“God,” she murmured, shock sending a ripple of numbness through her as she tried to grasp that.
“Not like the god or anything. Just a god.” He shrugged, but there was nothing casual about it this time.
“But a god… you’re a god… oh my god… your brothers…”
“Well, it sort of stands to reason that they would be gods too.” He raised his hand to rub his neck, tensed and lowered it again. “I might get into a little trouble for this.”
“For what?” She was still stuck on trying to wrap her mind around the fact he was apparently a deity.
She supposed it explained why he had powers.
“Well… you’re kind of mortal. It’s a no-no.”
“Oh.” She stared at him, the shock subsiding as worry replaced it. She didn’t want to get him into trouble. “But, I mean, the gods apparently appeared to mortals all the time back in the day. Jupiter was always at it… if you know what I mean.”
The touch of colour on his cheeks and the way his eyes heated said that he did.
That flash of desire was gone a moment later, a frown replacing it. “Jupiter is a pussy.”
It was her turn to frown.
He huffed and looked down at Rome. “The whole pantheon sucks.”
The ground trembled. Valen grinned.
When he looked across at her, that grin widened and his eyes sparkled with mischief.
“They fucking hate it.”
Eva wasn’t following. “Hate what?”
Valen sighed, tipped his head back and stared at the lightening sky. “Having a Greek on their turf.”
A Greek.
“So I would do better to mention the fact that Zeu—”
His head snapped down, his eyes bright gold in the low light, and he snarled, “Don’t mention that fucker.”
She tensed and shifted back a step.
His demeanour instantly shifted, the darkness lifting from it and an apology entering his soft eyes. He did scrub a hand around his neck now.
“Bastard,” he muttered and spat on the grass.
Lightning rolled across the cloudless sky.
How odd.
She blinked, feeling dazed as that one tried to sink in, wanting to laugh at how crazy it was.
Or how crazy she was.
“Uncle loves it when I call him that.” Valen grinned at her and then his face fell again. “Something wrong?”
She shook her head, even though everything was wrong. It was all messed up.
Valen laughed, a nervous edge to it. “I suppose you’re right though. The bastard can hardly punish me for revealing myself as a god when he was always off shagging mortals.”
He didn’t sound sure.
The ground trembled again, more violently this time, and she eased closer to Valen, afraid the earth was about to split and swallow her.
“The, uh… Roman pantheon gods sound angry,” she said, and wished she hadn’t, because saying out loud that there were gods ended her ability to pretend that she had imagined everything she had seen, including the freak cloudless lightning.
Valen kicked at the grass with his right foot. “That wasn’t them.”
It definitely hadn’t been an earthquake.
So who had made the ground shake?
She lifted her head to ask but Valen’s expression warned her not to do it. There was wariness in his eyes that hadn’t been there a moment before, a hint of fear that had her holding her tongue. Mentioning that he was a god had set him on edge, why?
It struck her that it was because he thought she would run away, or reject him or do something to leave him because she was afraid of him now.
It wasn’t the case at all.
If gods were real and he was one, then it explained a lot.
“Electricity,” she whispered and caught his frown as she dropped her eyes from his face to his hands. She reached for them, stopped herself before she could touch them and withdrew. Her gaze leaped to his face.
He stared down at his hands, a distant look in his eyes and a sombre air surrounding him.
She hadn’t meant to hurt him by stopping herself from touching him, but clearly she had. If he thought she was afraid to touch him now, he was wrong about that too.
She edged her right hand towards his left one and brushed her fingertips over the back of it and down his fingers, a thrill tripping through her as they touched.
“Lightning,” he said and when she looked up at him, added, “technically. I can control electricity… but when I was born, that sort of contained lightning-type energy hadn’t been invented. So… lightning.”
“Lightning,” she whispered and gasped as tiny white-purple arcs crackled between the fingers of his other hand. She released his left one on instinct.
He sighed. “I wouldn’t hurt you.”
It was easy for him to say that, but it was human nature to fear electricity, and how difficult would it be for the hand she had been holding to suddenly conduct that electricity too?
“When I was ‘seducing’ you, you needed a time out… I saw your power then.” She looked between his bright golden eyes and his hands.
He sighed again and grimaced.
“Fine. Sometimes it gets the better of me.” His tone turned sombre again and he looked off into the distance at Rome. “Sometimes I let it.”
He didn’t sound proud of that.
He raised his hands in front of him and little bolts of lightning chased between his fingertips.
Eva studied his noble profile in silence, deeply aware of what a big step this was for him. It touched her that he was doing this for her—sharing this place and himself. All in an effort to set her mind at ease. She had the feeling that he would answer any question she asked right now, because he wanted her to feel better and it was all he felt he could do for her.
She would do something for him too. She would take that same big step and tell him about herself if he asked, would hold nothing back from him, letting him be the first person to know the real her.
“What did happen at the club that night… when you reacted to the drink?”
