Poisoned Kisses
Stephanie Draven
Unleash the untamed passions of the underworld in these deliciously wicked tales of paranormal romance.His blood would be her deathDaughter of the war god Ares, Kyra had been born into darkness – a darkness she’d vowed to annihilate. Just as she’d destroy warmonger Marco for feeding the bloodlust she despised. She’d use her nymph’s carnal powers to seduce him, then slay him. But Kyra wasn’t prepared for Marco’s secret weapon.For millennia Kyra had avoided mortal men, but she couldn’t resist Marco’s magnetism, his raw sexuality. That he was a shape-shifter she could forgive, but not his one fatal flaw – his poisoned blood could kill her. Kyra had fallen for the only being who could destroy her… Yet how could she spend eternity without him?
He stalked toward her, eyes locking on hers…
Kyra tried not to stare at his bare chest. It was sculpted like an iron breastplate and gave her vivid memories of having run her hands all over him. “I knew you’d come. After all, we have unfinished business between us.”
His hand came to rest on the wall behind her and he leaned in, his closeness making her nervous and excited at the same time.
He caught her by the chin and lifted it, forcing her to look at him. “I know who you are. You don’t have to pretend you’re demure now.”
The feel of his calloused fingers brought back such sharp memories of pleasure that Kyra felt weak at the knees, just like in all those mortal movies where the fair damsel swoons away. And it wasn’t just arousal. She could have handled that. No, this feeling was something different from lust, and wholly unfamiliar. She felt as if she was being turned inside out and it was more than she could bear.
But nothing had changed. She hadn’t fulfilled her destiny. She hadn’t conquered the hydra within him. She hadn’t killed him. She hadn’t even convinced him to give up arms dealing.
But she knew he was going to kiss her. If she didn’t stop him, he was definitely going to kiss her.
And gods help her, she wanted him to…
Dear Reader,
I always thought that in Homer’s Odyssey, Calypso really got a raw deal! Having saved Odysseus from the sea, she was his lover for seven years before he broke her heart and sailed away without a backwards glance. Something about this always stuck in my craw.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against a good mortal woman like Penelope, but I promised myself that if I ever invented a supernatural heroine who saved the hero from a dark fate, she’d get to keep her man. Accordingly, I’ve written a much happier ending for my nymph and her wayward warrior!
I’d be delighted to hear what you think, so please stop by www.stephaniedraven.com. And here’s hoping that, like the heroine of this book, every single one of you blazes a path through the world.
Yours,
Stephanie Draven
About the Author
STEPHANIE DRAVEN is currently a denizen of Baltimore, that city of ravens and purple night skies. She lives there with her favorite nocturnal creatures—three scheming cats and a deliciously wicked husband. And when she is not busy with dark domestic rituals, she writes her books.
A longtime lover of ancient lore, Stephanie enjoys reimagining myths for the modern age. She doesn’t believe that true love is ever simple or without struggle, so her work tends to explore the sacred within the profane, the light under the loss and the virtue hidden in vice. She counts it amongst her greatest pleasures when, from her books, her readers learn something new about the world or about themselves.
POISONED
KISSES
STEPHANIE DRAVEN
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my husband, who is my light in every dark storm
and the man who carries me over all life’s thresholds.
Prologue
Ares climbed over the rubble of his burned-out armory, his mood black as the soot-covered remains. So much waste, he thought, kicking aside scorched artillery crates. All harmless shrapnel now. So many mortars reduced to ash…so many bullets warped from the heat, deprived of their savage destiny on the battlefield. Magnificent guns destroyed without ever finding their way into the hands of even one ferocious warrior. It was a travesty. And the broad-shouldered god decided that someone should have to pay.
“Who did this?” he roared, discovering one of his vultures hovering over a dead body. At his approach, she left off tearing at the corpse’s gory innards and flapped her wings. With a rush of wind that spiraled the dust and autumn leaves around her, she rose into the form of a willowy redhead and licked the blood from her scarlet lips.
“The guards say it was a woman who blew up the armory,” his vulture explained, shoving the gutted corpse onto its back. The dead man’s belt was unfastened, his pants unzipped, as if he’d died while taking a piss. “This one caught her and decided to have a little fun…”
“It doesn’t look as if he had a chance to enjoy himself.” Ares noted the dead man’s face, stiffened in shock, as if he couldn’t fathom what had happened to him. But Ares knew what had happened.
Kyra had happened.
His daughter was lethal with a blade and knew how to defend herself. She was also a rebellious child with a knack for finding new and unique ways to annoy him. “What about the file on the hydra?”
His minion twitched. “It’s gone. Kyra must have taken it.”
Ares liked the look of fear in his vulture’s expression and was hungry to take out his frustrations on her. There could be pleasure in it—for him, at least. He reached for that fiery hair, yanking his vulture’s head to the side so that her throat was exposed. “And where is my daughter now?”
“I—I don’t know,” the vulture stammered. “They shot her, but she escaped.”
Bullets wouldn’t stop Kyra. As a nymph of the underworld, she crossed the thresholds of life and death at will. What’s more, she was immortal. He’d seen to that. There wasn’t a wound she could suffer that wouldn’t heal. She could appear to mortals in her own guise, or fade into the mists like an apparition. The fact that she’d let his guards see her meant that she’d wanted him to know she was responsible for this.
The unmitigated gall of the thing! For Kyra to destroy his weapons was almost too much to bear. And to add to that insult, she’d taken the file on the newest hydra—a man whom Ares intended to add to his monstrous menagerie. Admittedly, the war god admired Kyra’s audacity. After all these years, most of the forgotten ancient immortals slunk away like beaten dogs to live mundane modern lives, but his daughter was still certain she was fated to do something glorious. And he couldn’t fault her for it, even if it drove her to test him like this.
Ares was an indulgent patriarch, after all. Unlike his own wine-soaked lecher of a father, Ares encouraged the fierce nature of his descendants. He’d even made war with them at his side. Oh, how mortals had trembled when Ares rode into battle with his twin sons, Phobos and Deimos, at the reins of his chariot! How the mortals had screamed in terror when he unleashed his monsters. Fire-breathing horses, hydras, chimeras and minotaurs… Oh, how he missed those days.
And he intended to relive them with Kyra at his side. If only she’d accept her true destiny. Instead, she was in open rebellion against him. Did she think he could be stopped by blowing up his munitions? If so, she was wrong. Lesser gods might fade away, but the forces of war remained eternal. No one sacrificed at Zeus’s temples anymore. The science of spindly weathermen had reduced the once fearsome sky god into an old man who spent his days in a taverna complaining about the loss of Greek culture to the European Union. Exhaustion, science and some of the newer gods of peace and goodwill had crowded the old gods off the world’s stage. Even crafty Hecate had been relegated to being a fortune-telling gypsy!
But Ares was different. It had been a long time since anyone had seen him as the Greek god of bloodlust, glowering from beneath his plumed helmet, but men still worshipped him, whether they knew it or not, because war was different, too.
The new gods didn’t glorify it, and science only made it more deadly; it bankrupted the victors as well as the vanquished. War was a senselessness mankind couldn’t explain. Warriors no longer called for Ares by name, but they still made bloody sacrifices. And whereas Zeus once ruled the gods of Olympus, Ares meant to rule now.
So how was he to deal with Kyra’s rebellion? Perhaps it was a phase that would pass. After all, his daughter was born to viciousness. Kyra claimed to abhor war, but the wreck she’d made of this armory only proved that she was bred for destruction.
The sooner he forced her to accept it, the better.
Chapter 1
Kyra was dressed to kill. Literally.
Just beneath her short red skirt and only inches above her high-heeled boots, a small but deadly hunting knife was strapped to her thigh. A gun might have been more useful, but Kyra preferred the weapons of an older, less complicated time.
A knock came at the nightclub’s bathroom door—probably another gaggle of drunken Italian socialites—but Kyra wouldn’t be rushed. She stared at her reflection in the mirror to steel her courage. She might not be able to thwart Daddy and his bloodthirsty minions, but she could do this one heroic thing for humanity. This was her destiny.
But the mirror reflected a distorted image. It was cracked, as if the thumping club music burst through the wall from the other side. Still, she could see that her plunging pearlescent halter top complemented neither her black tresses nor her ghostly pallor. No matter. Kyra never let mortals see her true form, anyway. Tonight, her prey would see her as she wished him to see her: with blue eyes and cropped platinum hair; after all, she’d studied Marco Kaisaris long enough to know his type. And she was ready. Hydras like Marco were dangerous, but surely not to someone like her. She just had to kill him. Like Theseus and Perseus of old, she had a monster to slay.
With that thought, Kyra gave the bathroom door a shove and it swung open like a gate to the underworld. She stepped into the nightclub’s press of bodies and people made way for her, as if they sensed her power. As the dance beat drummed at her pulse points, she brushed against the crowd, and it excited her because she had a nymph’s nature; she found the vitality of humans to be infectious and distracting. This was, of course, one of the many dangers of getting too close to mortals.
The club was dark but for the strobe lights that shined spots on the walls, purple as evening shade, purple as wine. The grape kaleidoscope illuminated the writhing bodies on the dance floor, flashes alternating with pitch-black. But the darkness posed no obstacle for Kyra. Like all nymphs of the underworld, she carried an internal torch. Her eyes could penetrate the darkness. She could see through a crowd, through clothes, through flesh. Her eyes could even breach the barriers around men’s souls.
And from the bar, her quarry’s soul lit up like a flare.
She knew Marco Kaisaris even though the face he wore was not his own. He was dark, brooding and slightly unkempt. He wore an expensive dress shirt open at the collar, the glimmer of a gold chain at his throat. He didn’t look like an arms dealer, but then he was almost as good at disguises as she was. He wasn’t just a mortal man, after all. He was also a hydra.
Kyra slipped into the standing-room-only space next to him at the bar, pretending to dig for money in her purse. She felt his eyes on her—an intense, wary stare. Fortuitously, a group of revelers pushed her a little closer to him. She pretended it was his fault.
“Do you mind?” she asked in Italian, grateful that the club was quieter here.
Marco shrugged, taking a swallow from his glass, which was filled with amber liquid and ice. “I was just sitting here.”
Oh. His voice. It was baritone and beguiling, with a hint of a New World accent. American or Canadian—she couldn’t be sure. Either way, it was the kind of voice that’d make a normal woman swoon and it weakened even Kyra’s immortal knees. Gods above and below, Kyra thought. What justice was there in the world that such a voice could belong to a monster?
Recovering herself, she brushed his leg, but his expression betrayed nothing. Everything about his posture was guarded. Sexy, but guarded. That’s when Kyra noticed he held a picture of an older man and was tracing the edge of it with his thumb. Naples was known for its criminal element, so the photo was probably of some contact Marco was meeting tonight. A supplier of munitions or a thug looking to buy an arsenal. Someone in Marco’s violent business. “Friend of yours?” she asked in English, motioning with her chin toward the picture.
“My father.” A look of melancholy passed over his face as he slipped the photo into his shirt pocket, but that’s all he said. He didn’t want to talk. And that was a problem because she’d planned to lure him somewhere private with the promise of a steamy encounter; she couldn’t kill him in the middle of the club with everyone watching. To make matters worse, her cell phone was vibrating. It was probably her father calling to rage at her for destroying his arsenal. Daddy thought it was Kyra’s destiny to join him, but she had no intention of being a part of her family’s legacy of war. If anything, she wanted to make up for it.
