Betrayer (Hidden Book 7)

by Colleen Vanderlinden

  “Can you tell me about them?”

  He gave a small laugh. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Perhaps I want to understand you. You are often a mystery to me, Cub. Maybe if I know more about the people who raised you, I will have some understanding of you.”

  “If either of us is a mystery, it’s you, Eunomia,” he said, taking my hand again. The warmth in his gaze, that small smile on his lips. In that moment, he was my entire world, and I had never, ever felt that before. I had never felt so completely overcome by anyone in my entire existence. I would have suspected some kind of sorcery, but I am old enough to have seen it all.

  There was no spell, no enchantment, that could match what I was feeling when I looked at him.

  “There is nothing mysterious about me,” I managed in a quiet voice.

  “So you say,” he answered. “I want to know it all, eventually.”

  I blushed, and gave a small nod. “Your parents?” I reminded him.

  He tangled his fingers with mine, and began rubbing his thumb along the side of my hand as he spoke. “My dad was a lot like Nain, I guess. It makes sense that they were good friends. Really gruff, not a man of many words, but when he said something, everyone listened. I look a lot like him.” He paused. “I can show you a picture of them sometime.”

  “That would be nice,” I said.

  “Except for my eyes, I think. My mom’s eyes were the same color as mine. My dad was a workaholic. He was with Nain during the ’67 riots, and I think it changed him. Made him more focused. That’s when he met my mom, actually.”

  “Oh?”

  “She was on Nain’s team. She was really close to Ada,” he stopped and smiled. “Actually, Ada was with my mom when she gave birth to me.”

  I found myself smiling back. “No wonder she has so much love for you.”

  He nodded. “She was always around when I was a kid. And after my parents died, and I went to live with Nain, Ada was the only mother figure I had. And she is everything I could have asked for, beyond having my own mom back.”

  Our food arrived, and I missed his hand in mine almost immediately. I glanced down at my food. I had ordered a steak, as had Brennan, and my stomach rumbled just a bit as the peppery, rich smell of it wafted toward me.

  “This looks amazing,” I said, and Brennan nodded. We ate in silence for a few moments.

  “So you’ve told me about your father. Tell me about your mother,” I finally said, taking another bite of steak.

  He nodded. “My mom was… she was living magic. She was loud, and opinionated. She did not take any crap, you know?”

  I nodded again, watched him as he chewed a bite of his steak.

  “She lived fully. Everything she did, she did fully. If she fought, it was almost a given that whoever’s ass she was kicking would come away bruised and limping. When she looked at my dad, you could practically feel the love. And when she hugged you, she hugged you so hard, so completely, that it was impossible to feel anything but warm and loved.”

  He paused, and for not the first time, I wished I had known Rhiannon Matthews. Brennan clearly had no idea how much of his mother lived on in him.

  “You could say the same for yourself, Brennan,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Only sometimes, maybe. Too often, I’m more like my dad. Which would be fine. A lot of the time, I’m not like either of them. A lot of the time, I’m more like some kind of robot that just does things in the order it’s supposed to to finish a task.”

  I set down my utensils. He was not saying anything I had not already noticed.

  “But when you are yourself, you are everything you admired in both of your parents. It is only when you forget who you are that you go into robot mode.”

  “At least in robot mode, I don’t screw up.” I wanted to fold him into my arms at the flat tone of his voice. He had made so many mistakes, with Mollis and everyone else. He had spent the past few years trying to make amends and rebuild the trust he had ruined among some on Nain’s team, and with Mollis, especially.

  “Making mistakes is not something to be ashamed of. It is how we learn. It is how we become better,” I told him softly.

  “You say ‘we’ as if you think it applies to you, too,” he said.

  “Because it does. If anyone is intimately familiar with living life in robot mode, it is me. I spent thousands of years in it.”

  “What made you change?”

