that she was aware this was more his home than it was their home now.
“I love it.” Esher slipped his hand into Aiko’s and smiled down at her. The first real one Keras had seen since he had returned from the Underworld and his hunt for the wraith. “But the grounds are my favourite part.”
Cass muttered darkly, “The damned fish are your favourite part.”
When Enyo looked at Keras, he simply said, “They have a bad history.”
Daimon mumbled an apology as he gathered the witch into his arms and peppered her cheek and lips with kisses.
Valen faux retched, went as far as bending over and clutching his stomach this time. Eva sighed at him and rolled her sapphire eyes, the mortal assassin clearly unimpressed with his antics.
Enyo looked at them all, her jade irises glittering with something.
Something that stole his heart all over again as her gaze landed on him.
“Your family seems to have grown a lot stranger since the last time I saw them,” she said, her voice warm and filled with light that banished the shadows in his heart to the deepest recesses.
“A lot stranger and a lot larger,” he countered and looked at them all, and it struck him that he liked it though.
It was reassuring to see that his brothers had all found love.
He looked back at Enyo as she smiled and spoke with his brothers, keenly feeling that he had found love a long time ago and it hadn’t let go of him, had lasted the two centuries he had been without the source of it—the light to his darkness.
That light she had awoken inside him faded back to shadows as he reminded himself that she was wed now.
He had let her slip through his grasp.
He had lost her.
And it hurt.
She looked at him, and froze, her laughter dying as her face fell, expression turning serious. “Is something wrong?”
He shook his head, even though it was.
“I was just thinking how it might be some time before the meal is ready and I thought perhaps we might walk awhile?” Did he sound as nervous as he felt?
“Walk has to be the most boring euphemism for sneaking off to make out that I have ever heard.” Valen nudged Marek, who looked as if he wanted nothing to do with him as he edged away.
Eva cuffed Valen around the head before Keras could do it, so he settled for glaring at his brother and making it painfully clear without words that if he ever dared to speak about Enyo in such a way again, he would destroy him.
He cast a look at Enyo, sure she would look horrified to be spoken about in such a manner, offended by the fact his brother had suggested she would do such a thing when she was a married woman.
Crimson stained her cheeks and she was staring out into the garden, a distant look in her eyes.
He wanted to know what she was thinking when she looked like that, beautifully awkward, not a goddess of war who had slaughtered thousands but a delicate feminine beauty who needed to be kissed.
He wanted to be the one to kiss her, just as Valen had suggested.
But he couldn’t.
And it killed him.
When she finally looked at him, he held his arm out, gesturing to the garden. She stepped out onto the covered wooden walkway that ran around the inside of the house, enclosing the courtyard garden. He followed her, trailing a step behind her as he gathered his thoughts and fought a war against his feelings.
Against the urge to reach for another pill in the hope this one would work and free him of his emotions. What if it didn’t? What if the increasing number he had been taking recently was having a negative effect, his body growing accustomed and resistant to them?
Panic swamped him, had his pulse shooting off the scale. He couldn’t be growing immune to them. He needed them.
She paused at the end of the walkway and looked back at him, sunlight casting strands of gold in her dark hair and reflecting off the silver detailing of her black armour.
Calm instantly washed over him as his gaze collided with hers.
Her beauty struck him hard, stole his voice and had him staring at her.
“Can I use these?” She stooped and picked up a pair of slippers from the wooden boards.
Keras shook himself back to his senses and nodded, waited for her to slip her feet into the pair of shoes and step down into the garden before he did the same with another pair.
He tried not to overthink things as he came up beside her, as he led her along the path that cut across the end of the courtyard garden, separating the gravel to his right from the grass that formed the bank of the large koi pond to his left.
It was hard.
His thoughts weighed him down, growing heavier by the second, pulling him deeper into them the longer they both remained silent.
He had so many things he wanted to say to her. Why couldn’t he just say them?
His inability to find his voice and speak to her had feelings twisting inside him, twining together into a tight knot in his chest. Self-hatred was at the fore of them, shame at his own weakness backing it up. She had come to see him, and he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her, found it increasingly impossible to break the silence as it stretched between them.
It hit him that he didn’t know where to begin because he had convinced himself that he would never see her again, that she always visited Marek to relay her information because she didn’t want to see him.
But she had come to see him in the end.
“The infamous fish, I presume?” Her voice was light, driving back the dark again.
He glanced at the carp in the pond. The colourful fish were following them, no doubt expecting either him or Enyo to feed them.
“The very same.” He pushed the words out and felt lighter for breaking his silence. The tangled knot of emotions was quick to unravel, the tension melting from his muscles as his voice echoed in his ears and Enyo looked at him.
“What happened with them?” She stopped at the bottom of the arched vermillion wooden bridge that spanned the pond and led to the main garden.
“Daimon was… frustrated… by the sorceress because she had placed his boots into the bath, so he teleported her to this bridge and dropped her into the pond.” It hadn’t been his brother’s finest hour.
Enyo covered her mouth with her hand, blatantly hiding a smile.
“Apparently it was not the first time someone had attempted to drown her.”