Renewing her resolve, Kyra turned the phone off and flashed Marco Kaisaris her most charming smile. “Mind if I sit here?”
Marco motioned toward the distinct lack of empty bar stools. “Sit where?”
Okay, she’d have to be a little more aggressive. “How about if I sit right here?” Before he could do a thing to stop it, Kyra slid into his lap. It was a crucial moment. There was a good chance he’d thrust her away, alarmed at her forwardness. But as the backs of her bare thighs pressed against the weave of his linen slacks, his breath caught, and it wasn’t just with surprise. He liked it.
This shouldn’t be too difficult, she thought. Her nymph’s charm made it easy to seduce mortals—even special ones like him—and she felt him respond, his breath warming her neck. Encouraged, she shifted wantonly with her hips, precisely timed with the music, careful not to let him feel the sheathed knife on her leg. He liked that, too.
She could tell because he wrapped one arm around her waist and inhaled the cheap perfume she wore. It smelled like overripe passion fruit and candy and he reacted as if she were just a confection—one little taste wouldn’t hurt. His teeth grazed her neck beneath her choker where a glowing peridot stone hung like a tiny lantern in the dead of night. She tilted her head for him and felt him go hot all over.
“You’re shameless,” he finally whispered, the scent of expensive alcohol on his breath.
But I’m not shameless, she thought. There were many shameful things in this modern world, but her sexuality wasn’t one of them. How was it her fault that men were so easy to arouse? “I’m shameless? What about you? You look guilty of something.”
He let the cool glass in his hand slide wetly over her shoulder. “And what do you think I’m guilty of, Angel? Give it a shot.”
Angel? Oh, she was going to enjoy killing him. “Are you telling me to guess?”
“No,” he said, his mouth finding the soft spot behind her ear. Then his voice lowered. “Unless you want me to tell you what to do.”
Her stomach fell away with arousal. Yes. Absurdly, she did want that. Just for a few minutes. It wasn’t sex with mortals that was dangerous for nymphs, after all. Just all the emotions that came after. Still, best not to let him get the upper hand. “If you tried to tell me what to do, we’d only end up engaged in a fierce battle of wills.”
She felt him smirk against her neck. “Mine is hard as iron.”
His will. He meant his will was hard as iron. Trying to steady herself, Kyra fanned her fingers over the bar. They came to rest on an unopened pack of cigarettes. Marlboro Reds. Old school. “Yours?” she asked, and when he nodded, her lips curled in mock disapproval. “Bad addiction to have.”
“I’m not addicted,” he countered, one hand stroking her arm. She loved the callused feel of his fingertips on her smooth skin. “I only smoke when I’m trying to come to terms with something.” Kyra almost asked him what he was struggling with. But she didn’t dare. She shouldn’t care. Couldn’t care. It’d only make it harder for her to kill him. “I can quit anytime,” he said.
“How about now?”
He paused, then crushed the whole pack in his fist, tossing it behind the bar like so much trash. He looked smug at her openmouthed stare of astonishment. “Like I said. Iron will.”
He might think so, but he couldn’t resist her. She was sure of it.
Marco called to the bartender. “A drink for the lady.”
“And what if I’m not a lady?” Kyra asked, with a provocative smile.
“That’s okay,” Marco murmured, grasping the nape of her neck. “I don’t plan to be a gentleman tonight.”
She let him bring her back to his penthouse; even from the marbled foyer she glimpsed just how well the monster was living off his ill-gotten fortune. If he’d chosen any of the artwork here, he had exquisite taste. But this probably wasn’t his penthouse, just like the face he wore wasn’t his own. He was a hydra of a thousand faces—an impostor—which made it all the more remarkable that he didn’t seem suspicious of her; he apparently brought women home with him all the time.
No, Kyra thought. Killing him wasn’t going to be difficult at all.
The only problem was that he was an astonishingly good kisser. His mouth was on hers, dizzyingly warm. It surprised her how much she actually liked the way his stubble scratched her cheeks and the animal way he bit her lower lip every time she pulled away for breath. He wasn’t shy about touching her, and he wasn’t taking his time.
He pushed her back against the door, a rapid strike, all strength and speed. Caged in by his strong arms, she saw that his eyes were stormy with challenge. She felt her insides quicken in response. Oh, he so didn’t know who he was dealing with.
Kyra gripped a thick handful of his dark hair and when his hands snaked up under her top, thumbs brushing over her nipples, she thought he was rather daring for a creature that could be killed; he’d been wary in the bar, but now that he’d committed himself to having her, there was no hesitation in him at all.
The heat of him delighted her. The roughness of his touch. The bestial sounds he made, as if he meant to devour her. Kyra’s heartbeat crashed in her ears, as if the thumping roar of the club music had followed them here. She told herself it was just the allure of his mortal energy, the dangerous deception of a man’s desire. But had it felt this good the last time she’d taken a mortal lover?
Maybe Marco was different. The clues in the file she’d stolen led her to believe that in addition to being an arms trafficker, Marco Kaisaris was a war-forged hydra, a mortal man, a monster that could be killed. Now she wondered if he was actually some shape-shifting trickster god, which would excuse her attraction to him and relieve her of guilt for what she was about to do. Stabbing an immortal, after all, wouldn’t cause any lasting harm.
His scent—somewhere between man and musk—drove her crazy. Meanwhile, his kisses had become frenzied as if pleasure was such a fleeting thing in his world he had to consume it before anyone took it away from him. As Marco nipped at her neck, his mouth moving over the luminous gemstone she wore, her own gasps cut through the stillness of the penthouse apartment. Whoever he was, whatever he was, he was rocking her world.
But Kyra prided herself on not being one of those silly nymphs who dallied with mortal men and fell helplessly under their spell. She’d taken plenty of lovers and cast them aside when she was done. After all, she was built for carnal passions, for stolen pleasures in the dark. So, it wasn’t Marco’s all-consuming sexual prowess that was giving her second thoughts about killing him. It was what she saw inside him, beyond the surface. A looming shape of almost unfathomable grief. Beyond the veils of darkness in which he wrapped himself, she glimpsed a forlorn desperation to know and be known, to understand and be understood.
This, she hadn’t expected. Sincerity, pain, need. His vulnerability was subtle but potent sex magic. It made her curious; there was a longing in her to let her eyes open wide and illuminate everything inside him. Unfortunately, that would drive him mad, and that was one thing Kyra would never do to a mortal again. Besides, there’d been a reason she’d tracked him down for months, a reason she’d slipped into his lap tonight, and it wasn’t to satisfy her curiosity or to enjoy herself with a sexy stranger.
Like her father, Marco Kaisaris made a profit selling weapons. He was a merchant of death. The underworld was filled with victims of the bullets Marco sold. No matter what her lust-soaked mind wanted to see inside him, he was an evil man and if she wanted to make up for all the pain and chaos her father had caused in the world, Kyra had no choice but to kill him.
The hydra had to be the reason Kyra still had her powers while so many of the old immortals had lost theirs. This was her destiny. Still, it was with true regret that she realized Marco’s groping fingers would soon discover her hidden knife. With a long-suffering sigh, Kyra stopped him. Marco pulled back, a slow and frustrated tilt to his lips. “Am I going too fast?”
Gods above and below, his voice just wrecked her. The heat of it seared a path from her belly down to the quivering place between her legs. Oh, how she wanted him to touch her. But when he tried to put his hand under her skirt again, she didn’t let him. “Wait. I’ve got something for you.”
She turned slightly and, with one hand, secretly unsheathed the knife beneath her skirt. The motion between her legs must have looked particularly obscene, because Marco’s eyes narrowed with desire. “Don’t be a tease, Angel.”
“Oh, I’m no angel and I never tease.” With that, Kyra thrust the sharpened blade at his chest, aiming directly for the heart. But something went horribly wrong. She’d prepared herself for the blood, the resistance of blade against bone and the death grimace. What she hadn’t counted on was Marco being nearly as fast as she was. Kyra knew that Marco had military training. Still, she could hardly believe how deftly he blocked the blow with his hand. The knife slashed open his palm from fingers to wrist and red blood sprayed the carpeted floor.
His expression twisted in surprise at her betrayal, and he used his uninjured hand to grab her wrist. He slammed it against the wall so hard she thought the bones in her hand might have shattered. “Drop the knife,” Marco growled, all sincerity and need now replaced with the hard features of a furious and injured man.
There was nothing for Kyra to do but struggle. He couldn’t kill her with that knife, but he could hurt her. Even for an immortal, pain was pain. Suffering was suffering. And Kyra was afraid of it even though she didn’t have to fear for her life. So she brought her knee up hard into his stomach.
He grunted with the impact, but didn’t let go of her wrist. Instead, he used his leverage to flip her to the ground. She thudded to the carpet, her body splaying awkwardly. And before she could scramble to her feet, he threw himself on her, forcing the air from her lungs. He had her wrist in his grasp, twisting it to the breaking point.
“Drop your weapon!” Marco shouted like the soldier he’d once been. But Kyra bucked under him, clenching her free hand into a fist and punching him in the jaw.
Marco rocked back from the blow. “Bitch!”
Then he backhanded her in retaliation. Kyra tasted blood in her mouth—her own, she hoped.
The sting of his slap had made the entire right side of her cheek red-hot. In thousands of years, few mortals had ever dared to strike her, and those who had tried paid for it with their lives. All the forces of the underworld bubbled up inside her. She was the daughter of Ares and rage was overtaking her, boiling out of control. She remembered the armory she’d blown up, where her father’s guard had confused her with a human and tried to rape her; she’d shown him with fatal accuracy how mistaken he was. Now she’d show Marco Kaisaris!
As she pulled herself up like a specter from a grave, Marco recoiled. “What—what the hell are you?” he stammered, staring, his tone more loathing than fear. In their struggle, she’d become so enraged that she’d stopped projecting the shape she wanted him to see. He saw her real face now, the depthless blackness of her nymph’s eyes, and he seemed as horrified as if he’d glimpsed three-headed Cerberus.
Taking advantage of his surprise, Kyra rolled to her feet with the grace of a cat and crouched on tiptoe behind a desk for cover, realizing that her high-heeled boots may not have been the ideal choice for an assassination. “The real question, Marco Kaisaris, is, what are you?”
At hearing his real name, Marco’s expression turned murderous. Later, she’d have to admit that he frightened her. He was stronger and faster than she’d anticipated and now this entire mission had gone awry. She could try to fade—try to disappear before his very eyes—but her concentration was broken. Perhaps she ought to escape and try again another day. As these thoughts raced through Kyra’s mind, Marco rushed toward her. She lifted the knife—this time in self-defense—and he flipped the elegant desk behind which she’d sought refuge as easily as if it were dollhouse furniture. Papers and knickknacks exploded through the air and the desktop slammed her, knocking her back where she smashed her head on the wall and slumped to the floor.
Kyra lay there for a moment, stunned. Had she blacked out? Scrambling out of the wreckage of the desk, she realized that the penthouse was quiet.
Damn it to Hades! The door was open and Marco Kaisaris was gone.
