“Back to taking the empire the smart way,” Yuri says. “More boring. Still effective.” Again we drink.
Viktor catches my eye. He looks concerned.
“I’m fine,” I say. A lie.
That’s when I catch sight of dark hair across the lobby. Mira. She’s heading to the elevator banks.
She turns to me as if she feels the weight of my gaze. And then she smiles. Her smile is like the sun.
I think it’s a dream. A mirage, maybe.
I stand, glass cool in my fingertips, as she turns and starts toward me, past the grand stone waterfall, dark hair catching the light from above.
She looks so beautiful, I think it can’t be real. I feel something cool dribbling over my fingers.
“You are spilling it, brat.” Viktor takes my glass from my hand. “I would not like you to waste good vodka. Even on a spoiled mafia princess.” A joke, I suppose. I’m barely comprehending. I’m already gone, moving across the gleaming marble floor. I stop in front of her, speechless.
She just grins. She’s happy. The haunted look is gone.
“What’s wrong?” she asks. “I got a bluebird on my shoulder?”
I go to her and yank her in for a kiss. She’s warm and real and everything I love.
She pulls back with a mischievous expression. I think she’s going to give me shit for drinking vodka at two in the afternoon.
She doesn’t.
“You and your fucking English toffee and selfless gestures and you expect me to get on a plane? I love you, Aleksio.”
My heart twists. “You said love wasn’t enough. The whole thing with the sandcastles?”
“Yeah, you’re still kicking down sandcastles, but some of them need kicking down. I want to kick them down with you—like that Valhalla, for starters.” She gets a serious look here. “But then let’s make our own life, our own rules. Build something better than what our families built. Together. What do you think?”
“Yes. Fuck yes.” I brush the hair from her forehead. I love her like this. A rebel and a warrior. I grab her hair and kiss her.
And somewhere out there baby animals are laughing, and it doesn’t have to mean everything is doomed. It can just mean something stupidly normal.
Like happiness.
Like forever.

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Annika Martin is a NYT bestselling author who loves reading fun, steamy books, doing yoga, taking pictures of her cats, rocking out to 90’s music, taking long baths, consuming See’s chocolate suckers, mooning over heroes’ hands, helping animals, and connecting with readers. She can be found hanging out in Minneapolis coffee shops with her awesome writer husband and tending her crazy bee-friendly garden.
Learn My Lesson
Katee Robert
Chapter One
Meg
Once upon a time, a woman fell in love with a man. He wasn’t a good man. Men never are, I’ve found. But this woman hadn’t learned that hard lesson yet. She still had stars in her eyes and the kind of innocent love in her heart that the world delights in setting aflame.
When the man asked the woman for a favor, just a tiny little favor to prove her love to him, because she did love him, didn’t she? Of course she said yes. Of course he left her to pay the price for his sins. Of course he never once looked back.
And the woman?
The woman lost her innocence in the flames of his betrayal.
She rose from the ashes, a goddess in her own right, second only to her new master.
It’s a good story, as such things go. Far more romantic than the reality: I loved the wrong man and made a deal with the devil to save him. That kind of man doesn’t cleave to innocence lost, no matter what lies he spilled to bargain me away, and he left me as soon as the price was paid.
It’s just as well.
The devil suits me better anyway.
The devil in question sits next to me in a corner booth in a restaurant that’s unfamiliar to me. He’s wearing his usual suit that always seems a tiny bit rumpled in the sexiest way possible and his salt-and-pepper hair is styled to perfection. Add in the thick black-framed glasses, and it’s enough to have me clenching my thighs together in anticipation. Or it would be if I didn’t know him better.
Nearly ten years at his side and I know what the gleam in those dark eyes and the tiny smile pulling at the edge of his sensual lips means. Nothing good. Not for me. Not for whoever he has his eye on.
I idly stroke the stem of my wine glass and sigh. Another day, another game of manipulation. Sometimes, I swear Hades pulls shit just to keep boredom at bay. When one rules his little sliver of Carver City and has every other ruler in town simpering at his feet, boredom is the only real danger he faces.
I wish my life were that simple.
I contend with boredom. Of course I do. I’m Hades’s right hand, his queen, the second most powerful person at the Underworld. No one would dare touch me. To do so is to court his wrath, and if there’s a single person in this world who holds a grudge better than I do, it’s Hades.
None of that protects me from the harm a decade together can cause. The kind of drifting that sets two people at odds despite their best efforts. I don’t know where we went so wrong, and I can’t begin to fix something so broken on my own. Hades doesn’t even seem to notice the distance between us that grows more and more uncrossable with each day that passes.
“How would you like to play a game, love?”
If he were the real Hades, or whatever creature rules the afterlife, he couldn’t be more tempting and dangerous than he is in these moments. I look away. I have to. I’m not the green twenty-three-year-old girl who bargained away her life for a man who’d forget her before the day had passed. I know better than not to play a game with this man.