Light whirled around her and when it dissipated, she was standing on the zinc roof of a Parisian townhouse.
She stared across the road at the building opposite her, all of her focus on it, her nerves rising faster now.
Keras was in there.
She could feel his power, and gods, it was a sweet comfort and a torment at the same time. How long had it been since she had felt this? How long had it been since she had seen him?
She slowly eased into a crouch, planting one hand between her spread knees for balance. The night air was cool around her, heavy with the scent of rain. In the distance thunder rumbled.
Enyo lingered, eyes fixed on the warmly lit windows of the pale townhouse opposite her, heart thudding against her chest.
That heart shot into her throat when a black shadow moved across one of the windows to the right of the building, drawing her gaze there.
Keras.
She swallowed to wet her dry mouth as she watched him move around the room. A trickle of excitement ran through her blood, an urge to move closer so she could see him more clearly filling her. She wanted a better look at him, not these stolen moments where she couldn’t see all of him. She wanted to see if he was as she remembered him.
But still she hesitated.
Her mind filled with when they were last together and she cursed her own weakness.
Keras wouldn’t want to see her, and she could understand that. She despised how she had acted then, how weak she had been, allowing her brother to manipulate her and use that weakness against her.
He had taken her fear, all of her doubts, and moulded them into a weapon.
And she had been blind to it.
She had believed him when he had told her that Hades would never approve of the match, that he would expect more for his firstborn son than her.
Hearing that had stung her, not only because she had believed she could be with Keras but because it made her realise that her brother thought she wasn’t worthy of someone like him. It had shown her how little he thought of her.
Looking back now, she could see why he had done it.
Marrying Keras would not only have reflected badly on her brother Ares because he had promised her to another, but she would have been elevated in society and may have even surpassed him in standing and power. Her eyes were open now. She had learned over the last two centuries that her brother was an egotistical bastard, lived to constantly hold her back so she couldn’t surpass him.
He had trampled her feelings to keep her in her place.
She should have known that the moment he had confronted her two centuries ago, should have seen the reason why he had done it, why he had chosen to confront her the second he had noticed she was spending a lot of time with Keras and the two of them had been growing close.
Gods, she had been so defensive in response and had denied feeling something for Keras, and that was something she had come to regret. Her weakness had plagued her these last two hundred years.
She should have stood up to her brother.
She shouldn’t have let him walk all over her like that.
It had taken her far too many centuries to reach this breaking point, but she was going to step over that line her brother Ares had drawn, was going to defy him and do what her heart desired for once.
That heart ached as Keras moved to the next room, briefly disappearing before he appeared beyond an elegant couch. He kept walking, concealed by another wall for a hard beat of her heart before he emerged. He opened cupboards and withdrew some things, set them down before him and stood with his back to the window—to her—obscuring her view of the items.
What was he doing?
Preparing a meal?
A smile wound its way onto her lips as she recalled a moment with him, one shortly after he had moved into his own home on the grounds of the main palace in the Underworld.
He had confessed he found the thought of learning to cook appealing.
She had teased him often about that in the years that had followed, and always he had grumbled about how his parents insisted that the household staff took care of that sort of thing for him.
His parents were as old-world as her brother, believed that cooking and cleaning were the domain of servants, not the gods who ruled the lands of the Underworld and Olympus.
Enyo had tried to cook once, had been wandering the shores of Olympus near to the port and had found herself on rocks that jutted out into the crystal-clear water. Fish had been swimming around below her, and she had watched them for a while before realising that she wasn’t alone.
Two men had been fishing further along the shore and she had approached them, had been curious about what they were doing. They had kindly answered her questions and made an offering of fish to her.
She had attempted to cook it on their open fire, much to their amusement.
Apparently, it was better to remove the guts first.
A lesson that she still remembered now, together with how she had made the two men laugh by mentioning how removing guts was a specialty of hers.
Enyo let those memories fade away and focused back on the present, on the dark god in the building opposite her as he stood with his back to her, still in the same place she had left him when her mind had wandered.
She was putting things off. She knew it deep in her heart. The memories she conjured were a distraction, a way of lingering where she was, avoiding facing him.
She pulled down an unsteady breath and blew it out, steeling herself.
“Be brave,” she murmured softly and rose to her feet.
She clenched her fists at her sides and then flexed her fingers, called to mind all the times she had gone to battle. Countless wars. She had fought in thousands of them with her brother and sometimes alone. This was no different to them, and no more frightening.
It was though.
It was infinitely more terrifying.
She hadn’t seen Keras since he had been banished to this world.
Since she had told him that she was betrothed to another.
She stared at Keras’s back, aching with the need to go to him, to look into his eyes and read his feelings in them as she used to.
Had he ever had feelings for her beyond friendship?
He had closely guarded his heart when she had known him, had never given her a clear indication that he felt the same way as she did. Maybe if he had, she would have found the courage to defy her brother two hundred years ago.
She pushed those thoughts aside, aware that they weren’t helping her and that there was no point in thinking about how things might have been. She couldn’t change the past.
She could only shape the future.
Starting right here, right now.
By speaking with him again.
Would he remember her?
Marek said that he did, but for some reason she couldn’t bring herself to place what little faith she had in the words he had offered her. She feared that Marek was wrong and that if Keras had ever felt something for her, those feelings either no longer existed or no longer matched hers.
“Focus on why you are here,” she muttered, using it to bolster her courage. “You came to give him information.”
A sound plan.
One she had put into motion upon hearing from her brother that Nemesis had betrayed Hades.
Enyo had done a little digging, as Marek called it, and had heard many rumours about Nemesis.
She sucked down another breath and held it as she teleported, appearing in a swirl of white-blue smoke in the kitchen of Keras’s home.
Only a few feet behind him.
Her heart thundered, blood rushing like a torrent through her veins as nerves instantly crashed over her, had her hands shaking so badly she had to ball them into fists at her sides.