She wondered why he hadn’t tried to kill her when he’d had the chance, but then she felt the sickening burn. She was smeared with Marco’s blood and it stung like fire. It was ever-deepening agony. Rushing to the bathroom, she hurriedly scrubbed her arms clean. Too little, too late. The hydra’s blood wasn’t just burning her, it was also seeping into her skin and making her sick. Waves of nausea flowed over her; she sank to her knees and tried not to retch.
If she’d been a mortal, the poison of his blood might have been enough to kill her. As it was, her world started to spin. Marco Kaisaris was no trickster god. His blood wasn’t divine ichor. His wounds hadn’t closed up on their own. And even from the bathroom she could see that where his blood had pooled on the penthouse floor was now a sizzling mess, as if someone had poured acid on the carpet. His blood was poison. Deadly poison. There could be no doubt now that he was a hydra and needed to be stopped.
If only she could get up from the floor.
She’d cut him deep. Crouched in an alleyway, Marco tore his shirt off and wrapped it around the wound like a makeshift bandage. With his uninjured hand, he fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone to call an ambulance. The woman in his penthouse would need one. Yeah, she’d tried to kill him, but she had no idea who she was dealing with. By now, his blood would be soaking into her skin and eating her alive. He wasn’t sure what the hospital could do for her, but he wasn’t eager for another dead body on his conscience.
“Si prega di identificare se stessi,” the dispatcher squawked into the phone.
Identify himself? Under other circumstances, the question might have made Marco laugh. Who exactly was he? He wasn’t the guy who rented the penthouse. He wasn’t the guy he looked like now. He wasn’t a soldier anymore and he wasn’t even the do-gooder son of a Greek immigrant—not according to his father or his sister. “I’m nobody,” Marco said, then hung up.
The blood coursing from the cut on his hand had soaked through his wrapped shirt and dripped down his battle-hardened stomach in a deadly scarlet rivulet. Every time a drop of it spattered on the ground, it hissed and sizzled where it fell. Marco hated to leave his blood anywhere, but he couldn’t do anything about it now. His breathing was still erratic—partly from the pain of his wound and partly from the shock of what he’d just seen. What the hell had he just seen? An angel, a demon or some creature with powers like his own?
One thing was clear: his enemies had obviously tracked him here and sent the woman to assassinate him. This identity—this borrowed face he wore—was thoroughly compromised now. He’d have to change his appearance and there was no time to wait for a more private moment. Pulling himself deeper into the shadows, Marco braced against the brick wall and steeled himself for the transformation. He closed his eyes and remembered the face of a blond haired, blue-eyed Russian smuggler who’d once tried to steal a shipment of shoulder-mounted rockets from him. Marco had long since dispatched the Russian to hell, but he’d been wounded in the struggle—which meant that now Marco had a useful but grisly souvenir; he could assume the face and identity of his old enemy. It was his curse; he could take on the form of anyone who wounded him. A power he could neither explain nor fully comprehend. Perhaps it was a madness—inherited from his mother. Whatever it was, he couldn’t stop himself from quivering with disgust at the slow creep of flesh as his face began to transform. Marco didn’t have to look in the mirror to know that his eyes were now blue, and his hair like yellow straw. Except for the wound on his hand, his enemies wouldn’t know him.
No one would.
Chapter 2
Kyra found herself in an ambulance, squinting into the peculiar light. Her arm was caught in the grip of a blood-pressure cuff and she realized that her heart must have stopped because a stunned paramedic loomed over her with paddles.
For one moment, she understood mortal fright. It used to be that the dying would take comfort to see her by their bedside with her torch in hand. Now, if they opened their eyes to see a dark nymph like Kyra standing beside the men with the paddles, they feared her as an evil harbinger. Sometimes they screamed in terror.
These days, dying mortals only wanted to see angels. Some of her fellow nymphs of the underworld played along, pretending to flap ridiculous feathered wings, singing, “Follow the light!” But Kyra refused. She was a lampade, a guide, a warrior for men’s souls. If mortals didn’t want her to attend them at death, she still had a heroic destiny to fill. Which is why she’d gone after the hydra, and how she ended up on this gurney in the first place.
She was shocked at how wretched she felt; her skin was clammy, yet she felt as if she were being boiled alive. Under normal circumstances, she’d have already recovered, but the hydra’s poisonous blood had weakened her somehow. With difficulty, she tried to sit up. It was then that the emergency medical technician reached for her peridot choker, perhaps with some foolish notion that removing it would help her to breath. His mistake. Kyra’s choker was the only keepsake she had of her mother’s. Anger that this stranger should try to take the precious stone gave her a surge of strength. Kyra stared into his eyes, trying to see if he was an enemy, or perhaps one of her father’s minions. But when she couldn’t illuminate his soul, her insides flailed in fear. Had the hydra poison extinguished her powers altogether?
It took her more than three attempts before she was able to pull the needles from her arm. All the while, the paramedic tried to restrain her. Again, his mistake. Self-preservation gave her the power to pin him against the vehicle wall. “Don’t make me hurt you,” she growled.
The paramedic shrank away, the whites of his eyes showing like a horse about to rear up. He seemed to have realized all at once that she was no ordinary mortal woman. There was a chain at his throat upon which dangled a little golden cross, and he held it up as if to ward against evil. Just what did he take her for? Angel or devil? The mortals could never decide! Muttering a curse at him under her breath, Kyra leaped out of the back of the ambulance before he could stop her.
The rising sun knifed through the lavender cloak over Lake Avernus, its light cutting a thin golden gash across the dark waters. Kyra didn’t like mornings. It was night that protected her—it always had. Luckily, it was still dark enough that she didn’t have to obscure her true form. Escaping from the ambulance had seemed like a good idea, but as Kyra staggered toward the little villa apartment that was her lair, she feared she’d collapse before she could make it home.
Marco Kaisaris’s blood had done this to her.
Things that killed humans rarely affected immortals this way. Then again, the poison in Marco’s blood was no ordinary kind of poison. It was the poison of a hydra. Achilles, the great warrior of the Iliad, died when he was shot in the heel with an arrow dipped in hydra poison. And he wasn’t the only demigod to die this way. Hydra blood had also killed mighty Hercules. The thought sobered her. Hercules was the son of a god, but his mother was mortal. Just like Kyra’s.
Surely she was nothing like those legendary heroes. They had died young, whereas Kyra had lived for thousands of years. They had walked among the living, whereas Kyra drew breath with shades in the underworld. She’d never thought of herself as vulnerable. She’d lived so long, and so recklessly, that death was nothing she’d ever contemplated for herself. Was it possible that Marco Kaisaris’s blood could actually kill her?
She needed to get to Hecate. Perhaps her old mistress had just enough magic left to brew a curative potion. Even if she didn’t, who else could guide Kyra over the threshold from this life into the next but the goddess of the crossroads? Yes, Kyra had to get to Hecate. Nothing else was as important. She kept going on pure adrenaline, feeling vulnerable, naked without her powers. It was disorienting to rely on normal human sight—luckily, she found the street where Hecate’s shop was illuminated by a swinging lantern at the end of a rusty hook. The worn and faded sign over the door read Notte Incantesimi: Tè e Chiromanzia.
The Night Enchantments Tea and Palm Reading shop was the last refuge of the once-powerful goddess who had—for centuries now—been reduced to fortune-telling and serving herbal infusions. Hecate’s black hounds bayed in greeting and the goddess appeared in the parlor doorway wearing an absurd embroidered gypsy robe, a sprig of yew berries in her luxurious silver hair. “My best little nymph has come to call on her old mistress,” the once-mighty goddess crowed.
Then Kyra collapsed at her feet.
Chapter 3
There was no point in disguising himself here in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a place Marco still thought of as Zaire. The militias knew him. Some even feared him. And though the corrupt government called Marco the Merchant of Death, many of the locals said he was their salvation. And that’s why he kept coming back. Why he would keep coming back as long as they needed him.
Marco’s driver—a dark West African named Benji—was waiting for him at the jungle airstrip. “That’s quite a bruise on your jaw, Chief,” the kid said, glancing at him from beneath the sweaty bandanna on his brow. “And your hand doesn’t look good, either. Trouble at the border?”
Marco didn’t answer; after all, he didn’t want to tell anyone about the she-devil that attacked him in Naples. Instead, he put his sunglasses on, retreating behind the shades as they rattled along the dirt road.
Their vehicle was a patchwork of rust, duct tape and white paint. It made a fat, slow-moving target. With all the money he made selling weapons he should be able to afford a better ride. He should be less vulnerable to his enemies…enemies like the siren who had tried to stab him.
Reminded of her, Marco flexed his hand around the disintegrating bandage. It was a deep cut that would scar, but meanwhile his blood was eating through the cloth. He couldn’t risk going to a hospital, so he’d stitched it himself in the back of the cargo plane and now it hurt like hell. It was no consolation to him that his attacker was, no doubt, hurting worse—if she was even still alive.
Who was she? No, more importantly, what was she? In the club, he’d taken her for just a rich party girl looking for a quick hookup. But in his penthouse, she’d literally transformed into another woman—one with ethereal skin, raven hair and unnerving black eyes. She’d been like an angel of death, knife at the ready. Until that moment, he’d always thought he was the only person in the world with this…affliction. But now he knew he wasn’t the only one who could change faces. The woman had the same power, and she’d used it to hunt him down like prey.
They stopped at a jungle checkpoint. These government soldiers should have tried to halt the spread of weapons throughout the Congo, but that wasn’t how things worked here. Benji simply paid the customary bribe to the guard who waved them through. Then they veered away from the city, heading into rebel territory, winding up steep roads into the mist-soaked mountains.
Africa was a furnace, even at this higher altitude. A little bit of hell on earth. A cluster of gun-wielding boys dressed in camouflage marked the entrance to the stronghold on the road up ahead. They were playing some kind of game with rum and matches and Marco growled. “How many times do I have to tell him that they’re just little kids?”
“They’re little killers,” Benji muttered under his breath. “And the general doesn’t listen to anyone anymore. I tell you, the devil is in him. He’s become the devil!”
When Benji was just a teenager, Marco had rescued him from a diamond mine in Sierra Leone. Since then, the kid had helped Marco steal more guns than either of them could count, but Marco had never asked him to fight. Even so, Marco felt defensive. “The general means well. These orphaned boys have nowhere else to go. At least if they serve in his army, they get fed.” It was a sad and all-too-familiar story in this part of the world. But giving children guns and calling them soldiers was evil, and Marco knew it.
Benji knew it, too. Parking the vehicle, he muttered, “Think what you want, Chief, but he’s the devil.”
The encampment was a primitive mountain fortress surrounding grass-roofed huts. Even so, with the weapons Marco supplied them, these rebels held their own against the Hutu militiamen—and sometimes even the government. Wearing green camo and military boots polished to a mirror shine, the general approached Marco sporting a brass-tipped baton. A pack of dogs barked at his heels and all his boy soldiers saluted as he passed. His ebony face warmed with a smile of greeting. “Ahh, the Great Northern Warlord has arrived!”
Marco’s old friend seemed leaner, gaunter, with a hint more mania in his eyes, but the two men embraced like comrades. They’d been together in Rwanda and seen the horrors of genocide. Now it was an obsession for both of them.
