Tempted (18 page)

She kissed him harder, deeper, like a woman starved. Her nipples rubbing against his bare chest was the most erotic feeling. Her hot sex straining against his fly had him seeing stars. Frantic to get inside her, he laid her out on the blankets, kissed her again and again, and pressed his hips into hers until they were both breathless and sweaty.

“Oh, gods, Demetrius.”

The sound of her voice cut through the screaming need. He eased back just enough to stare down at her. At her swollen lips, her cheeks rubbed raw by his whiskers, her straining nipples, her heaving chest, her naked hips pressed against his, and finally her sex poised to take him deep into her body.

Him. Atalanta’s son. The enemy.

She stared up at him with soft, trusting eyes. Eyes that didn’t see the real him. Eyes that would be horrified if they ever did.

Sickness pushed up the center of his chest. And reality, harsh and way too real, pressed in until he couldn’t breathe.

This couldn’t happen. This could never happen. He had to get away from her. He never should have touched her. Never should have tasted her. Holy Hades,
what
had he been thinking?

He jerked to his feet, rubbed a hand down his face. Tried to quell the panic roaring in with the force of a jackhammer, but couldn’t.

“Wh-where are you going?”

“Out. I gotta go…out.”

She pushed up on her elbows. “But I thought—”

His mind spun with excuses. Latched on to one coherent thought. “That’s your problem, Princess. You think too much. I changed my mind.”

“But—”

He had to twist the knife. It was the only way he was going to break free. It was the only way he was going to guarantee she never let him near her again. And he knew the one way to do it, even if the thought sent bile sliding up his chest.

“Look, I figured you had a little more experience, but apparently I was wrong. I’m really not into the whole virgin thing. More work than it’s worth.”

Shock ran across her perfect face, followed by disbelief, then abject mortification. Her cheeks turned bright red and she drew the blanket up to her chin with fingers that shook just enough to tell him he’d done exactly what he intended to do. He’d made her feel as shitty as he did.

His chest squeezed so hard it was all he could do not to drop to his knees and tell her he didn’t mean it. Instead he turned for the stairs and forced himself not to look back.

He didn’t have to. He already knew what was on her face. The image of her pleasure was now branded into his brain along with the horror of what he’d just said to her. And it would stay with him for a long time. As long, probably, as the knowledge that his suspicions over the years had been right. One taste had confirmed it.

Isadora really was his soul mate.

***

Casey stood in the center of Demetrius’s flat in the rundown Tenedos region of Tiyrns and turned a slow circle on the stained carpet as she looked from the barren table and chairs to the threadbare couch across the room.

The fact that Demetrius, one of the Argonauts, lived here surprised her. Especially when she contrasted this to the massive wood and glass house she and Theron shared in the forests outside the city. But what shocked her more than anything was the garbage that lined the cobblestone streets outside, the busted-out shop windows, and the abandoned belongings. And mostly, the ragged people she and the others had passed as they’d come here, watching them with wary eyes as if they were the villains in a B movie.

Argolea was a beautiful realm, a place of peace and safety. But the more time Casey spent here, the more she realized it wasn’t Utopia. It had its own share of problems, its own class system and prejudices, just like any country. And, now she knew, its own poverty issue.

“I didn’t realize Demetrius was such a neat freak,” Cerek said from across the room. He ran his index finger over a side table and held it up to show Phineus not a speck of dust.

“Don’t touch anything,” Theron warned his guardians. He turned to Casey. “
Meli?
”

Casey shook her head. “It’s like he never spent time here. I can’t pick up enough of him to get any kind of feeling. Are you sure this is his flat?”

Theron rested his hands on his hips and frowned as he glanced around the empty apartment. Across the room, Callia, Max, and Zander inspected something on the kitchen wall. “This is his listed place of residence.”

A heavy bass echoed through the floor and Casey looked down at her feet, sure they were moving in time with the beat. The rowdy pub one floor below was not what she’d expected either. But then what did she really know about Demetrius to begin with?

“Look around,” Theron said. “There’s got to be something we can use.”

They each fanned out, checking the small flat that consisted of only a near-empty living room, a closet-sized adjoining kitchen, one bathroom, and a bedroom that held no bed. There were no pictures on the walls, no clothes in the closet, nothing in the kitchen that said anyone lived here.

Just when Casey was sure they’d hit another dead end, Max’s small voice from the bedroom called, “Here! I think I found something here!”

The bedroom wasn’t large enough for all of them to fit inside. Casey pushed her way past Cerek and Phineus and stepped into the room, only to realize Max was all the way in the back of the small closet.

“What did you find?” she asked, moving around Zander to peer inside.

“A door,” he said in an excited voice. “And there’s a ladder in here. It’s just like…”

Max didn’t finish the sentence, and one glance at Callia’s suddenly taut face told Casey it reminded Max of the door and ladder in Atalanta’s prison that led to the small loft she’d kept him locked inside.

Max was a resilient kid, but ten years with Atalanta had left its mark, and Callia and Zander were working hard to make sure he felt safe here. Casey reached into the closet and pulled him out of the small space. “I’ll go up.”

