Page 61 of Scion of Chaos

I blink and turn to Erika. She raises an eyebrow. “Youdohave a plan, right?”

“Yes,” I snap. “We’ll beat them the same way we beat them the last time.”

“That’s it? You don’t think they’ll be prepared for whatever that is?”

“We can adapt. It’s also been thousands of years since the last time we fought. We have all gained power, and there are more of us than there were then.”

“But you don’t have any of the original gods along for the ride, or Prometheus. Didn’t he help the first time?”

I clench my jaw, because she’s right; my squad may be bigger, but we weren’t the only ones fighting the Titans the first time. Many of our allies during the first conflict have scattered to the winds, and it would take far longer than a week to gather them. But we have something we didn’t have the first time—we have Nemea, and if the glimmers of fledgling powers she exhibited are any indication, she will be a force to be reckoned with when she’s learned how to use them.

“I have something more powerful.”Potentially.

The reminder agitates me, and I stand. Training Nemea shouldn’t wait, but neither could this. I should have at least enlisted Erebus to begin her training, or Typhon. Either of my brothers could connect to her magic, even help her control it. Hopefullynotthe way I intend to teach her, though.

I pace to the door to Fate’s office, then back across the waiting room to the window, staring out, unseeing. Superimposed over my field of vision is the shape of the ink trailing over Nemea’s side while I buried my cock into her alongside Pan’s. The curve of her spine as she arched her back with pleasure. The rough cry she let out when she came.

What is she doing now? I mentally reach within, something I normally only do when my guards sound an alarm. What I find causes an involuntary grunt to rise from my chest, as if I’ve just been punched.

I shut down my reach as if slamming a door and fix my gaze on the infinite horizon. It fades to a thin line of shimmering silver at the farthest distance, like a mirage. But the mark of sensation and beauty that greeted me a second ago is still etched against the backdrop, and heat has flooded my body.

Erika clears her throat, and I tear my eyes from the vista. She has one eyebrow lifted and pointedly lowers her gaze to my crotch, then raises it again. “Clearly you like lavender more than I do. I guess everyone has their kink.”

It isn’t until she draws attention to it that I realize how painfully hard I am. I close my coat around my waist and button it.

“It has nothing to do with this place, I promise.”

I sit again, burying my face in my hands. Ilefther. What did I expect would happen? I know the others want her as badly as I do; not one of them was shy about sharing their excitement for her arrival. Asterius only stayed behind because I didn’t need him on this part of the mission. He’s more self-contained than the rest, but even he is affected by her. His eagerness to answer her invitation last night was evidence enough of that.

And now all of them are back in the prison. Well, at least they weren’tallwith her in the scene I witnessed—just Asterius and Typhon.

“Want to talk about it?” Erika asks, leaning her elbows on her knees. She’s in the chair across the room from me, giving me a concerned look.

I glance at the door again, mentally cursing the being that holds court on the other side. She turns her head to follow my gaze, then turns back.

“It’s got something to do with Fate, I’m guessing. Directly or indirectly?” Her eyebrows lift as it dawns on her. “It’s a woman, isn’t it?”

I narrow my eyes. “I get that you’re bored, but my love life isn’t for your amusement.”

She raises her hands. “Fuck me for caring. I just know bottling things up is never the best solution.”

She crosses her arms and tilts her head back until it thunks against the wall behind her, then sighs heavily. In a musing tone she says, “When I was a teenager, I started having these crazy dreams—sex dreams. I didn’t know what the fuck they meant, only that they were more real than life sometimes. This man … this beautiful red-haired man was in all of them. Over the years they only got more detailed, more intense. The dream I had the night my father died… that was the first time my lover and I went all the way.”

“You mean you fucked,” I say, trying to decide whether to tell her I’m not interested in her story, but the womanisinteresting, so I let her continue. I need a distraction.

“Yep. I lost my virginity to a dream. That’s all it was, or so I told myself. But it happened so regularly that it started to feel real.

“And then my dream lover started telling me to find him. Somehow, I knew that my dad’s research was the key. He gave me this before he died…” She raises a hand, fingering a small red jade dragon charm resting in the hollow of her throat. “He believed dragons were real, and he’d spent his entire life hunting for them. So his life’s work became my life’s work.

“Yet somehow even making it to the end, walking into that temple where they all slept, I still clung to some fragment of my scientist’s sensibilities. That magic wasn’t real, that what we’d found was just some ancient ruin filled with treasure. Well, they weren’t ruins for one thing, and the treasure inside wasn’t the gold and jewels, though we found a shitload of that too.

“It washim. And it wasn’t until he was actually inside me for the first time that it became crystal-clear that everything I believed until that moment was bullshit. Every supposedlyrationalbelief I had about how thingsshouldwork was just blown out of the water by how he made me feel.

“It wasn’t until later that I learned about Fate and Chaos and all the other gods and creatures that are part of this world. But none of that mattered; whether some higher power orchestrated our relationship is inconsequential, because Geva ismine. I know it deep in the nucleus of every cell in my body.

“But I get it—rejecting the pull when you’ve never felt it before is natural. I witnessed my entire team go through the same thing when we opened the temple. Corey—my tech—was the hardest to convince. But we belonged to them, and them to us. And not once in the past seven years have any of us regretted making the choice to give in to our fates.”

I grit my teeth through her entire tale, gradually relaxing as confusion sets in. This can’t be why I’m so frustrated, can it?

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