“What did you bring for me this time?” the general asked.
“Ammunition.” Marco motioned toward the crates of bullets being unloaded. “We’ll parachute the weapons in, but…your soldiers are too damned young.”
The general waved away Marco’s concern with his baton. “I know it displeases you, my friend, but what can be done? We’ll talk business later. First we drink!”
In the general’s hut, they sat on patio chairs. Marco almost took a cigarette until he remembered his close encounter with an angel of death. She’d challenged him to quit and he’d said he would. For some reason—maybe because of what he was sure his blood had done to her—it was an unspoken promise he felt compelled to keep. “I’ll take a beer instead.”
“I stole this from Hutu militiamen,” the general bragged, handing Marco a bottle. “It is good, no?”
Marco took several gulps before asking, “What happened to the militiamen?”
“You don’t want to know what happened to them.” There was an awkward silence. Then the general leaned forward. “Benji, your boss is from this place of mists and rainbows…this Niagara Falls, where everything is soft and covered with dew. He sometimes forgets what life is like in Congo. He forgets what it is to fight for survival in Africa, what it is to make war. But we know, don’t we?” Benji looked as if he might crawl out of his skin. “He is scared of me.” The general chuckled, poking Benji with the end of his baton. “Boo!”
Marco flexed his bandaged hand. “Leave him alone.”
The general smiled enigmatically and blew a ring of smoke. “Have you never told your boy here how we met?”
Marco wasn’t much for show-and-tell when it came to his employees, but the general was intent on telling tales. He pulled an old photograph from his pocket, where it must have been positioned for just this occasion. “Ahh, Benji! You see that soldier in the picture, so proud under his blue beret? That was your boss, upright as a Mountie. In those days, Marco even kept a letter from his betrothed for luck.”
Benji stared, amazed, though whether it was at the idea Marco had once been a UN peacekeeper or that he’d once been engaged, Marco couldn’t tell. “And do you see that skinny black man standing next to him in the picture?” the general asked. “That is me. I was a teacher then, and twenty little Tutsi children came to my school to learn. The Hutus swore they would kill us all. But Marco promised he would keep my students safe.”
Marco stood abruptly, nearly tipping his chair in the process. Several beer bottles clinked together and fell at his feet. “That’s enough reminiscing. I need to find a bed.”
Marco hadn’t had to feign exhaustion; he hadn’t slept since the night the woman attacked him in Naples. And now he couldn’t stop thinking of her. That night, he’d just learned about his father’s prognosis; the knife-wielding vixen had taken advantage of a weak moment, his yearning for an easy connection. He remembered the feel of her under his hands, the way she gave back as good as she got. She’d been perfect, crafted for sex. It made him break into a sweat just to remember.
But it hadn’t just been that. There’d been something about the way she looked at him—the way she looked into him, as if she could see into every little hidden crevice. It’d made him feel as if one person in the world might finally understand him.
And then she’d tried to kill him.
That night, Marco dreamed of Rwanda again. The Hutus were coming with their machetes, but United Nations forces had been ordered out of the area. The evacuation convoy raced down the dirt road, away from the grenades, which sent plumes of soil into the air. Marco had the wheel when they saw a group of militiamen herding villagers into a ditch.
Stand down, soldier!
He was supposed to keep driving, but Marco jerked the truck to the side of the road, tires shrieking to a stop. He was out of the vehicle, weapon drawn, in one smooth motion. Behind him, another truck stopped and his commanding officer jumped out. Marco had halted the whole convoy. “Get back on the goddamned road!” his commander bellowed.
“They’re killing the whole village right in front of us,” Marco argued. The murderers hadn’t even hesitated at the sight of the UN convoy. Instead, the militiamen opened fire on the civilians with the few guns they had and hacked and dismembered the rest with machetes. From the ditch came the horrific screams and the stench of death.
Marco lifted his service pistol and aimed it at the militiaman giving the orders. He thought his commander might do the same. The villagers were unarmed. They called out for help, reaching for mercy. Blood was in the air like a fine mist of a waterfall, and for a moment, Marco couldn’t hear anything but the roar.
Stand down, soldier!
Marco pulled the trigger. Damn the rules, Marco shot first, and a burly Hutu militiaman returned fire. Marco was hit in the left shoulder, but it didn’t knock him down, so he lifted his pistol and aimed again.
Stand down, soldier!
His red-faced commanding officer was shouting. “We’re observers!”
Observers. They’d been ordered to observe while the world did nothing. On the news somewhere, politicians dithered over the definition of genocide and the world was busy with other matters. Citizens didn’t want to hear it. So, standing there bleeding while his fellow soldiers tried to haul him back into the truck, Marco observed as the killers finished their grisly business. He watched until the last little hand of a village child twitched in its death throes. Then he watched as the militiaman who shot him turned and smiled.
Stand down, soldier!
Later, Marco returned to bury what remained of the bodies. In the empty eyes of a dead woman, he saw his fiancée, her lips twisted in a rictus. In the bloodied face of an old man, Marco saw his father. He saw among the dead even his own face. He was one of them. He was the brother, the lover and the son of the dead.
But he had not been their savior.
Marco woke in a cold sweat, his stomach churning and the taste of vomit in his throat. These were his sins, his crimes, and how he’d come to be the way he was. He wondered what sin the shape-shifting woman had committed to give her the same powers. She was probably dead—his blood had almost assuredly killed her. There was no point in thinking about her either way. Whoever she was, no matter how he had felt about her when they were kissing, she could be nothing but poison.
Chapter 4
In the small guest room above Hecate’s shop, Kyra tossed and turned with fever, shivering under a pile of blankets. A beaded curtain separated her sickbed from the kitchen, where Hecate was tending to a teakettle. It shamed Kyra to have her former mistress care for her like a lowly nursemaid, but the hydra’s blood had left her as helpless as an infant.
Hecate came into the room bearing a tray and sighed before pouring the dandelion tea. “Drink this. I used to brew so many magic potions we’d have our pick of them, but it’s the best I can do for now. If only you’d let me call Ares—”
Kyra shook her head. Daddy was the last person she wanted to see in her weakened state. Hecate pressed the matter, anyway. “Ambrosia would restore you.”
Ambrosia. Precious ambrosia. The scarcest resource in the world. A large dose of it as a child had given Kyra immortality in the first place, and she had her father to thank for that. He kept a secret store of the stuff, but not even for the elixir of immortal life would Kyra want to be indebted to a war god. Not even her father. Perhaps especially not him.
“I don’t need ambrosia. I’m getting better on my own.” Kyra’s words were belied by the fact that she could barely hold her own cup. A little tea slopped over the rim and Hecate had to wipe it away with a napkin. Then the old woman settled into an antique rocking chair with a threadbare cushion and Kyra’s weak flicker of inner torchlight revealed that the goddess was decidedly cross. “I didn’t know Marco Kaisaris’s blood could kill me.”
“Of course you knew! You just didn’t want to admit it to yourself because now that angels are popular, you have a death wish.”
Kyra hung her head. “No, I just wanted to do something good again—something important.”
Hecate swirled a golden spoon in the ancient teacup—one of a thousand treasures she’d hoarded in her cluttered shop over the years. “Did you really think that killing Marco Kaisaris would make the world a better place?”
“A little, yeah,” Kyra cracked.
Hecate took a sip from her cup. “Killing is your father’s way.”
Kyra hated to be compared to Ares. She might be his daughter, she might have tried to serve him once, but that was only because she’d wanted to forge a relationship with her only living parent; she’d never been one of his bloodthirsty gang. Unlike her other war-born siblings, she’d never ridden with Daddy into battle; she’d only been there to guide the souls of the dead afterward. How dare Hecate pretend otherwise?
But then, it wasn’t Hecate’s role to guide the dead anymore, was it? She’d given up her divine responsibilities long ago. She’d never comforted the shades of today’s murdered children, their skulls fractured by Marco Kaisaris’s bullets. Kyra had. She was only trying to rid the world of a monster.
As if reading her thoughts, Hecate’s lips tightened. “Kyra, why can’t you settle into your life? I’ve released you—you’re no longer my minion. Yes, you’re a lampade, but you don’t have to guide the dead anymore. You don’t belong in the world the same way you once did. None of us do. I hoped you’d use your freedom to find some happiness, but instead you’re off chasing monsters! Do you do these things to get attention?”
Maybe. A little. “I went after Marco Kaisaris because you once told me I was destined to destroy a hydra, remember?”
Hecate sputtered, as if some old memory were taking shape. “I said you’d conquer one, not kill him! When Hercules vanquished the hydra of his age, he used a torch to do it. You’re a torchbearer, Kyra. You have a gift. You can illuminate the truth of a human heart, find the wounds and sear them closed—”
“No,” Kyra said bitterly. “I’ll never do that again and you know why.”
It’d been a long time since they’d spoken of Kyra’s mother and Hecate’s sad eyes showed understanding. “Kyra, that was so long ago. You were such a young nymph and unsure of your powers. You didn’t mean to—”
“Condemn my own mother to a life of madness?” Kyra finished, furling her lip at the familiar but bitter taste of the dandelion tea. “I wanted to heal her, but she only saw Ares in me. It doesn’t matter what I meant to do. It only matters that she was a mortal with only a few years of life to enjoy and I robbed her of them.”
“You’ve seen her shade since then…you know she forgives you.”
But Kyra had never forgiven herself. She’d wielded her torch in her mother’s soul, trying to cauterize the wounds her father had left—and instead burned new ones there. Even after all these years, whenever she visited her mother in the underworld, there was an awkwardness between them. Perhaps it would’ve been awkward, anyway. After all, Kyra’s mother had been born in a world of togas, grand temples and state worship; she couldn’t understand the realities of the modern world in which Kyra would live forever. She’d become, for Kyra, a shade in truth. A beautiful stranger.
“I won’t use my torch that way again,” Kyra insisted. “Marco Kaisaris sides with the war gods every time he sells a gun so he deserves to be destroyed, but he doesn’t deserve to live as a raving lunatic. It’s kinder to kill him.”
“That’s the bloodlust in you. Perhaps you really are your father’s daughter.”
It wasn’t fair that Hecate knew exactly how to shame her. Fine, Kyra thought. Maybe she could just chain Marco Kaisaris in some dungeon, hide him away, so that none of the war gods could harness his powers. Maybe keeping the man at her mercy was the humane thing to do. Still, the thought of shackles on those strong wrists brought an unexpectedly uncomfortable sensation to Kyra’s stomach. “Hecate, if I promise not to kill him, will you help me find Marco Kaisaris again?”
“Beware the obsessive nature of nymphs,” Hecate warned. “I don’t want you anywhere near this man. He’s a danger to you!”
In more ways than one. Most nymphs just had to worry about broken hearts, but just touching Marco’s blood had felled her. What if the poison got into her bloodstream? Into an open wound? If Kyra were wise, she’d never come into contact with this mortal man again. But then he might fall into her father’s hands and if Kyra had to live forever, there had to be some meaning to it. Otherwise, she was a power without purpose. She had to find some point to her long life other than the bloodlust Ares said she was born to.
Besides, she and the hydra had unfinished business between them. More than just his poison had gotten under her skin. His kiss, his touch, his voice…oh, that voice. “I’ll be more careful this time,” Kyra promised. “Help me find him. I know you can still work some magic and you don’t need a crystal ball to do it.”
