“Off the deep end?” She couldn’t hide the confusion that swept over her, knew he had heard it when a semblance of a smile touched his lips.
“A mortal saying. It means to lose control. To be wild.”
Enyo filed it away as she looked from the bottle to him, concern replacing her confusion. Valen had lost control, and Keras had decided to imbibe the same mortal-made brew that had made him wild.
Did he want to go off the deep end too?
“And you?” She frowned at him. “What did you feel?”
Her eyes strayed to the bottle again.
“Nothing.” Keras shifted a step to his left, into the path of her gaze.
“Why?” She lifted her eyes back to his, unsure whether she was asking him why it hadn’t worked or why he had done something as reckless as drinking mortal alcohol when he knew how badly it affected him and his brothers.
He hiked his shoulders. “I am still trying to figure that one out.”
Enyo moved around him, deeper into the kitchen, curiosity and concern pulling her forwards, flooding her with a need to see the bottle. “How much did you drink?”
He took hold of it before she could get a look at it by moving around him and held it up for her to see.
A third of it was missing.
Far more than she had expected.
She hoped to the gods that he had at least started with a sip to gauge his reaction to it rather than diving straight in at a full glass.
She stared at the bottle, unable to shake the feeling something was wrong. Very wrong. A third of a bottle of alcohol was a lot for him to drink. Was this more than an experiment?
Had he hoped to awaken the same destructive power that Valen had by drinking alcohol?
Her gaze drifted back to meet his.
Why would he want to unleash that sort of power on this world?
His eyes revealed nothing, not a single trace of what he was feeling. His heart was closed to her, and it chilled her, had the warmth she had felt from being in his presence and in his arms turning to ice in her veins.
She reminded herself that she deserved his anger and this cold shoulder. She had come here to make amends, to slowly piece their friendship back together and perhaps even build on it in time. Olympus hadn’t been built in a day, and she was going to have to pick up the rubble of their past before she could begin constructing the future she wanted with him.
Or at least a path that might bring her there if he felt something for her.
Right now, she wasn’t sure that he did.
In fact, she felt certain he didn’t, and that he never had.
She tried to focus on the present, refusing to let the past jade her or read into things too much. She had leaped the first hurdle. She just had to keep on her feet now and keep running forwards. No looking back.
“Perhaps your inhibitors are too strong?” she said.
He tensed and his eyes darkened briefly, a shadow passing across them that lifted when he glanced down at his wrists, at the twin bands that encircled them, dampening his powers so he could be in this world without destroying it with the strength of them.
She’d had thousands of years in this world to learn to control her power, and he had been thrust into it without any training, expected to know how to hold back his strength.
“A reaction?” Enyo watched him closely, canting her head to her right as she tried to decipher whether the alcohol he had consumed was affecting him.
He barely shook his head and didn’t look at her.
She closed the distance between them again and took hold of his hands. An electric thrill bolted up both of her arms, had a shiver tripping down her spine as she felt the coolness of his skin against hers. He had always run a few degrees colder than her, something she blamed on his father’s genes.
Hades could be as cold as they came.
Enyo used her thumbs to brush the cuffs of his black dress shirt back and stroked them over the twin braided onyx bands that encircled his wrists, sitting flush against his skin. The power locked within them seeped into her.
The man she had known in the Underworld.
Never as strong as she was, but still incredibly powerful.
She watched her thumbs caressing his wrists, fought another bout of nerves and ridiculous tears that wanted to fill her eyes as she felt a shadow of the connection that had once existed between them.
Keras’s hands.
Strong. Capable. Skilled in battle.
Wrestling her emotions back under control, she lifted her gaze to his face, burning with a need to take it in again.
His green eyes lingered on her hands where she touched him, something she couldn’t decipher slowly filling them.
“I really did miss you,” she whispered, and cursed when the tears she thought she had wrangled under control began to fill her eyes. She blinked them away before he could see them. “I haven’t had a good fight in centuries.”
He smiled, but it lacked the emotion it would have held once.
He slipped his hands free of hers and turned his back to her, grabbed the glass and carried it to the sink to her left.
Enyo stared at the bottle on the black counter.
It worried her to see him doing something so irresponsible.
It wasn’t like him.
Sure, she had been hitting the ambrosia again recently, since things had started getting more intense in the mortal world. She had needed the escape it offered as her worry for Keras’s safety had grown.
Was Keras seeking such an escape too?
Keras casually turned back to face her, the air between them growing awkward again, something she felt sure she was the only one feeling. He stared at her in silence, and again she was hit by the fact that there wasn’t a single trace of emotion in his emerald eyes, none of the anger she deserved for avoiding him for two centuries and for the manner of their parting.
He was strangely calm.
There wasn’t even a hint of hurt in him.
It made her feel as if she was looking at a different man.
In the centuries she had known him, Keras had always shared his father’s personality, often calm on the surface but seething with powerful emotions beneath, a churning and dangerous mass of them that were liable to erupt to the surface at any moment. He had always been unpredictable. She had never known when his temper would snap, but she had always known when he was angry. His tone had never revealed it, but his eyes had.
Now those eyes were empty as they gazed at her.
She thought about the things Marek had said to her and the messages Valen had sent.
And felt they were both right.
Something was wrong with Keras.
Very wrong.
Keras cleared his throat, seeming to shake himself out of whatever thoughts were keeping him quiet, and approached her again, narrowing the gap between them down to a foot.
He leaned against the counter again, folded his arms over his chest and said, “How does your brother Ares fare?”
She couldn’t hold back her smile. “He grows impatient for battle and has been pursuing Aphrodite again.”
Keras lifted his left hand and touched the small black heart-shaped mark on his cheek where the goddess had kissed him when he was a baby, bestowing her favour upon him. His fingers swept backwards, brushing the pointed tip of his sideburn that accentuated his cheekbone, and then he ran his hand around the back of his head.
Let it drop to his neck.
Drawing her eyes with it.
Her gaze lingered on his throat, watching the fast tick of his pulse. She wasn’t the only one who was nervous. Perhaps that was why he was being so quiet and distant. He was feeling as unsure about things as she was.