Chapter 30

Evie

Garden District, New Orleans, Louisiana

C ole stopped touching me . In the wake of more life-changing news, that was the only thing Evie could think about. She should definitely have an opinion on the story Cole had shared. She should have some extremely important thoughts of her own to discuss. But, even though intellectually she knew these things, her brain kept cycling through only one thought: Cole stopped touching me . And what was worse? She knew exactly why he had stopped touching her. He wanted her to make a choice without his touch influencing her. Not that that was going to work. He was going to have to forcibly remove her from his lap if he wanted to avoid touching her.

She tried to shake herself into rational thought, but that one repetitive phrase remained.

“Angel?” Cole’s voice brought her back. He still sat motionless under her. “You got any thoughts on… any of that?”

“So when you told me you were a reincarnated god.” Her voice trailed off. “That was… real? You weren’t just being self-important?”

Cole snickered at her question but pulled himself together quickly. “First off, if I could have gotten out of this prophecy years ago, I would have. It’s a huge burden for a kid to have around their neck. I never wanted to be royalty. Second off, I don’t need to try that hard to be important.”

“So all of it’s real?” Evie asked softly. After everything in the clearing, all of their time together, there was no way that he was crazy or it was coincidence. Which meant that the gods of legend were real.

“Yeah, it’s real. I wish it weren’t. That we could be normal together, no pressures besides me being an idiot with the romantic intuition of a goat.”

“Why did you tell me everything?” Seriously, that’s what she was was asking? Why he was being honest with her?

Based on his slightly raised eyebrows, he was also confused. “Why did I—wait, are you asking why I told you the truth?”

She wrinkled her nose but nodded even still. “It sounds like you need me for you, but that there’s this whole other component. Why would you tell me any of this if you could just keep me here with you and surprise me with the rest?”

He gave her a deep scowl. “Because when you stay with me—and you will stay with me, Angel—I want it to be because of me. And if, beyond that, we choose to rule—I want it to be because you chose to do that too. I don’t want to trick you into anything .” With a sigh, he continued. “And there are going to be a lot of people who know the magical lore surrounding us. I never want you to feel like you were ever a person I was ‘stuck with.’ You’re here with me because I can’t fucking stand the idea of you not being here with me, not because of some damn prophecy.”

“But Kore’s curse. She did that to reunite their memories and powers, but you said it was also to finish what they started.” She was going to stay with him, of that she had no doubt. Yes, she loved her sisters and her life in the forest, but she had a feeling that anything she felt for this man would make the change bearable. But she wanted to know everything first. No lies, no half-truths. “What does that mean for us?”

Cole scrubbed his hand over his face. “We would have to do a lot. We would have to access the Underworld, which has been… sitting for millennia. No one can access it, either entering or exiting. Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.” He heaved a small almost laugh at the Shakespeare quote. One of her favorites, if she was being honest; of course her mystery man would use it in conversation. “We would be the king and queen of the Underworld, tasked with setting up a court and a living system down there. And we would have to retrieve all of the shades. We could enlist help to do that, but we would have to bring back every single shade that escaped way back when, every soul that has died and stayed on this earth for millennia. It’s a massive undertaking.”

“What does accessing the Underworld mean?”

“Without a deity leading it, the Underworld is, for all intents and purposes, closed for business. So, right now, nobody, including souls of the recently deceased, can enter or exit the Underworld. It’s just there. The king and queen must take their rightful place, vow their lives to the throne.” Cole saw the question cross her face before it left her mouth.

“How do they do that?”

Evie saw him struggling with the answer, almost caved and let him get away without telling her, but didn’t. Eventually, Cole spoke once more, but it was a mumble. “What? I couldn’t hear you.” Raising his voice slightly, he tried again but still… only an incomprehensible mashup of words. “Try again. This time clearly, Cole.”

Clenching his teeth, he gritted out his response. “They consummate the relationship.”

“They consummate the relation—” Her mouth dropped open as she realized what he was saying. “You're saying that the key to opening the Underworld is to have sex.” A nod. “And if we have sex, then the Underworld just . . . magically opens up?”

A shrug was her response. “I think we’re already seeing the effects of us being close,” he commented. “The earthquakes are too weirdly timed to be anything else.”

“They’ve only ever happened when we’ve been together.” She turned over the idea in her mind, squinting as she puzzled it out. “Is that the Underworld, what, welcoming us home?”

“I honestly don’t know,” he responded. “We’re the first since Aidoneus and Kore who it would recognize as its rightful rulers. So there’s basically no rulebook except the old texts and, no offense to my ancestors, but they’re pretty fucking useless. It’s a lot of guessing, most of the time. Although Charlie is usually good at interpreting these things, especially whether my ancestors sanitized stuff while on their puritanical bullshit or not. Like, one of my ancestors said that marriage was a requirement to take over the throne, but it didn’t line up with anything else, so we threw that one away as nonsense. Sex, though. That's always a requirement.”