As one of Hecate’s black hounds settled at her feet, the older woman took on the more imperious stare of her gloried past. “I don’t want to risk your father’s wrath. Think of Ares, won’t you?”
“I am. If I don’t find the hydra before Daddy does, imagine the damage he’ll do. He could use hydra blood to poison whole armies. Whole countries!”
The ancient goddess had always been a benefactress of mankind. She didn’t relish human suffering. Kyra knew she’d relent, and she did. “You’d have to get on a plane—I know how much you dislike flying.”
Kyra hated flying. Nonetheless, she was determined. “I’ll manage.”
“Very well.” Hecate sighed. “You’ll find the hydra in the New World. He’s on his way home, because he’s about to lose someone very dear to him indeed.”
Niagara Falls in winter, with its thundering gray river, was gloomy as the Styx. Kyra watched the netherworld entrance of mist below the tumbling water of the falls, and waved to the receding shade that had been Marco’s father. Kyra hadn’t killed him, but she’d guided the stubborn old man a little ways when he died. Giving him some light between the threshold of this life and the next had seemed like the least Kyra could do. She even let him see her as a sweet angel, because it seemed to comfort him.
He spoke of his estranged son, how heartbroken he’d been to lose Marco to a world of weapons and war. Kyra didn’t add to his burden by telling him that Marco had become a monster in truth and that she planned to cage him for the greater good. She’d built a dungeon to contain him. Now she just had to find a way to lure him there.
Of course, Kyra couldn’t just put on a sexy outfit and pick up the hydra in a random nightclub again. He’d be wary of strangers now, and twice as dangerous.
Fading so that none of the mortals could see her, Kyra made her way to the funeral home. That’s where inspiration struck. Marco’s ex-girlfriend made only a brief appearance—just long enough to express her condolences to the family. Long enough for Kyra to study her face and memorize its shape.
Ashlynn Brown wasn’t the sort of woman that Kyra would’ve expected to find in Marco’s past. The hydra was a fierce warrior; she’d discovered that from painful firsthand experience. So how had he ever cared for someone so delicate? With doe eyes and fawn hair, the woman looked as if she were ready to bolt at the first sign of unpleasantness.
It’d be tricky to impersonate such a meek woman, but it was the best idea Kyra had.
Kyra waited until Ashlynn left, then took on her appearance, right down to the prim black dress. The soft eyes, the rosy skin, and the wavy hair that could not seem to commit to being either light or dark. She even disguised her peridot choker as Ashlynn’s classic string of pearls.
The hydra might trust Ashlynn. He might go home with Kyra if she looked like Ashlynn. Then she could lock him up in the basement dungeon she’d built and Daddy would never find him.
Marco knew that funerals were for the living, so the least he owed his family was to show up wearing the face his mother recognized. Consequently, he eschewed all disguises and made his way down the funeral home’s hallway in a dark suit and overcoat, bracing for the inevitable reunion; he just didn’t expect it to be with Ashlynn Brown.
His ex was sitting on a polished wood bench by herself. Her hair fell in soft waves over her shoulders, and she still dressed like a society girl, but there was something different about her, if only he could put his finger on it. Perhaps it was the confident tilt of her shoulders and the alluring smile. Or maybe it was the way she looked at him like he was some kind of hard candy she wanted to suck.
No. That was the look the angel of death in Naples had given him, just before she tried to kill him. So why couldn’t he stop thinking about her?
Ashlynn stood to greet him, a bouquet in her hands. “So sorry about your father.”
If they’d been anywhere else, he’d have brushed past her without a word. Ashlynn Brown belonged to another part of his life. Another life entirely. Still, it was his father’s funeral, and she’d been good enough to come, so he fumbled for a polite reply. All he came up with was, “Asphodel?”
Ashlynn seemed to suddenly remember the white lilies in her hand. “Oh! They’re for your father. I’m told it’s an old Greek tradition.”
“Very old.” In one of her saner moments, his mother told him that ancient Greeks used to plant asphodel on the graves of their ancestors to nourish them in the underworld. But Ashlynn had never been interested in his family’s ethnic heritage, so this was an entirely unexpected gesture. “Thank you…”
“Can we go for coffee, Marco? After, I mean?”
It was a spectacularly bad idea. The funeral dredged up enough bad feelings without adding a trip down memory lane to the equation. He’d only come to pay his respects and comfort his mother; then he planned to leave the country. There was a storm coming, and he had a jet waiting under an assumed identity in Toronto. But in spite of everything, the way Ashlynn looked at him, the way she seemed to look into him, made it hard to refuse.
Damn it. He was over Ashlynn Brown. He hadn’t thought of her for years. He wasn’t even sure he’d actually been in love with her when they were engaged, so why should he feel a pull toward her now? After all this time, he couldn’t imagine what they’d even have to say to each other, but bless her shallow little heart, Ashlynn might be the only person from his past still willing to speak to him.
“Sure, why not?” he found himself saying.
Chapter 5
His father’s casket was white. An oddly fitting color. White was stark and cold, intolerant of any blemish. Just like his father had been. And yet, Marco didn’t resent the old man. His father had fled from war-torn Cyprus with his wife and child in tow. He’d lived a difficult life, and Marco hadn’t made things any easier. I’m sorry, Marco thought, reaching out to touch the dead man’s cold hand. But his father couldn’t give him forgiveness now; he wasn’t really here.
Grief tightened in Marco’s chest. It hurt so badly, he stuffed his hands into his pockets to keep them from shaking. Just then, his sister, Lori, marched to his side, and after ten years, the first words his sister spoke to him face-to-face were, “You shouldn’t be here.”
She’d lost weight; her face had become all sharp angles, and her eyes were red-rimmed from crying. He supposed he hadn’t made her life any easier, either. “Lori, can we not do this now? It’s a funeral.”
“He didn’t want to see you even when he knew he was dying,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Why would he want you here now?”
Marco had resolved not to fight with Lori today, so he clenched his teeth instead.
“Unless…” His sister’s tone lightened with hope. “Have you given up…what you do?”
“I can’t,” he ground out. “I’ve told you before, there are people whose lives depend on me.” His sister sniffled. “Then why are you here?” “Because he was my father, too,” Marco said, desperate for a cigarette.
His sister softened and turned into his arms with a sob. He kissed the top of her head, but the tenderness of their reunion was broken the moment she felt his holster. “You’re wearing a gun?” Lori whispered furiously. “Don’t you know everyone’s watching you?”
Marco had been in such a grief-stricken stupor he’d hardly noticed the other mourners. Now he realized there was a staring crowd. Were they waiting for him to cry? Or were they watching him because of his notoriety? Even if people didn’t know exactly what Marco did for a living, there were rumors. “Bet he’s in the mob,” he thought he heard someone whisper, and he had to restrain a dark and bitter laugh. Their imaginations just weren’t fertile enough.
As the wind outside rattled the funeral-home windows, every eye seemed to settle on the expensive sunglasses that dangled from the pocket of his tailored suit. Every glance felt like judgment, except for one. Ashlynn was there, like some kind of beacon in the midst of a sea storm. As if she had some kind of innate understanding of his mourning. And when their eyes met briefly across the crowd, it unexpectedly steadied him. At least, until he saw his mother sitting by herself. “Ma?”
“Oh, Marco, I’ve been waiting hours to see the doctor,” his mother said in Greek. “Can’t you speak to a nurse about moving up my appointment?”
She didn’t know where she was. Maybe she didn’t even know her husband was dead. Marco tried to smile, tried not to alarm her, but he couldn’t make himself do it. “How are you feeling, Ma?”
“I’m so sad,” his mother said, her scarred cheeks drooping. “I’m always so sad.”
When he was a boy, she used to say, “I left my smile in Cyprus.” He never understood until he was a soldier. Until he saw for himself how ethnic fighting splintered communities, broke nations and stole the happiness of the survivors. Now, from her wheelchair, his mother reached for his hand. “It’s so dark Marco. It’s black as night.”
But it wasn’t. The darkness was inside his mother’s mind, and Marco felt it creeping into his own. “I’m sorry about Dad.”
“I’m frightened,” his mother said, her voice rising in terror. “I’m frightened. I can’t find my way!” She lifted her hands, clawing at her face as she retreated back into that shadowy place of madness.
Marco caught his mother’s wrists and called for Lori, but Ashlynn got there first. She stooped down and gently took his mother’s hands from his. “It’s not that dark, Mrs. Kaisaris. If you just look at me, I’ll guide you.”
Marco wanted to push Ashlynn away. This was none of her business and she should stay out of it. But his mother stopped struggling. “Oh, the light,” his mother murmured and in that moment, Marco thought he saw something flicker over the old woman’s scarred features. Something like…grace. “But you’re—you’re not Ashlynn, dear.”
“Of course she’s Ashlynn,” Marco said.
As a teenager, his ex had always been polite about his mother’s illness, but shied away from her, as if madness were contagious. Now, Ashlynn let his mother grip her hands like they were a lifeline, and didn’t pull away even when the older woman’s nails dug into her skin. “Ma, let Ashlynn go,” he said quietly. “You’re hurting her.”
“It’s all right,” Ashlynn said. “She’s hurting worse than I am.”
Lori pushed forward with a bottle of pills and his mother’s nurse in tow. “Both of you get away from her,” his sister said, glaring at Marco as if he’d caused his mother’s outburst. Ironically, it was the one damned thing he didn’t feel guilty about today.
“You’re okay now, aren’t you, Ma?” Marco asked. “I’m right here with you.”
“Please,” Lori said, acidly. “She doesn’t even know who you are. On the days she remembers you, she tells the doctors that her son was a soldier, a peacekeeper. And you know what breaks my heart, Marco? She sounds proud. Ma’s mind is so far gone she doesn’t have any idea that you’ve become some kind of mercenary.”
He shouldn’t have this argument. Not now. Not again. Not here where everyone was listening. But being home again was opening every old wound. “I’m not a mercenary,” he hissed, voice low. “It’s not like I sell weapons to the highest bidder. I choose sides in the world.”
Lori just shook her head, angry tears in her eyes. “But nobody elected you to choose sides, Marco.”
“The people we elected are doing a shitty job of it!” Marco wanted to slam something. He wanted to kick over chairs, or crash the floral displays to the floor. It was only Ashlynn’s hand on his arm that calmed him and gave him the presence of mind to fish a check from his coat pocket. “Here, take it.”
That’s when Lori realized it was a check. “I don’t want your money,” Lori snapped.
Marco took a deep breath. “Funerals are expensive. You can’t afford it with the house, and mom, and the restaurant—”
“Your money is blood money, Marco. I think you should go.”
And, for once, his sister was right.
Chapter 6
Kyra was shaken.
It wasn’t that she thought she was the only person in the world whose mother suffered from mental illness. But in confronting the hydra again, she hadn’t expected such a stark reminder of her own past. It made her feel sorry for Marco Kaisaris and, somehow, she was going to have to shake that off.
She’d managed to get the hydra to agree to go for coffee. If she played this right, she could lure him into the basement dungeon she’d built for him, and then neither his poisonous blood nor his bullets could ever hurt anyone again. But Marco didn’t look like he was in any mood for a caffeinated beverage. He maybe needed a Scotch on the rocks, not a latte.
