17

17

To The Dubious Victor…

If I’m not careful, I’ll have run up those stairs and vomited on his shoes for nothing. So I pin a sweet smile on my lips. “Of course I want my prizes.”

“I thought so.” Now he’s back to being an ass. “The first gift chooses you.”

“Are all the others doing this in their individual houses?”

Irritation at my interruption crosses his features, then fades. “Yes. If we don’t know what gifts the others have given, it makes things more—”

“Challenging. I get it.” I roll my eyes. “You gods truly do like to have your fun.”

His gaze turns derisive, and his perfect lips curl. “Don’t include me with them. I had nothing to do with the Anaxian Wars and nothing to do with their Crucible, either.”

Which means his entering this time is deliberate and not just to punish me. Curiosity kicks in so hard, the rest of the room fades, my focus narrowing on him and him alone. “Then why now?”

Hades’ face tightens, just for a heartbeat, before he smooths it back. But I caught it. He slipped, telling me that.

“Let’s just say I have a different game to win.”

I blink back at him. “And I’m your pawn?”

After a second, he shrugs, the action so uncaring, so callously casual.

I blow out a long breath, trying very hard not to lose my cool and knee the god of death in the balls. The more I’m around him, the more I forget who and what he is. That’s a dangerous thing to forget. “How about we get on with the prizes?”

“Watch it,” he warns, and I think maybe the fires in the braziers in the corners curl toward me a little. “You amuse me…for now.”

In other words, I’m not reaping consequences as long as I keep amusing him.

I’m too tired to deal with this, so I do what I do with Felix when he throws his weight around. Lowering my gaze timidly like a dutiful little mortal, I clasp my hands in front of me and wait.

A heavy sigh reaches me.

“You’re a menace,” Hades mutters, then takes off his suit jacket. He rolls up his sleeves like he could only stand being confined by those clothes for so long.

I glance away. Forearms aren’t sexy. They are just body parts.

“Here.” He takes my right hand in his, clasping them palm to palm, then closes his eyes and whispers a few words I don’t catch. Almost immediately, he jerks his gaze down to our hands.

No, not to our hands. To his arm.

As if he’d roused sleeping spirits, lines appear in the wake of his touch, and I stare as tattoos that weren’t there a second ago materialize on his skin. Not tattoos, though—not black lines of ink. These are colorful and glittering, and each set of simple lines forms a different animal—a blue owl, a green panther, a purple fox, a red tarantula, and…a tiny, adorable silver butterfly.

As if they are alive, they move across his skin, the tarantula greeting the butterfly with what seems like a little wave of one of its legs, the owl flapping its wings at the snarling panther. I can’t look away, fascination holding me in thrall.

The owl in particular looks at Hades in question. Asking permission, I think?

“It’s okay. Go to your new mistress and help her,” Hades commands.

The tarantula, closest to our clasped hands, is the first to move, scuttling across his skin and onto mine, and I gasp at the sensation of tiny bubbles as it finds a new home on my wrist. Then the fox slinks forward, its tail the last thing to disappear around Hades’ palm before it sits on my arm and wraps that tail around its paws, cocking its head in curiosity. The other animals follow, picking their places on my skin and blinking up at me.

All except the butterfly.

“You too,” he says. But she stays in place, wings slowly flapping.

“Looks like I’m not the only one who doesn’t listen to you,” I whisper.

His gaze snaps up to my face, but I don’t meet it.

“It’s fine,” I tell the loyal little creature. “You can stay with him.”

“You promised to obey me, Lyra.”

I raise my eyebrows, then offer my most pleasant smile. “Did I?” I never really agreed.

Hades releases my hand, the warmth from his rough palm against mine seeps away…and the absence feels like a loss.

Get a grip.

“You’re lucky,” he says finally. “They haven’t left my arm for someone else since my mother gave them to me.”

His mother? The Titaness Rhea? A being he and his brothers fought and caged in Tartarus with all the other Titans. These are from her? I stare at them.

“Draw your finger from your elbow to your wrist,” Hades tells me.

When I do, the animals disappear, closing their eyes and lying down as they sink into my skin and fade away.

“Wow,” I whisper.

“Now, when you awaken them, they will listen to you.”

I raise my gaze to his. “To do what?”

“Whatever you need. They can bring you items. Or you can send them to find information—scout out the best route, overhear conversations, spy on other champions.” His lips tilt. “Maybe on the gods, if you’re careful.”

Sounds like a good way to land myself another curse.

“You don’t have to send them all at the same time,” he says. “Just like the animals they represent, each has different talents you can use.”

I look back down at my skin, which is now blank as if they were never there. As if they’re not sleeping under the surface.