  “It did not happen all at once. I was ever devoted to serving Hermes and then Hades. Once command of the Guardians had been given to Hades, it felt like everything changed. Hermes truly saw us as machines of some kind, no more noticeable than a table, or a hammer. Required to perform, but beneath notice, really, beyond that. Of course, that was how we were meant to be seen. We are soldiers. Servants. Lesser gods,” I said with a wry smile. “Hades treated us with more respect. It seemed to make no difference to my sisters. They carried on as they always had. But something changed in me the longer I worked for Hades. I began to see myself as more. I was still loyal to my duties, but, more so, I was loyal to Hades. It was the first time I realized there was something very wrong with me. We are supposed to feel loyalty for no one.”

  Brennan sat silently, listening.

  “I came to know the Furies. Tisiphone, especially, treated me with kindness, which is very out of character for a Fury. I had a sense that we were two oddballs. She was perhaps the first being I considered a friend. That was the second indication that something was wrong with me. Emotion. We were not supposed to have them, especially not ones like that. Anger, rage, determination. Those are all right. Genuinely liking someone? I did not even know what it was I was feeling for a long time. I hid my defects well,” I said with a smile. “And then I came to know Hephaestus after his return to the Aether, and he was a friend to me in a way that not even Tisiphone had been. He was the only one I confided my fears about myself to. I knew all of his secrets, and he knew all of mine. Two defective beings surrounded by perfection.”

  “Or the only two really sane ones surrounded by immortal jerks,” he said. I laughed.

  “Perhaps,” I said in agreement.

  I took a breath. I knew he had questions about another immortal, and if I wanted this man in my life, which I was beginning to suspect I did, he needed to understand. “Triton changed things even more,” I said.

  I could see him trying to keep an impassive expression on his face. I knew he realized there was something more there, and his behavior in general toward Triton was reserved, and, while not rude, not exactly friendly, either.

  “The first time I saw Triton, he was standing on one of the cliffs in Greece. I was there, searching for a soul. Anyway. I walked around a large outcropping, and there he was. Muscles and fiery hair and the way my body reacted to him scared the Nether out of me.” I kept my eyes on his, holding contact. “I had never felt lust before. Never felt what it felt like to want something. It threw my entire world into chaos.”

  “Wanting him messed you up that much?” he asked, confused.

  “I had never wanted anything before, Brennan,” I said, trying to explain. “Not a thing. I did not know ‘want.’ And lust is a more overwhelming sense of wanting. It was terrifying, the way my stomach flipped, the way my body warmed, the way it felt as if I would suffocate, because it seemed like I could not remember how to breathe when he was around.”

  I knew he needed to hear something, so I smiled at him. “It is still terrifying, every time I look at you.”

  His gaze focused, intensified. “Me?”

  I nodded.

  His shoulders relaxed, and it looked as if the tension all fell away at once. “Same to you, Tink.”

  I smiled. “We became friends, and I believe he was completely unsuspecting of what I felt for him. I kept it hidden well, mostly. I think later, he knew. The feelings I had for him led to the first time I ever behaved badly. It marked the day my life changed completely.”

  “Tell me,” he said so
ftly.

  We had finished our meal, and cups of steaming coffee and plates of rich chocolate tarts sat before us. I ran the tines of my fork through the dollop of whipped cream on my plate, trying to gather the courage to give words to something that had so shamed me at the time.

  “I had been harboring all of those intense, terrifying feelings for him. Keeping them hidden from him. He did not know,” I emphasized, trying to make Brennan understand it, and he nodded. “We had agreed to meet at a particular beach once my duties were finished for the day. I finished, and arrived there earlier than he expected me. I found him and a sea nymph together. I remember feeling frozen, numb. And then she cried out with pleasure, and I snapped out of it and rematerialized to a cave where I knew no one would come looking for me. I had never felt pain like that. Physical pain was something I understood, something I even welcomed because there is pride in besting a worthy opponent. But this kind of pain… it felt like something inside of me was dying a slow, agonizing death. Everything hurt, and I hated myself for it. I felt weak and foolish.” I paused, and met his eyes.