Evie tangled her fingers together. She would feel so much better if Cole was actually freaking touching her for this discussion. “So in every scenario, us having sex will open the Underworld? That’s why the earthquakes are happening when they do?” She paused. “They’re happening because we’re one step closer to taking on the roles?”

He shrugged. “That’s my best guess. I confirmed with Charlie that sex for any reason will do the trick, which, by the way, was a hysterically uncomfortable conversation to have with the man who raised me.” She giggled. “But I don’t actually know about all the lead-up stuff since I’ve been, y’know, chasing you through forests and shit.” A smirk tugged at the corners of his mouth, and his voice lilted up playfully. “You know I got a job, right, witchling, that isn’t stalking your pretty little ass through the forest?”

“Well,” Evie responded, trailing off. She knew what she wanted to say. She knew she wanted Cole’s hands on her, especially if they were having a conversation about their future. “If you’re going to talk about my pretty little ass, you should probably have your hands on it, right?”

Cole’s eyes lit up, but he groaned, almost like he was in pain. “I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but my hands need to stay off that perfect body of yours until you decide.” At her slight snort of disbelief, he grimaced. “I'm trying to do this right. I don’t want to distract you. This decision is huge, and I want you to feel like you have a choice in all of it. I really do.” He grew serious once more, his face stark in its intensity. “But let’s be clear: your choice is whether we take our seats as rulers of the underworld. You made your decision to stay with me when we left that clearing together.”

In a second, Evie’s mirth vanished. “So, in the forest, when you said me leaving with you was it? That there was no coming back from it. You meant it?”

“Every fucking word, Angel.

“So why did you stop touching me, Cole?” she asked. “If I made my choice—and I did because I left my coven with you after you told me what leaving with you would mean—why would you stop touching me when you gave me a choice?”

"I didn't want to distract you or sway you or anything."

Leaning forward, Evie nuzzled his face, whispering a kiss across his cheek. “Cole, you are unbelievably distracting, but your presence is not prohibitively debilitating. I—”

Her voice cut off in a yelp as he slid a hand under her ass and gripped a cheek tightly. “If you can think straight while I’m touching you, I must not be doing this right.” He traced his thumb across her lips, tugging down her lower lip slightly with the tip of his finger before pulling his hand away with an angry sound. “You need to think about this one, Angel, and think about it hard. We can decide not to rule. We can pass off the reins to somebody else. But it’s a long and hard process, and it means the Underworld would be exposed while we try to find somebody to take the throne. Beyond the difficulty of finding somebody who wants to do the job, it would be kind of like the mafia don leaving their post. If they give up their position of power, their replacement will always think they’re going to try and take it back. Same thing goes if we abdicated. The myths are pretty clear that the gods are a paranoid bunch.”

“Cole.” He was offering her everything she had ever wanted. To be someone’s first choice. To be with someone who wanted her, would choose her over everyone else. “I want to be with you. Whatever that looks like. However that looks.”

“ Ma petite sorcière , I want that too.” He bit at his lower lip, his head tilting back against the couch. “More badly than you know. But I don’t want you to feel pressured into anything.”

“I don’t,” she said immediately, but he wasn’t done.

“I want you to take at least the day to think about it.” He lifted his head, his gaze intense but steady. “You’ve had a shitton of trauma in the last few days, and this is a huge fucking decision.”

“Do you not want me?” Her mouth trembled at the idea.

Cole blinked once. Then again several times in rapid succession. “What?”

“You said that we would be together no matter what and the only question was whether we would be ruling the Underworld. If we’re staying together, but we’re not ruling, then… what, are we just not going to have sex? Ever?”

“Fucking hell.” A low groan rolled out of his mouth. “Of course we’re gonna have sex, baby.”

“Then why are you so reluctant to touch me?”

“Because—” His expression turned ferocious, his arms locking around her waist as he leaned into her, his grip the only thing keeping her from falling to the ground. “I would crawl inside of you right now and stay there for the rest of our fucking lives, prophecy and duty and destiny be damned. Once I’m inside of you, though, I know I’m never going to want to pull out of that tight cunt of yours.”

She gasped at his filthy words, already so turned on by what he was saying that she couldn’t think straight.

One arm unlocked from her waist, and he gripped her hair, rocking his hips against her ass. His hard length settled in between her cheeks as he tugged her head back. His eyes flashed. “So don’t get it wrong—the only reason I’m not fucking you right goddamn now is because I want you to make your decision regarding our rule without any pressure.” He pulled her head back further. Nipped at her neck before licking the slight sting away.

She was panting, practically writhing in his lap, and his breaths were ragged against her throat.

“Trust me when I say that, as soon as you know what your choice is, regardless of what it is, I’ll be ripping off whatever you’re wearing and bending you over the closest piece of furniture.”

A shrill ring echoed through the house. Not the same sound from before but a different higher pitched one.

“Now, though, Angel.” His emerald gaze was still far too piercing—so much so Evie almost couldn’t look him directly in the eyes—but Cole sat up enough to put some space in between their bodies. “I’ve got a surprise for you.”