Once he’d helped her into the car, he was distant, but showed no signs of suspicion so she must be doing a good job of impersonating Ashlynn. Then again, the man had just lost his father. She had him at his most vulnerable. “No one ever tells you how much smaller a person looks in death,” Marco said, pulling out of the parking lot. “It’s like something’s missing, as if their spirit took up physical space.”
“Oh, but it does,” Kyra said emphatically. But now wasn’t the time to give lessons to mortal men on the physicality of the soul. Snow was turning to sleet, and it was good that Marco was driving because Kyra had trouble concentrating on the road. She was too busy watching for signs that Daddy was on her trail. She knew to be alert for the vultures of Ares or Athena’s telltale owls, but here in Niagara Falls, Kyra had to be just as wary of the local echo god who once carried Iroquois war cries on the wind.
“Listen, this was a bad idea, Ashlynn.” Marco’s black-gloved hands tightened on the wheel. “We’re not just two old friends going for coffee. You don’t know me anymore and, trust me, you don’t want to.”
“I know you’re in some kind of trouble with the law,” she replied.
When they stopped at a red light he looked like he wanted to reach for the unopened package of cigarettes on the dash. Instead, he folded a stick of gum into his mouth and crumpled the wrapper. She watched the way his strong jaw worked under his five-o’clock shadow. “Some kind of trouble with the law…is that what my sister told you?”
“Would she have been wrong?” Kyra asked, avoiding the question.
The light changed, but Marco didn’t drive through the intersection. Instead, he abruptly pulled over to the side of the road. Gravel popped under his tires. In the oncoming sleet, traffic cut past them in an angry blur of headlights and windshield wipers. “I can’t do this,” Marco said. “I can’t just pull into some coffee shop and sit down with you in a crowd and act like—”
“You don’t have to act like anything.”
He sighed, his shoulders slumping. “I can’t do it, Ashlynn.”
This wasn’t going well. If he made her get out of the car, then all Kyra’s scheming would be for naught. Scrambling for an alternative plan, she tried to play on whatever sense of chivalry he might have. “Can you at least drive me home?”
Marco gnashed at his gum. If he’d known who it really was beside him in the car, he’d have left her stranded—or perhaps even strangled—on the side of the road without a second thought. But when he finally glanced at her, he nodded.
“I’ll give you directions,” she said as he pulled back onto the road.
“I remember the way.”
“No, I just bought a new house,” Kyra said, and that wasn’t even a lie. So they drove up Niagara Parkway, mostly in silence. She’d chosen the desolated location carefully—just about as remote a place as one could get and still be in Niagara Falls. But once they were in the hinterlands, he was impatient. “Just how much farther is it?”
“Not far. Up ahead after the turn. You should come in. I can make you that coffee.”
“I just need to drop you off, and leave. This time for good.”
So that’s how it was going to be. Kyra hadn’t planned to use her powers right away, but unless she did, Marco Kaisaris was going to disappear again before she could stop him from becoming one of her father’s minions, or from putting AK-47s into the hands of another group of child soldiers. Luckily, Kyra saw the guardrail up ahead. Staring intently, she concentrated all her power. Ever since she’d been poisoned, it was painful to do this and she knew it’d weaken her, but she had no choice.
She was a nymph of the underworld, a torchbearer of Hecate; a mortal like Marco couldn’t bear the light she cast. Widening her gaze, she flashed her inner torchlight so brightly that it hit the guardrail reflectors and bounced back into Marco’s eyes. He brought his hand up as a shield against the sudden glare, but it was too late. Temporarily blinded, he lost control. They hit a patch of ice. He cursed, pumping the breaks, but to no avail. The car spun out and crashed in an explosion of shattered glass.
Kyra found herself face-first in a ditch, covered with shards and pieces of metal. She’d been thrown from the car and something inside her felt ruptured.
The pain was so intense, she couldn’t catch her breath. She was bleeding. It shouldn’t hurt this much, she thought, as she fought for air. She should be healing faster. But she wasn’t.
Gasping as icy water seeped into her clothes, she thought for a moment she understood what it was to fear death. And having used all her power to cause the accident, it took all the strength she had to maintain the illusion that she was another woman entirely.
Dazed and bleeding, Marco found himself standing in another ditch staring at another motionless body. He was confused, momentarily unable to orient himself in time or place. His instinct was to reach for his gun and radio for air support. It was only the snow that reminded him he wasn’t in some war-torn country in Africa. What had happened? Had he hit another car? If so, where was it? He only saw his own rented Jaguar in the ditch. And Ashlynn. She lay half-submerged in the water, bobbing like a beautiful but broken doll.
The sight sent a jolt of adrenaline through him. Climbing over the wreckage, he jumped into the ditch, slush up to his waist. His overcoat fanned out behind him, soaking up water, becoming a heavy drag, and utterly worthless against the piercing chill. Still, he desperately slogged forward.
Grabbing Ashlynn by the shoulders, he pulled her out of the ditch. He managed to push her up onto the snowbank and drag himself out after her.
He was grateful to find her breathing and at least semiconscious, but her teeth were chattering. He had to get her somewhere warm. And fast.
He hoped the keys in her coat pocket were for the house at the top of the hill. It didn’t really matter; it was the only house around. He’d break the door down if he had to. Lifting Ashlynn into his arms, he carried her up the snowy driveway, his dress shoes sliding on the ice every few feet or so. She made a weak protest but he ignored it. There was no way she could walk on her own given her condition. Besides, as he recalled, Ashlynn wasn’t built for adversity.
The key fit and he shoved the door open with his foot. He set her down on the living-room couch, but there was only a throw blanket to cover her with. Whoever’s house this was, it was remarkably spare. “Ashlynn, are you all right?”
“You’re the one who is bleeding,” she murmured with half-lidded eyes, reaching up to touch his cheek where he’d been cut.
He caught her by the wrist. “Don’t touch it,” he barked. “My blood is poison.” He hadn’t meant to say it, and he certainly hadn’t expected her to believe him. But she visibly recoiled—as if she knew how afraid she really should be. She blinked in wordless terror and he worried she might actually have a concussion. “Is this your house?”
She still blinked rapidly—too rapidly—but then nodded.
“Where’s the phone?” he asked.
“I—I don’t have one,” she stammered, her wrist still locked in his grip. “I just moved in. The service hasn’t been turned on yet.”
Something about her answer didn’t seem right. Maybe it was the way she stammered or the way her eyes slid away from him, but Ashlynn had never lied to him about the small things. Taking a quick personal inventory of his sodden belongings, Marco found that he still had his gun, but his cell phone was gone. If he was going to call an ambulance, he’d better go find it. Letting go of Ashlynn, he started for the door.
“You’re leaving me?”
His steps came to an abrupt halt. She’d asked him that once before, when he was just eighteen. It had been an accusation then, cloying and immature. As if enlisting in the military was something he’d done to ruin their wedding plans. This time was more of a plea—something desperate, and resigned. “I’m just going to look for my phone, Ashlynn. I’ll be back.”
Kyra hadn’t meant to cause such a horrible accident. She’d only been trying to cause a little fender bender. At most, she’d hoped for a broken axle—something that would incapacitate his rental without doing any real damage. She’d never intended to total the car. And no matter what Hecate would say, this time she really hadn’t been trying to kill the hydra.
The problem was that Kyra had never encountered a storm like this; she hailed from a warmer part of the world. It was the ice that hadn’t figured into her plans. Now, she deeply regretted that oversight. Why, she’d been so disoriented after the accident that she’d nearly touched the poisoned blood on Marco’s cheekbone!
Fear of death didn’t come naturally to Kyra; it was still a reflex she was learning. If he hadn’t stopped her from touching him, what might’ve happened? But he had stopped her. He’d even told her the truth about the poison in his blood—at least, he told Ashlynn the truth.
She should be healed by now. But ever since the poisoning, her powers of recovery were decidedly slow. She actually felt too weak to get up and follow Marco. He said he’d be right back, but she was afraid he’d just disappear again into the snow, and every day he was free to sell weapons was another day of death and destruction. Every day he was free made it that much easier for Ares to find him, and bend the hydra to an even darker purpose.
At least, that’s the reason she told herself she was afraid Marco would disappear when he walked out that door. But there was another reason, too; she was shaken. Shaken by the accident, and even more shaken by the way he’d pulled her out of the ditch and carried her to safety in a strong and protective embrace. Why had he been so tender with her? Not with her, of course. With Ashlynn. She must remember that he was seeing a woman he once cared about. Even so, if a man could behave that way, could he still be a monster?
Marco usually traveled with a driver, but he hadn’t wanted Benji or any of his employees nosing around his hometown, so he’d rented the car. Now, as Marco climbed over the twisted metal and fished his ruined cell phone out of the icy water, he counted that decision a mistake. There’d be questions about the wreck when the authorities found it. Meanwhile, he was in the middle of nowhere, alone with Ashlynn Brown for the first time in years and without a working phone. How in the hell had this crash happened, and why couldn’t he remember?
He found her purse in the snow and carried it inside. She was still on the couch, but she’d found another blanket. That was probably a good sign—that she’d been able to get up on her own—but she still looked stunned. They were both shivering, soaked to the bone, but he said, “I’m going to have to walk to a neighbor’s house and call you an ambulance.”
“In this weather?” she asked. “My closest neighbor is a mile away.”
Marco glanced out the window with frustration. The snow was really coming down. He’d planned to be well on his way to Toronto by now. But that was before he nearly killed his ex-fiancée in a car wreck. “I don’t have a better idea.”
“You’re not dressed for a hike through a storm,” she said, eyeing his ruined dress shoes and sodden overcoat. “And I don’t need an ambulance. I’m okay.”
“You looked dead out there,” he said, the memory of it still churning like bile in his stomach. “You looked dead,” he repeated, unable to fathom how quickly she seemed to have recovered.
“But I’m fine. I just have a few bumps and bruises. Besides, in your profession, I’m sure you’ve seen people hurt much worse.”
He stooped in front of the hearth to start a fire. “My profession?”
Kyra watched him, noting the way his shoulders tensed. His emotions were like a tinderbox just waiting to flare up. She remembered the dark expression on his face in Naples and the way he’d frightened her, and she wondered what the hell she was doing. This wasn’t the way to lure him into the basement dungeon. Still, impulse control had never been her strong suit. “They say you’re a gunrunner. I’ve seen your name on the news.”
“Since when are you interested in the news, Ashlynn?”
Kyra sighed inwardly. Just her luck to have chosen to impersonate the one clueless woman from his past who wouldn’t care about his illegal enterprises. “Maybe I’ve changed.”
Marco arranged a few logs in the grate. “Maybe we both have.”
“So, is it true?” she pressed. “Are you an arms dealer?”
He lit a match and started the fire. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It mattered to your father,” Kyra countered.
He rolled his muscular shoulders, but didn’t turn to look at her. Still, she knew her arrow had struck true. “You know, Ashlynn, I do what I do so that people like you can live your safe little lives and never have to think about the horrors of the world.”
“You broke your father’s heart,” she said bluntly.