Hades clears his throat. “You are also allowed a gift from me personally…”

He pauses.

Long enough that it hits me. The god of death is…hesitating.

His gaze drops lower. “I offer you a kiss.”

By now I should stop being shocked, especially by Hades, but the impact of that word reverberates like a tuning fork striking metal. It shivers through me all the way to my core, where a new sensation stirs. An uneasy sensation.

A haunting sensation.

I’ve never been kissed. I shouldn’t want it. Should I? Or is this just curiosity?

He steps into me, forcing me to tip my head up. “This kiss will mark you as mine.”

In the less than twenty-four hours I’ve known him, I’ve felt a thousand different emotions when it comes to this god—fear, hate, irritation, envy, frustration, grudging gratefulness. Most of those feelings run along the lines of anger, the burn of it rising and falling with each passing event.

I didn’t deserve this. Any of it.

So no one is more surprised than me when the word “mine,” uttered in that silky voice with his mercurial gaze intent on my face, stirs in my belly a quivering, like his precious butterflies are all trapped inside me.

No. Definitely no. Horrifyingly no. A very hard no. I am not getting fluttery over any god or goddess, but especially not this one.

With a tiny step backward, I frown at him. “What kind of gift is that?”

He looks right back at me. “This mark will give you safe passage through the Underworld so that you may return to the Overworld and not get trapped down there.”

“Oh.”

I don’t move back when he takes another step closer. That’s a gift worth receiving, even if it involves a kiss.

Hades takes one more step, and his unique bitter-chocolate scent wraps around me. He uses a gentle finger under my chin to tilt my face up to his, then leans down slowly. Only instead of a brotherly kiss somewhere neutral, his lips hover over mine, almost touching.

His breath is warm against my flesh before I realize what he’s doing, and I make a tiny sound in my throat.

Immediately, he freezes, gaze lifting to meet mine, though he doesn’t move away. “Problem?”

“Can’t you just kiss my forehead or cheek?” Gods, I sound like a petrified virgin. Which I am, but no need to sound like it.

After a second, he slowly shakes his head. “It doesn’t work that way. Do you want a different gift?”

No. This is a gift no one should knock back. Worse, I shouldn’t want to kiss him, but that curiosity thing has me firmly in its clawed grip. It’s not like I’m risking my heart.

It’s just a kiss, Lyra.

Decision made, I close my eyes and tilt my face toward his like a sunflower following Apollo. “Go ahead.”

He doesn’t move for so long that I almost open my eyes again, but then his lips touch mine.

Softly at first, but that’s not the surprising part. It’s that he doesn’t simply kiss me and then be done with it. Instead he brushes, then brushes again before pressing his lips to mine more firmly. He only lightly touches my chin with his fingers and my lips with his, but his warmth seeps into me…everywhere.

His lips gently part mine, shaping, teasing, becoming more demanding, and I don’t pull away. I’m too caught up in the everything of it. My head spins, and I don’t know which way is up, down, or sideways. I open under his touch and lean into him, and he doesn’t hesitate, the kiss taking on a heat and a life of its own as he plunders and owns and takes even as he gives.

And I don’t want to stop.

Because the god of death’s kisses are…delicious.

A craving stirs for more as his chocolate scent swirls around me, blending with the taste of him.

He makes a sound deep in his throat, then his kisses change again, turning hungry, hot, and menacing, like the predator I know he is, but it’s too late for me. Too late in so many ways. I’m lost in my response to him. Matching him kiss for kiss in heat and heady, intoxicating peril. Exposed and undeniably vulnerable and yet powerful in my own right because he groans.

Hades groans.

With no other warning, his power releases through that touch. It snaps through me in a wildfire of sensation, searing every single tiny nerve, every inch, spreading outward from my lips. His magic consumes me like a blaze as it sinks into and under my skin to lie there in wait like his tattoos.

Marking me as his.

An involuntary tremble takes hold of me. In its wake—as the blaze cools and the magic settles—comes the cold snap of reality, of where we are, of the only reason he’s kissing me. And I go as still as a corpse under his touch. Hades must sense the change in me, because, though he still holds my chin with his thumb and forefinger, I feel him pull back slightly.

I blink my eyes open to stare wordlessly up at him, holding my breath—because what could I possibly say in this moment?

“I wondered…” he whispers, more to himself than me. Those silver eyes spark almost like they’re touched with starlight, and for the wildest second, I think maybe he’s as shaken as I am.

But then he offers me a knowing smirk.

Damned if I’m going to stand here and awkwardly avert my gaze like a girl who just had her first kiss. Instead, I scowl and say the first thing that comes to mind. “Of course the god of death kisses like a demon.”