He smiled, tipped his head back and groaned. “Not quite what I had expected, that’s what happened. I thought maybe it would throw me a little off balance, strip away a few too many inhibitions. I hadn’t anticipated it would strip away my control like that instead.”
He tilted his head towards her.
“I don’t know the why of it. Me and my brothers are just more sensitive to some things. Alcohol, some drugs, caffeine. It makes fuck all sense to me since I can drink in a bar in the Underworld and all I do is get drunk.”
Eva stared at him.
He grimaced, turned to face her and blew out his breath as his hands landed on her shoulders and he crouched so he was eye level with her.
“Let’s just toss some shit out there and then I don’t have to worry about it anymore, okay?” he said and she dumbly nodded, still reeling from him talking about the Underworld. Hell. He drew in another deep breath and expelled it hard. “Here goes nothing. I was born in the Underworld. You’ve probably heard of my parents. I have six brothers, all pains in my arse. I was banished here two centuries ago by Dad to protect gates between the Underworld and this one. Daemons like Benares and Jin are trying to shatter those gates and if they do, the worlds we love merge and it all goes to shit. Still following?”
Eva nodded again, her ears ringing and head spinning as she raced to follow him.
“I’m in charge of Rome, which is why you met my fine arse, and we think Benares and Jin are part of a group of daemons who are behind the calamity the fucking bastard Moirai… uh, Fates I guess you would know them as… foresaw.”
She nodded, and kept nodding, her gaze glued on his face but her mind sweeping her away from him, down a vicious rapids that she wasn’t sure she would survive.
“Take any of that in?” Valen whispered and looked between her eyes, his narrowing as he searched them.
She kept noddin
g. “You’re from the Underworld. You have brothers. Daemons want to destroy everything. You really don’t like the Moirai.”
“Because they’re bastards,” he muttered and his face darkened, reminding her of the way he had looked when she had almost said Zeus.
He hated Zeus too.
Had something happened to make him hate the three Fates and the king of Greek gods?
She wasn’t going to ask, because he had that look again, the one that said she would regret it if she dared to voice that question.
“Still with me?” he murmured, voice a low rasp that was far too sexy.
She latched onto that and the wicked thoughts it stirred, using it to escape the vortex of craziness of everything he had just said.
Eva stopped nodding and stared at him. She had to focus on something small, something she was comfortable with if she was going to take any of this in and believe it was real, not a figment of her warped mind.
Or his warped mind.
She looked down at his hand on her right shoulder. “You control lightning.”
He nodded.
She lifted her eyes back to his. “Do your brothers too?”
“No.” He eased back, released her shoulders and put his hands behind his neck, clasping it. The action raised the hem of his black t-shirt, flashing a strip of toned stomach at her that had her wicked thoughts escalating, multiplying rapidly. “We all have different ones.”
His expression soured.
“Except Keras. Being the firstborn he got the job lot because he’s special.”
Eva had the feeling he hated Keras most of all out of his six brothers, and that it was because he believed Keras was special for some reason.
Keras wasn’t at all special in her eyes.
Valen was.
She had the feeling she could fall in love with him.
She crouched, pressed her hand to the grass and smiled when she found it wasn’t too damp. Good, because she needed to sit down. All of this would be easier to take in if she wasn’t standing.
She planted her backside on the ground and grimaced as her jeans were instantly wet.
Maybe not such a grand idea after all, but she was committed now.
Valen sat down beside her, so close she could smell his aftershave and feel the heat radiating off him. He placed his hands behind himself and propped himself up, his long legs stretched out in front of him, his gaze fixed on Rome.
She dragged her eyes away from him and looked there too.
Dawn was coming, painting the sky with ribbons of gold and pink.
“It’s beautiful.” She sighed as she took it in, gave herself a moment to absorb the view and how good sitting here enjoying it with Valen made her feel.
She had never watched a sunrise with a guy before.
“Was just thinking the same thing,” he murmured throatily and she frowned across at him, wondering what had gotten into him to make him sound so sexy again.
He was staring at her.
She shoved him in his left arm, making him sway sideways, and his smile was wicked and unapologetic.
“Watch the sunrise,” she said, putting her best effort into sounding as if she was scolding him even as she blushed inside at the fact he had called her beautiful.
He sighed but did as she asked.
God, this was comfortable though.
Sitting on a damp hillside, watching the sun rising over Rome, next to a Greek god.
Not exactly how she had pictured her life going.
But she wasn’t going to complain about it.
She looked down at the city stretching before her and Benares crept back into her thoughts, but rather than feel shaken by his presence, resolve filled her and she set her jaw as Valen’s words swam in her mind.
Benares and Jin wanted to destroy Rome.
Like hell she was letting that happen.
This was her home, and she was going to fight to protect it, just as Valen did.
CHAPTER 21
“Do you have any guns at your place?” Eva said and felt Valen’s eyes leap from the city to land on her.
“Guns?”
She nodded, not taking her eyes off the rooftops, seeking out all of her favourite buildings. She could see everything from up here. The Colosseum and the forum area, the Vatican and the weaving snake of the Tiber as it swept through the city.