Marco silently stabbed into the fireplace with a poker. Then he exploded all at once. “What else is new? You remember how he was. I wanted to do something with my life so that other people wouldn’t have to suffer like my mother suffered, but he couldn’t get over the fact that his only son didn’t want to work in the family business. The only thing he cared about was that stupid restaurant.”
That’s crap, Kyra wanted to say. But instead, she kept Ashlynn’s sweeter demeanor. “No. Your father just thought he’d escaped a world of war. He didn’t want to see his son back in it. But at least he was proud of you when you were a soldier. It was when you amassed your own private arsenal to sell to criminals—that’s what he couldn’t forgive.” Kyra knew this, because these were among the last things Mr. Kaisaris had said before she led him to the entrance to the underworld.
Fortunately, Marco didn’t ask her how she knew. He was too pissed. “My father didn’t understand and neither do you.”
“I understand that you cause wars.”
“Gunrunning doesn’t cause wars. It simply prolongs them.”
Ug! He sounded like Ares himself. Wrapping her blanket more tightly around her, Kyra wondered if he knew how chilling his words were. “And that’s better?”
“It is better,” Marco said, turning to face her at last. “You see, there are some things civilians don’t get.“
Civilians? Did he still think of himself as a soldier? Even now? Fighting some war the rest of the world had forgotten? “Why don’t you educate me, Marco.”
“Sometimes the only thing that keeps people alive is war. In some places in the world, ‘peace’ only comes after a massacre. Fighting isn’t the worst thing that can happen, especially when it means you live to fight another day.”
“How can you say that? You used to be a UN peacekeeper.”
“Because when I was a peacekeeper in Rwanda, they killed eight hundred thousand people in one hundred days. Which is how I know peacekeeping is a joke.”
Kyra opened her mouth to reply, but the fire and his temper weren’t the only things burning; where his blood had dripped onto his collar, smoke rose from the cloth. She recognized the potent scent of it and it immediately reminded her of how Marco’s blood had literally stopped her heart. Kyra pretended not to notice, but he caught her glance. “I need to get cleaned up,” was all he said.
Chapter 7
While Marco showered, Kyra took his clothes into the small laundry room off the kitchen, and put his shirt and slacks in the dryer—his jacket was a lost cause. He’d told her that once his clothes were dry, he’d hike through the storm to find a phone. Kyra thought he was a menace to himself and society for even considering going out in this weather—wet clothes or dry—but she didn’t know how much longer she could keep him here unfettered.
The accident had left him confused and unsteady, which should make it easier to tranquilize him and drag him into the cage in the basement. It also made it easier for her to lie to him about not having a phone. She was lucky her purse had been thrown clear of the wreck, and that he hadn’t opened it and found the cell phone inside. Now she flipped it open, made sure it was still working, then tucked it, snug in her ruined coat, into a laundry basket.
Then she went to check on him.
He was in the bathroom with nothing but a towel around his waist. The first thing she noticed was his muscular back—broad, shower-damp shoulders above a perfectly curved spine. The second thing she noticed was that he had a sewing kit on the bathroom countertop, and a needle in his hand.
As he lifted the needle to his face, she gasped. “What are you doing?”
“A bit of quilting,” Marco said through clenched teeth. “What does it look like?”
He was giving himself stitches. He was actually sewing together the cut skin over his cheekbone as if he’d done it a hundred times before; as if he had no one else in the world he could trust to care for him when he was hurt. And maybe he didn’t. Kyra couldn’t help but let her eyes drift down to his hand—the one she’d slashed open with her knife in Naples. She wondered who healed him then. He was mortal, after all; his wounds didn’t close up the way hers did. Kyra reached tentatively for the needle. “Let me help you.”
“No,” he said quietly. “I told you, my blood is poison.”
She hadn’t forgotten, and yet, she still wanted to help him. Was it just her natural inclination as a lampade to guide him? Or did she really have a death wish, after all?
At that moment, their eyes met in the mirror, and before she could guard against it, she briefly glimpsed right into him. She saw him with her underworld nymph’s eyes, shedding light on forgotten corners of his soul. She saw his grief over his father. Again, she saw his need to know and be known, to understand and be understood. That same need echoed inside her and, for reasons she couldn’t explain, tears welled beneath her lashes.
“Aren’t you going to argue with me?” Marco asked, breaking eye contact as he cut the end of the thread. “Aren’t you going to tell me it’s not possible to have poisoned blood?”
Kyra shook her head. “No.”
“I’m HIV positive,” he said.
“You don’t have to lie, Marco. When you told me your blood was poison, you meant it literally. I saw your blood burning your shirt. I just want to know…why.”
“Why?” Marco’s dark eyes met hers again, his voice thick with emotion. “I guess it’s because sometimes, in war, you see things so horrible, so unforgivable, so toxic, that it gets into you…it poisons you.”
Kyra understood this better than she could admit. With Ares came the vultures and anguished cries of the dying—cries that Kyra endured as part of her duties in the underworld. Like all the war gods, her father fed on bloodlust and brutality. It wasn’t just Kyra’s family legacy, it was in her blood. She could have let her violent instincts destroy her, but she hadn’t. She could have given in to her father, but she hadn’t. At least, not yet. “It doesn’t have to poison you. You can use it to find your purpose.”
“I have found my purpose,” Marco said bitterly. “It’s just a darker one than I ever imagined. You see, nobody cares about what happened in Rwanda anymore. It’s over, they think. The world has moved on, but I haven’t.”
He was struggling. Kyra could taste it. She understood it. While Kyra was born to darkness, struggling to live a life of light, for Marco, the reverse was true. “What I mean is that you can use what’s happened to you, to change.”
“Oh, I change,” he replied.
And then he did.
Kyra watched with fascination as his face reshaped itself. She saw the skin age and wrinkle before her eyes. She watched his hair shimmer with gray until he looked like his father. Then, in a horrifying display of malleable flesh and popping cartilage, Marco changed into a series of men Kyra did not recognize until he finally settled upon the face she knew. She startled, captivated by the sight of the lips she had kissed in Naples only moments before stabbing him.
Kyra didn’t have to pretend to be upset. No matter which face he was wearing, her inner torch revealed such exquisitely mortal pain, that it shamed her. She’d tried to kill him in Naples, like he was only a creature, like he was some sacrifice on the altar of her good intentions. She’d seen only the monster in him, not the man. Maybe she wasn’t so different from her murderous immortal family, after all.
With that thought, she turned and fled the bathroom.
In the living room, she stared out the front window. Shadowy tree limbs arched gracefully under the freezing rain, encased in moonlit ice. She’d never seen a storm like this and she couldn’t stop shivering, but this time not from the cold.
She heard Marco come up behind her. “Ashlynn, look at me.” It wasn’t her name, so she didn’t turn around. She just pushed her hands against the windowpane and let the cold seep into her. “Ashlynn, it’s just me. It’s Marco. I promise. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.” He wrapped his arms around her, holding her, trying to comfort her, when she should be the one apologizing. But she couldn’t speak. “I think I just wanted someone to know about me,” he said softly as the fire in the fireplace crackled behind him. “To know that I can change into people who’ve hurt me in some way. I’m some kind of. I can’t explain it.”
Was it possible that he didn’t even know what he was? “You’re like a hydra,” she whispered, suffocating under the weight of her own deceit. He was not like a hydra; he was one. But how to tell him?
He turned her around so that she was looking at him. “A hydra?”
“Your parents are Greek,” she whispered. “Don’t you know the old stories?”
“I know them,” he said, tilting his head.
Kyra stole a glance up at him from beneath her lashes. “The ancients said that the hydra was a poisonous monster. And it had a thousand heads. If a warrior cut off its head, two more would grow in its place.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said impatiently. “Unless the warrior used a torch to cauterize the wound.”
How innocently he said it. How guileless. He didn’t suspect he was holding a torchbearer in his arms. Nor that she was fated to destroy him. And yet, she couldn’t pull away. “I think you’re like that, Marco. Like a hydra.”
She hadn’t meant her words to wound him, but he fell back as if struck. “You think I’m a monster.” His face reddened. Then, finally, he nodded with grim resignation. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I am a monster.”
Kyra’s stomach clenched, as if she could feel his pain as her own. She was only trying to help him to understand what he’d become. “Marco…what happened to you?”
To her surprise, he told her.
He told her about Rwanda. He told her about how he had been shot. He told her about the villagers in the ditch, slaughtered while he stood by. And he told her about the day he buried them. The way his voice flattened broke her heart. Even now, he made fists of his hands as if to keep them from shaking as he finished his tale.
“When I returned to base camp, I looked in a mirror and, instead of my own face, I saw the face of the militiaman. I saw the face of a murderer and somehow it made perfect sense who shot me, because I’m just like him.”
Kyra listened to his story in silence, but couldn’t contain herself any longer. How could she have been so wrong about him? “You’re nothing like those men.”
He leaned back against the arm of the sofa, unable to meet her eyes. “I stood by and just watched that massacre happen.”
“No, you didn’t,” she argued. “You tried to stop it and got shot for your trouble.”
Reminded of his old injury, his hand went to his bare shoulder. “Well, that’s what soldiers are supposed to do. We’re there to take the bullets if we have to. We’re there to protect people who can’t protect themselves. But in the end, we just observed.” He said the word with venom.
“You were just following orders.”
He winced. “Bullshit, Ashlynn. Since when has that been a defense for anything? But I’m trying to make up for it now. Now I help people fight back. I make damned sure they’re equipped to fight back. I give them all the guns and the ammo they’ll ever need.”
He was just like her—trying to do the right thing, and making every conceivable mistake along the way. He was all but naked and she could read it on his skin. He carried inside him a terrible grief, and not just for the mother he’d lost to madness or the father he’d buried today.
She wished she could take it away, make it hurt less somehow. The cords on Marco’s neck were tight with emotion and Kyra couldn’t stop herself from tracing his chest with her fingers. He watched the path of her touch as if mesmerized, and it encouraged her. Her heartbeat picked up the pace of his. Kyra stroked the scar on his bare shoulder, knowing a bullet fragment was still there in the bone. And yet, that bullet had caused less damage than the things Marco had done, and the things he’d failed to do. He wanted someone—anyone—to understand. And she did. He was only a mortal, so she couldn’t imagine how they were so much alike. But there was no denying it. He was a reflection of her. It made her want him.
And why not? She could give him pleasure without having feelings for him, she told herself. She’d done it with countless mortal men before. She was a nymph of the underworld; she could use her skin to soothe his pain. It didn’t have to mean more than that.
She drew his hand to her and kissed the still-angry scar. Her lips upon the sensitive skin made him twitch. “Don’t,” he finally choked out. But Kyra stepped closer and kissed the scar on his shoulder, too. At first, he was still as a stone, but the heat of his skin and the soft hair of his bare chest against her cheek reminded her he was no statue. “I have an open wound,” he whispered. “I’m not safe to touch.”
No, he wasn’t safe to touch. And that, in itself, held a powerful allure. “You’re bandaged. It’s not dangerous to touch your skin, is it?”
“No,” he admitted, sheepish longing in his eyes. “I just…don’t want to hurt you.”
