Page 40 of Tangled Threads Of Fate

I gave him a tight smile. “Sure, I’m fine. I’m coming.”

“You’ve been in here fifteen minutes since the food arrived. I was worried,” he said soothingly. He rubbed his hands down my arms. “You’re shaking.”

My face screwed up as I looked down at my hands. Iwasshaking. “Huh. I hadn’t noticed. It’s probably low blood sugar. Let’s go eat.”

One thing Crete had in abundance was damn good food. As I sat on the bed, Nate spread all different foods around me so Ididn’t have to reach, like I was some kind of fertility deity and he was paying tribute with carbs.

He leaned against the bed, his own plate loaded down with dips, pita and some kind of hand-size pies that looked comically small in his fingers. I did begin to feel better after the food, but the trembling continued. I sat on my hand so Nate couldn’t see.

“So, are we going to talk about how you’re the God of War and didn’t tell me?”

He rolled his eyes at me. “I wasaGod of War. There are a lot of us rolling around. Mythics like nothing more than a good bloody battle.”

“You weren’t going to tell me?” I tried to keep the note of betrayal from my voice, because I had no real reason to feel that way. He hadn’t promised me his truths. He hadn’t promised me anything.

He shrugged. “I haven’t been the God of War in nearly three thousand years,mo stóirín.That God died on the battlefields of Moytura. That God was exiled from the Emerald Isle. The man made his way to the Americas. The man is who you know.”

“He just happens to be bathed in runes and knows how to handle his ax?” I joked, trying to break the sadness of his words. There was pain there, and three millennia was a long time for a wound to fester.

He stood, grabbing the plates from the bed and tossing them haphazardly onto the table beside us. Then he crawled up over my body and kissed me softly. “My ax isn’t the only thing I know how to handle,” he purred, and my whole body clenched with need.

“Prove it?” I teased.

Boy, did he prove it. Twice.

Chapter 20

WREN

Iwoke up sweating. My body felt both hot and cold, chilled by rivulets of sweat that felt like ice as they slid down my forehead into my dampened hairline. My legs were tangled in Nate’s, but our torsos were as far apart as I could get.

Every part of my body felt like it was vibrating. My heart felt… weird.

“Nate,” I whispered. “Nate, wake up.”

He was on his feet, his ax in his hand, before his eyes had even opened. “What’s wrong?” he rumbled, his eyes searching the dark corners for intruders. But there was nothing here that wanted to harm me, except my own body.

As I shook my head, I realized some of the moisture on my face was tears. “I don’t know.”

“The babies?”

They felt fine, and I couldn’t even explain how I knew that. The pain was definitely coming from my limbs, not from my womb. “I think they’re fine. This… I don’t know.” I made a keening noise, getting to my feet and moving toward the door. As I walked over to it, the pain eased. “We need to go back.”

“Back where?” Nate asked, sounding more rattled than I’d ever heard.

“Amourgeles. The compound.” I groaned, my shaking hands fumbling with the door lock. “I need to go back. It’s like I’m being dragged back there by my insides.” I slammed the flat of my hand on the door. “Please, Nate. Please, I need to go back.”

He was nodding, throwing on his clothes. “Okay, little one. Okay. Let me just pack our shit up.”

He rushed around the room, his face worried. Luckily, we hadn’t really unpacked, so it only took minutes for him to gather our things from the bathroom and stuff them in our bags. But those minutes felt like an eternity as I leaned back against the wall and groaned. Every muscle in my body ached. Nate’s shirt clung to me, sticky with sweat.

With the bags in one hand, he ushered me out of the room and down the darkened hallway. I felt like I was suffocating, and as we stepped into the warm night air, I sucked in a deep breath. We hurried to the car on silent feet, the light breeze drying the moisture that was filmed on my face.

The sea air soothed something in me, but not enough. My muscles felt rigid as I climbed into the front seat, while Nate quickly tossed our bags in the back. He peeled out of the parking lot and onto the darkened roads of Heraklion.

“Are you sure you don’t need to go to the hospital?” he asked, like we hadn’t been there only hours earlier.

I couldn’t explain to him how I knew that the only thing that would help was going back to the compound in Amourgeles, because I really didn’t understand it myself. I justknew. I felt like a junkie who needed a fix, like there was a fist wrapped around my heart, squeezing.

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