  “It was on that day that I realized that the danger in loving is in giving someone the ability to destroy you. Because you cannot truly love without giving up some of yourself, and it is a leap of faith to hope that the person you give it to cares enough for it that you keep yourself all in one piece. I came apart. I neglected my duties, and refused to heed Hades’ call. I left, and I stayed gone for a very long time.”

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Hades finally came to get me. And he told me that now I truly understood what it was to be alive. I became his most trusted Guardian after that, and I worked for him as I now work for Mollis.” I paused. “I suspect that was why I was sent to Detroit in the first place. He knew his daughter was here somewhere.”

  Chapter Eleven

  After we left the restaurant, rather than having his car pulled around so we could leave, Brennan and I strolled down Jefferson Avenue, past the GM Building and ended up at the Riverwalk. The night air was cool bordering on cold; an early December preview of a winter to come. It did not bother me, of course, and Brennan did not seem overly bothered by it either. We walked, my hand held tightly, warmly in his, his thumb caressing the underside of my wrist.

  We walked, and we talked. Mostly, I talked, and he listened. I told him about living as a Guardian, about Hermes, about my sisters. I told him about the first time I had tasted chocolate, and he laughed at the wonder in my voice.

  “You threw a few names at me that night we talked about your scars,” he said, sitting on a bench overlooking the Detroit River. I settled myself beside him, the side of my body pressed tightly to the side of his, and he put his arm around me. “Jack the Ripper, Genghis Khan, Al Capone. I’m still finding it all a little crazy. The concept of what you’ve seen in your lifetime is almost too much to comprehend.” He smiled. “What does it feel like?”

  “Immortality, you mean?” I asked softly, knowing it was something he thought about more often, since I had suggested that he likely had an unnaturally (for a shifter) long life ahead of him.

  He nodded.

  I took a breath, thinking. “It feels like you belong everywhere and nowhere. As if you can call any city on Earth home, because you know them all so well, yet, at the same time, finding a place that actually makes you feel centered and comfortable is nearly impossible.” I put my hand on his thigh. I wondered to myself if his penchant for maintaining physical contact with those he cared for was not beginning to wear off on me as well. I enjoyed touching him, the feel of his warm skin against mine, the contours of his muscled body beneath my hands. “It is easy to become jaded. At some point, it begins to feel as if you have seen everything, and you tire of seeing humanity make the same mistakes over and over and over again. The first time you watch an empire fall, you will feel sure it will be impossible for anything like that to happen again. And then you watch it happen countless times thereafter, and the impermanence of empires becomes commonplace. The space of a human life becomes fleeting. You realize this, and it makes you sure that getting to know any particular human is a waste of time, because they will be dust before you know it.”

  His head was bowed, listening to me, his hand rubbing up and down my arm. I smiled. “And then you realize how foolish you have been. The impermanence of life is what makes it beautiful, something to cherish. Each human is here for such a short time… they live more in sixty years than many immortals do in a thousand. We can learn so much from them, once we realize that everlasting life is nothing more than an excuse to avoid having to truly learn anything about ourselves or anyone else.”

  We sat in silence, his hand still running up and down my arm. The scent of him surrounded me, clean, wild, and comforting. I rested my head against his shoulder. “Your grandmother wants me to remind you that we are not positive you are immortal and you need to start being more careful, by the way,” I said. “She messaged me this morning because she knew you would be seeing me.” He chuckled.

  “I know. She said the same thing to me. She’s not letting it go since I got shot. You know what, though?”

  “What?”

  “I saw a picture of myself from when Molly first joined our team, and then I saw a photo Sean took of me when he was messing around with my phone. It’s been almost seven years, and I look younger now than I did then.”

  I patted his thigh. “You have had Asclepius’s healing and some of Mollis’s blood. It makes sense that those things would take a few years of age off of you.”

  “I’m stronger than I was,” he pressed.