Mortal men never wanted to hurt nymphs, but they always did. And yet, Kyra couldn’t turn away from him. Not when he needed her. “Your kisses aren’t poisoned, are they?” she asked, lips trailing up to his mouth, achingly soft. She couldn’t remember a time she’d ever kissed a man so softly. But the scent of his clean skin and the taste of salt upon his lips made her sigh. He’d been holding his breath, and now his lips parted as he exhaled into her kiss. She took that breath into her with all its stain and sorrow and kissed him again, giving that breath back to him cleansed with her inner light.
Then it happened all at once.
The way he groaned. The way he took her hands, clasping them at the small of her back. The way he crushed her against him, his teeth scraping along the hollow of her throat. It was the grief that drove him, she thought. Mourners often sought solace in physical connection, as if to prove to themselves they were still alive. But she didn’t mind. She knew how to make her body malleable for a man’s pleasure.
She let him pull her onto the sofa in front of the fire where he laid his body atop hers, pulling her clothes off piece by piece. There was some fumbling with his wallet on the end table where he’d left it, and he sheathed himself in a condom. Then it was all skin and sweat and sighs.
The feel of his arousal hard against her sent little shocks along her skin. The sudden forcefulness of his body as he pinned her wrists over her head made her senses spark like the fire in the hearth. Kyra was no shy maiden nymph in the face of a man’s need. No coy Daphne, to flee from Apollo’s lust. This was a threshold that Kyra wanted to cross.
Her thighs parted and their eyes locked as he sank all the way into her. She’d done this to comfort him and sate his needs—but it stoked a fire inside her, too. She loved his thickness and the way she stretched to accommodate him. She loved the feel of his muscles as his back arched. She arched, too, to meet him.
He was looking into her as she looked into him; he was inside her just as she was inside him. There was nowhere to hide—and for one magical moment, she was certain that he knew her, that he saw her true face, that he saw her for herself.
But then he closed his eyes.
Gods above and below, she loved the feel of this mortal. The scratch of his beard, the light scrape of it on her cheek that reminded her he was man and she was woman. She loved the rough texture of his scars. How must it feel to have marks that so boldly told the story of his pains right there on the surface of his skin? And she loved his strong arms. Arms long enough to wrap all the way around her. Arms that made her feel as if she were not too wild to fully embrace.
She’d had many lovers before. She’d worshipped the perfect bodies of ancient gods. She’d admired the well-oiled muscles of Olympic athletes throughout the ages. But for some reason, Marco’s body, battle-hardened and scarred as it was, suited her perfectly. He fit with her, and every time he pushed inside her, the sensation of completion was renewed.
She wanted to make him come—fast and hard. She wanted to move her hips in just the way he liked, and make him forget everything else. But as they moved together, it was her arousal that spiraled higher and higher, out of control. The couch scraped against the floor, his chest scraped hers, and it went on and on, as if every stroke exorcised some demon. As if every caress were a confession. She kissed him as they strained together, a kiss broken finally by her own gasping climax. Flickers of light danced beneath her eyelids and she couldn’t believe it had happened so quickly or so intensely. His followed soon after, a groan at the back of his throat. He buried his face against her chest as his body convulsed in orgasm, his legs straining between hers. Beneath him, Kyra lay nothing short of astonished.
Afterward, her body tingled with sensation, every single hair seeming to stand on end. They were quiet, her hands stroking the hair from his damp face as he nuzzled her breasts. It’d been a quick release of tension—and now he seemed to want more. She did, too, but she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had sex this tenderly. At least, it’d been tender by Kyra’s standards, and tender wasn’t her way. Somehow, she and Marco had connected. Maybe it was because they were so much alike.
Or maybe it was because she was pretending to be someone else.
The thought was so sobering, so unsettling, that she stopped the trail of his lips down her stomach. “What’s wrong?” he asked.
Everything was wrong. What’s more, his bandage had peeled away just enough so that she could see the crudely stitched wound. The threads looked frail and tattered as if the poison was eating them away. What if even a little bit of his blood dripped onto her skin again? Just being this close to him, she was taking her life in her hands, and yet, why did she suddenly fear it was her heart most in jeopardy? “It’s just…”
“You regret it,” he finished for her.
No. She didn’t regret it. And that was the problem. “It’s just—I’m not sure I’m the kind of woman who does this.” What she meant, of course, was that she wasn’t the kind of nymph who did this. She took lovers, certainly. But this encounter with Marco had the potential to be so much more. And that frightened her out of her wits.
As the silence stretched on between them, his shoulders tensed in the firelight. She could see she’d angered him, broken the thread of tenderness between them. When he spoke again, it was guarded. Sarcastic. “What, Ashlynn? Are you afraid I’m not going to respect you in the morning?”
“Maybe,” Kyra said, but that was a lie. She was afraid that, in the end, she’d be just like all those silly, sentimental nymphs who mistook sex for something more, and lost themselves in the bargain. “You wouldn’t be the first man to judge a woman in the morning for doing exactly what you wanted her to do the night before.”
“I’ve had too many one-night stands to judge you,” he said. So he meant this to be the only time. Kyra wasn’t sure why this should’ve bothered her, but it did. Her disappointment must have shown, because he said, “Look, I know I said some unkind things when we broke up…”
In spite of herself, she was desperately curious about how Marco parted from his ex-lover. “Like what?”
“Don’t do that,” he said, shaking his head. “I know you remember what I called you. And I’m sorry. You were lonely when I went overseas and you were inexperienced. He took advantage of that. You were an innocent and I blame him not you.”
An innocent? Kyra made a mental note never again to impersonate someone like Ashlynn Brown.
She couldn’t pull it off. In fact, she’d better cut off this conversation quickly. Any trip down memory lane was likely to mess her up. She didn’t share his memories and she wasn’t the woman he was reminiscing about, but she wasn’t sure she could bear for him to realize it so soon after the tender intimacies between them. “Well, we’re different people now.”
“We are. And though I’m sure you don’t like to think of yourself as the kind of girl who gets down and dirty in the middle of the living room…if you ask me, a little naughtiness suits you.”
“So you’re saying that you like me better now than the way I was?”
If only he hadn’t paused to think about it. If only he’d given her any real answer at all. But what he said was, “I’m not sure my opinion matters. I’m hungry. Are you hungry?”
“Charming.” Kyra tried, and failed, to keep the acid from her tongue. “Is that how you are with your other women? ‘Hey, thanks for last night. Let’s order some pizza!’”
Marco arched a brow. “My other women?“
“Weren’t you just bragging about all your one-night stands?”
His brow arched even higher. “Are you jealous?”
“Should I be?”
“I just take fleeting pleasure where I find it. I don’t deserve much more than that.”
“That’s not true.” Now she knew that he wasn’t an arms dealer for the cash or for the power. He was a crusader; he had the idiotic notion that what he was doing would help people.
She ached a little at the break in contact as he withdrew from the tangle of limbs and couch cushions, but she liked looking at his body in the firelight. He was as hard and scarred as an ancient legionary, with dark hair that trailed down his chest and thinned out on his belly. She wanted to rub her face against it, and her arousal frustrated her. Meanwhile, he found his towel, wrapped it around his waist and padded barefoot, apparently intent on foraging for food. “I’ll cook us something.”
She opened her mouth to stop him, tried to spin some quick lie to explain why the fridge was empty, but she was too late. He threw open the door, then looked at her from across the countertop that divided the living room from the kitchen, incredulous. “Don’t you eat?”
“I told you—I just moved in.”
His eyes narrowed. “You keep saying that, but I don’t see any boxes.”
“They’re still back at my old place,” Kyra quickly lied.
That’s when he flung open the freezer and found the food rations she’d stored when she’d planned to lock him in the dungeon. She hadn’t planned to starve him, after all. “What the hell?”
“Doesn’t everybody love Salisbury steak?” But she couldn’t keep the guilt off her face, and she pulled the blanket tighter around her, anticipating a truly horrible confrontation.
To her surprise, he laughed. And it wasn’t one of his dark bitter laughs, either. This one was rich and warm and it made her fingertips tingle. “Ashlynn, you have about twenty trays in here. It’s bad enough that you’re subsisting off craptastic frozen dinners, but every single one of these is the same!”
So she wasn’t caught, after all. “Variety makes me nervous,” she chirped in relief.
“I remember that about you.” He pulled two boxed dinners out of the freezer and tossed them on the countertop. “This is all congealed gravy and high sodium—you keep eating this stuff, and it’s going to kill you.”
No, she thought. There was only one thing in this world that could kill her and that was him. “Marco…I’ll take care of dinner if you want to clean up. Your bandage—”
It was the wrong thing to say. His hand quickly went to his cheek as awareness dawned in his eyes. For a few moments he’d given pleasure, taken pleasure and laughed. For just a little while, he’d forgotten he was a monster.
Now, she’d reminded him again and it seemed to turn him to stone.
Chapter 8
Marco checked his bandage, relieved to find that he wasn’t dripping blood. How could he have been so damned reckless? What if his cut had opened up again while he was on top of her? What if he’d poisoned her? He was usually so much more careful about this. But somehow when their bodies were joined, Marco had forgotten about his poisoned blood. He’d forgotten about wars, he’d forgotten about Africa, he’d forgotten about his many faces, his mother’s madness and he’d even forgotten his father’s death.
And that was all because of her. Because of Ashlynn Brown. The same woman who couldn’t even wait until he’d come home from his tour of duty to return his engagement ring and run off with another guy. Ashlynn had wounded his pride, but that was all. He’d been so young that he’d already fallen out of love with her—if he’d ever been in love with her to begin with. Or is that just what he told himself? Because if he’d really stopped having feelings for Ashlynn, how could he explain what just happened?
He couldn’t explain it, or maybe he just didn’t want to. Furious with himself, Marco riffled through the bathroom cabinets to find a clean bandage. He’d been surprised at Ashlynn’s rather well-stocked medicine cabinet. Not just your standard aspirin and Band-Aids, but a full first-aid kit and some pretty heavy-duty sleeping pills. He couldn’t help but wonder what kept her up at night.
After he’d redressed the wound on his cheek, assuring himself that he wasn’t going to bleed on anything, he looked for something dry to wear. A towel wasn’t going to cut it. He went into her bedroom. The bed looked as if it’d never been slept in, but Ashlynn had always been a neat freak that way. He opened the closet and found two bathrobes hanging on the back of the door, neither of which looked as if they’d ever been worn. Also, to his extreme shock and surprise, he found a pair of shiny silver handcuffs.
He actually did a double take, pulled them out and tested them. Yep. Real handcuffs. What the hell kind of life was Ashlynn living now that her bedroom closet contained bathrobes and handcuffs but hardly any clothes?
Something about this house was so wrong, and under any other circumstances he’d have marched to the kitchen and demanded an explanation. But did he really have a right to ask? This was his high-school sweetheart he was dealing with here and he had the distinctly uncomfortable feeling that he was intruding in her private space.
Leaning against the door frame, he listened to the wind howling outside. The temperature outside was dropping, and every tree was slowly being trapped in ice. Just like him. Trapped here in this damned house with a woman who was as familiar as a lover, and as mysterious as a stranger.
The last time Kyra had cooked, microwaves hadn’t been invented, so she opted for the oven and set a timer. Not long after, Marco came back from the bathroom wearing one of the bathrobes the real estate agent had left there as a welcoming gift. He tossed his bloody bandage—as well as the towels he’d used—into the fire.
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