Page 43 of Pandora's Pain
There was no dinner. There were no expensive dates or sweet kisses shared. Zavier took me right back to their hotel room. I made my way to the shining window while he ordered in a pizza. The city life was wild below us. Dots of figures bustled. So many tiny people with lives that must have been so much simpler than mine.
I was reminded this was where Brock stood naked when we first met.
“Where’s your friend?” I asked in a quiet voice that carried through the room.
“Asleep. His shoots take all day sometimes. Models work more than I ever expected. He crashes pretty hard on his days off.”
He took a slow step closer to me. A line creased his brow. It made him sterner. He looked at me like I was a problem, and he wanted to solve it.
“That box. The stuff inside it. That stuff was real, wasn't it? The pain? You couldn’t have created that kind of pain inside me. What was that, Pandora?”
A tingle spread all through my core at the simple use of my name.
Pain.
That was something I knew more about than anyone else. The box sank it right in until it hurt so badly that it didn’t hurt at all. The survival part of my body shut down while I was imprisoned. It shut out the pain until there was only numbness.
And I never wanted to feel that again.
I wanted to feel everything. Everything this terrible world had to offer.
“It’s just the box’s way of keeping you. It locks, but the pain that it produces keeps you contained inside. I never escaped because I never had the ambition to rise up.” My throat tightened. I hated it. I wasn’t weak. I refused to let the gods cut me back down to that numb person I’d been.
“You’re really Pandora?” His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t take another daring step closer to me.
“I am. The gods want me to capture people like you. People like Ashton. Probably even people like Brock.” And so many more. The whole world was a misery if I really thought about it. We were all sinful.
He swallowed so hard his Adam’s apple bobbed.
He was going to push me away. Only an idiot would linger around a crazy woman who just told them she intended to steal their misery ridden soul.
“Why?” His question was quiet but also startling.
I hadn’t expected him to question it. I thought he’d be calling the police by now, if nothing else.
“I’ve been a prisoner of the gods for…all my life. I’ve lived in that box for lifetimes.”
“That thing that produces pain, you lived in there?”
A quiet nod is all I gave him.
“If I’m able to bring three miseries to the gods, they’ll release me.” Or so they said.
At this point, my odds of actually being able to take one of these men were not looking good.I might as well relent now.
“What’s Alex in all this? Is he Hercules?”
My lips parted as my head tilted back in confusion.
“Hercules? Gods, no! Do not give that man any more of an ego than he already has.”
“But he is a god?”
Again, I nodded.
Seconds passed while he just stared intently at me.
“You believe me?” My voice was a quiet and almost desperate sounding.