As soon as he was free from the closet, Callia immediately pulled Max against her and mouthed
Thank
you
over his head. Casey shot her sister a sad smile and turned to enter the closet, but Theron’s hand on her arm stopped her momentum.

“
Meli
, wait.”

“It’s all right, Theron. Nothing’s going to happen to me up there. I’m the only one who can get a feel for who has been there, so it makes sense I should go up. Besides, this is Demetrius we’re talking about. He’s one of your Argonauts, not the enemy.”

“I’m not so sure anymore,” he said with a scowl.

She squeezed his arm and stared into his eyes. And as she did, the connection they shared flared hot and bright. He might worry about her, he might order everyone around and frustrate her with his secrets sometimes, but she knew everything he did was done out of honor and duty and love. The last saved especially for her.

“I will be right back,” she whispered.

He rested his forehead against hers. “Or I will bring you right back down.”

Her heart warmed at his words and she smiled when he let go and nudged her into the closet.

Darkness closed in around her. The small door Max had found was all the way in the back of the claustrophobic space. As she moved to her knees and reached inside the wall to grasp the rungs of the old wooden ladder, she thought,
There’s no way Demetrius could fit in here
.

She started to climb, one rung at a time. The only light that flickered into the tunnel came from below, but it wasn’t enough to see even an inch in front of her face. A spray of dust from the rung she grasped hit her face and she coughed several times to clear the debris from her lungs.

“Are you okay?” Theron called up from the bottom.

“Fine.” Cobwebs tickled her cheeks and she swiped at them with her hand, closed her eyes tight, and kept going. She climbed another five feet in the inky darkness before her hand hit something solid above.

“I’ve found something,” she called down to Theron.

“What?”

His voice was muffled. He sounded like he was a mile away, but she knew she hadn’t been climbing that long. Realizing what she was touching was wood, she felt around until she found what she thought was a handle. “I think…I think it’s a door.”

“Does it open?”

She slid her fingers into the loop handle, pulled, but nothing happened. Gritting her teeth, she pushed. A scraping sound echoed and then popped with a force that jerked her shoulder in the socket. Using what little strength she had, she pushed the door up and over. “I’m through!”

Brilliant light flooded her eyes and she slammed them shut to block the glare.

“What do you see?”

“I…Hold on a minute and I’ll tell you.”

Bracing her hands on the floor above, Casey climbed the rest of the way out of the hole and dropped back to sit. Her legs hung down into the dark tunnel below as she rubbed at her eyes and blinked several times to let them adjust to the light.

It took several seconds for her vision to clear, but when it did she realized she was in some kind of lookout room on the top of Demetrius’s building. Square windows covered every inch of wall space in the octagonal room, rose at least twelve feet to form a dome above. A pile of blankets were gathered in the corner of the room, wrinkled as if someone had slept there. Books littered the floor, ones about weaponry and warfare and others with the Titan symbol stamped into the leather fronts. Clothes were stacked in neat orderly piles along the floor of one whole wall and laid carefully in boxes along another. Fresh weapons that looked just like the ones the Argonauts used were stacked in the corner. To her right she spied a large telescope that peered out over the rooftops of the city of Tiyrns. But what made Casey gasp, what tore the air from her lungs and sent dread pooling in her stomach, were the pictures.

Along every glass wall, taped up like snapshots, were dozens and dozens of pictures of Isadora. Close-ups of her face, ones of her dressed in her traditional gowns, talking to the guards, staring out at nothing in the courtyard of the castle, reading a book on the marble steps. Over and over and over, images of her were repeated like a sickening pattern, with her as the constant focus, the obvious obsession of the person who called this room home.

“Oh, my God.” Slowly, Casey pushed up to her feet.

“
Meli?
” Theron called.

“I’m okay,” she called back, zeroing in on the telescope. “Don’t come up here.”

Throat thick, she crossed the room, rose on her tiptoes, and looked through the eyepiece. She felt Demetrius’s presence in the room as soon as she touched the telescope, but she looked anyway, needing to know…hoping…

The image focused in the telescope and in a rush she realized she was staring into the windows of Isadora’s suite of rooms in the castle. Isadora’s disappearance, her abduction by those witches…it all suddenly made sense. “Oh, no.”

“Holy
skata
,” Theron breathed behind her.

Casey lurched around to see the horrified expression on Theron’s face as he pulled himself out of the tunnel and stood in the middle of the room. He turned slowly, and as the enormity of what they’d found sank in, the horror quickly faded and was replaced with a murderous look she knew came from the very core of him.

“It doesn’t mean—”

“It does. He’s been planning this for gods only know how fucking long. And we let him.” His hard jaw ticked beneath the smooth skin she loved to run her fingers and lips over. “Touch something, but make it fast. I don’t want you exposed to this vileness any more than you have to be. Just tell me if he’s Atalanta’s son. I don’t want you looking any deeper than that.”

Her heart dropped, and with it the little bit of hope she’d held out for Demetrius’s intentions. And though she couldn’t help thinking that in spite of everything else it didn’t really matter, she wondered what Theron would say when she told him Demetrius was also part witch. “I already did.”

“And?”

She sighed. “And Gryphon was right.”