“I have a few in my bag, but I don’t want to go back to my apartment for the others. I left my favourite guns there.” She swore his gaze grew more intense, drilling into the right side of her face.
He was definitely frowning at her now.
“One or two. I mostly have knives. Why, you thinking of starting a war?” he said, his tone measured and calm.
Assessing.
He was trying to figure out what she was up to even when he already knew the truth of it. A truth that he didn’t like, so he was looking for another reason, one more palatable to him.
Eva glanced across at him. “They already started it for me. I’m just going to finish it.”
He looked dumbfounded.
Not quite the reaction she had hoped to get from him.
He turned his face away from her, his expression losing all the warmth she had been enjoying, his eyes narrowing and glowing molten gold again. The air around him grew dark, tense in a way she didn’t like because she felt as if he was shutting her out, and she frowned at him.
“Let it go,” he said, his tone as dark as his aura. “It isn’t going to happen. I’m not letting you fight.”
She folded her arms across her chest. “You don’t get a say. I’m involved in this, and nothing will change that.”
“I’m changing it. I’m not going to stand by and let you get yourself killed, Eva.” His voice cracked at the end and he turned his head away from her, and her arms fell back to her sides as she sensed the pain in him.
The fear.
He didn’t want to lose her.
“I’ve spent over a decade as an assassin, Valen. I know how to handle myself. You don’t have to worry.” She reached out to touch his shoulders but they tensed and then he turned on her.
“But I do,” he barked and she flinched, her hand hovering in the air between them. “I do. Eva… you spent a decade eliminating mortals. You’re dealing with daemons now. They’re too strong for you to fight.”
Her lips flattened and she scowled at him. “I bet guns make them bleed just like a mortal.”
His expression remained dark, his eyes devoid of emotion, cold and hard, the way she hated seeing them. “What use is a gun going to be when they move faster than you can track?”
True. An image of Benares suddenly being in front of her flashed across her mind and she couldn’t argue against Valen’s point. One second Benares had been before her, and when she had turned he was right there, blocking her path.
“Knives are better,” he muttered and she had the feeling that he was starting to relent, his defences weakening as he looked at her. “Maybe a sword.”
“A sword?” She couldn’t quite believe he had just suggested that. “Who uses a sword?”
He glared at her.
Clearly, he used a sword.
“I thought you liked knives.” She must have sounded as unsettled by that thought as she felt because his frown hardened and he canted his head to one side and studied her.
“Not good with knives?”
Eva shuddered and shook her head. “Too personal.”
He clucked his tongue and huffed, “Women.”
Eva punched him in his left deltoid and he glared at her again. “Stronzo.”
He grinned. “Love it when you talk dirty.”
She hit him again.
“How can you kill with a knife though?” she said and he turned serious again, a sigh escaping him.
“I’m used to it… but there was a time when I thought like you do, back when I was young… before my powers had fully manifested and stabilised, and I had mastered them.” He dropped his gaze
to the patch of grass that separated them and picked at the blades with his fingers, and she gave him a moment to collect his thoughts and the courage to keep talking to her, opening himself to her. He twirled a blade of grass he had plucked between his fingers and stared at it. “A knife seemed too intimate… and the thought of stabbing or slicing into someone’s flesh turned my stomach.”
Exactly the way she felt.
“What happened to change that?” She didn’t want him to stop talking now that he had started, because she finally felt she was coming to know him, that the final pieces of the puzzle were falling into place and completing the picture of him.
“I went through my trial when I hit two hundred… pretty much a teen in mortal terms. Fucking voice hadn’t even broken then. I looked like a scrawny little bastard too.” He tossed the blade of grass and sat straight again, crossing his legs.
Two hundred.
It didn’t surprise her to learn that he was far older than he appeared. If he had looked like a teen at two hundred, he was probably around three times that age now, maybe more. He had been in her world for two hundred years too. He slid her another look, one that silently asked her not to probe into his age. She wouldn’t. Not yet anyway. He had been uncomfortable after telling her a little about himself earlier, clearly concerned that the things he was admitting would drive her away.
They wouldn’t.
She was here to stay.
And he would tell her in his own time.
He yawned, flashing his tongue stud and stirring wicked thoughts that tried to distract her from their conversation.
She shoved them out of her head and focused on his eyes instead as they locked with hers. “What’s a trial?”
“A rite of manhood.” He waggled his eyebrows but the dark edge to his golden eyes said it was nothing to joke about.
He wanted to lighten the mood, but she wasn’t sure it was possible if he was talking about what she thought he was—being forced into combat in order to prove himself a man. He scratched his left ear and shrugged, as if wanting to shift the heaviness of what he was saying from his back, but it didn’t seem to work because he remained stiff, his eyes still dark and haunted.
His lips parted on a deep sigh.
“It’s a Dad thing.” He tried another shrug. This one didn’t work either. “We get taken off to some remote corner of the Underworld and have to get back.”
Valen (Guardians of Hades Romance Series Book 2) Page 24