  “Same reasons for that, Cub.” He was about to speak, and I held my hand up. “I believe you are immortal. But that tiny possibility that you might not be terrifies me. Please do not test it,” I said, raising my face to his and meeting his eyes. “I would miss you if you were gone.”

  Hie gaze warmed, and he slowly lowered his lips to mine. I was caught up immediately, as always, in the feelings he raised within me. The things I had told him about Triton, the emotions Triton had made me feel, paled in comparison to the things I felt every time I looked at Brennan. If only I was brave enough to tell him so.

  His kisses, first soft and sensual, became hungrier, more demanding. He kissed me, sucked and nibbled on my lower lip, and when his tongue lazily caressed mine, I gently bit it, and he groaned. His arms around me were like iron, and I tangled my fingers into his hair, keeping him close to me as we devoured one another.

  Gods, he made me feel insane. Undone. Reckless and inexperienced and as if, for just a moment, I could still fly.

  When I finally made myself pull away, I was breathless, my hands trembling from the sheer raw emotion his touch inspired. He had a wild look in his eyes, his hair disheveled from the way I’d tangled my fingers into it.

  “Come home with me, Eunomia,” he said, his voice rough, hoarse.

  I managed a smile. “We both know I am not ready for that, Cub.” I said it gently, regretfully, because as much as my body wanted him, I knew my heart was not ready. I knew he was not a distraction I could manage with everything else going on, and, oh how I wanted him to distract me. I reached out and gently ran my fingertips through his beard, and he nuzzled into my palm. “Can you be patient with me?” I whispered.

  He turned his head, laying a kiss on my palm. “You know I’m not going anywhere.”

  I smiled, still shaken by everything he made me feel. “Someday. When everything settles down and the world is not falling down around us.”

  He smiled and kissed my palm again. “The way things are going, it should be a few hundred years or so.”

  “Hm. Good thing you are likely immortal, then,” I said, and he laughed, and some of the tension between us cooled. Not entirely. That strange energy between us was always there, but it had calmed enough to at least make it so that I was able to think straight. “I hope you know…” I trailed off, biting my lip, unsure and regretting the words already because
I was, at heart, a coward.

  “Know what, Tink?”

  I looked into his eyes, and it felt like leaping from the highest cliff with no wings to rely on to save me. “I hope you know how much I care about you,” I said softly, and it felt as if I could barely breathe. “I hope you know that I want this, whatever this is between us, to stay as good as it is right now.”

  “And I hope you know that I feel the same,” he said in a low voice. And then he grinned. “I didn’t expect to hear anything like that from you tonight. Especially since you were so prickly when I asked you out.”

  I laughed. “I do stupid things when you kiss me like that,” I said, raising an eyebrow at him.

  “I’ll have to kiss you that way more often, then.”

  “It seems unfair. You seem perfectly calm.”

  He choked a little, then looked away, a bit of a blush staining his cheeks.

  “What?” I asked, laughing.

  “Oh, honey. I am feeling anything but calm right now,” he said, looking toward me again. “Really I’m just trying not to embarrass myself too much.”

  Now it was my turn to blush. “Oh.”

  “Mmhmm,” he murmured, leaning in and kissing his way along my jawline. His hand traced up my hip, my side and rested just below my breast, spanning my ribcage. I was sure he must have been able to feel my heart pounding.

  “Eunomia,” he murmured.

  “Yes,” I whispered, hoping he understood.

  He did. He gently cupped my breast in his hand, and I gasped. He continued to kiss my jawline, my neck, that sensitive place where my neck meets my shoulder, and he gently squeezed me, rubbed his thumb over my breast in a way that had me pushing my body closer to his hand.

  After a few amazing, torturous moments, he pulled away, giving my breast one final caress before sitting back.

  “You are trying to kill me,” he groaned, sitting back and looking up at the night sky. A glance down at his lap was all the proof I needed that I did, indeed, affect him at least as much as he affected me.