“Oh, gods,” I whispered. “What have I done?”
I pushed back and away from him in horror. I’d hurt him. I’d tried to kill him!
He shocked me then, smiling slightly, the blood a stain on his teeth.
His gaze shuttered when I felt for a tickle beneath my nose, and blood slowly dripped from it. He reached forward and gently brushed some away, smearing it across my cheek when he did so in an obviously regretful gesture, but his expression was rather unmoved. There was no pity in his gaze, and I wanted none.
It shocked me to realize I had wanted this. With every part of my being I had needed a battle. I wanted destruction. And still, I craved it despite our small wounds.
My breath was fast and ragged as I watched Alec stare at the blood on his fingertips in a curious way, rubbing them together. My blood disappeared, but not before I realized he had not made it fade but absorbed it in some way. Testing me, tasting me, feeling for what it was.
“I can sense Apollo in you even now,” he said, his anger returning.
His green eyes glassed over. I was lost to him, they said. I was a traitor.
“Alec, please,” I tried one last time, sorry that I’d betrayed his trust even on accident, because, truth be known, I had just finally figured out why it was so hard for this particular god of men to trust anyone, least of all me or my family.
We were locked in a stare, his dead, mine pleading. Couldn’t we just be someone else for a moment, I thought, and he must have read it in my gaze.
Even with his distant expression and the finality I sensed there, he leaned forward and tipped my chin. Without warning, his lips crushed mine and Alec kissed me ...branded me, hard.
Oh.
I made one small noise, and not of rejection. It undid us both. Alec swiveled around so that my back was at the door, and he pressed me into his plants until my body was flush with them, with part of him, each leafy vine reaching for me with softness. They surrounded me with him at my front. Our movements were fluid and in a blink, as my legs lifted to cradle his hips, and my hands clawed into his thick, warm hair, their chilly touch making him stiffen as they scraped along his scalp. Then Alec let me steer his head back, me the one taller at this point, and I gazed down, heavy lidded, our mouths touching but not moving at the moment.
Despite how gentle we might have been with our hands, our mouths had been bruising, and my lip burned with a cut from his teeth, and my tongue burned even further with the taste of immortal blood. Forbidden. Like molten ichor, it scalded me, further branding the god-king on my mouth.
My sigh wasn’t unexpected, but it was cold on his warmth, his face frosted by it, his lips turning blue with each breath I made. I was fascinated by it. It must have hurt.
Alec slid me to my feet, and just when I thought he’d leave me, his warmth and pain receding as a sane girl would want, he bent from his great height and kissed me even harder once more. Fleeting, cutting, and how he’d let me tug his locks before, to pull him away, now he had my hair like ropes around his wrists, forcing me open, invading me, making sure I knew that all who ventured this far with the mighty son of Acheron, the river god of pain himself, would live to regret it.
And shouldn’t I? My muddied brain gave no definitive answer. There was pain but also...more.
Oh, how I had craved this only moments earlier, but now, it was….it was a punishment.
Brutal. Careless.
Dots behind my eyelids exploded for the wrong reasons.
The taste was iron and power that sliced from tongue to throat and down across my spine. This was not a sweet kiss of endearing properties. No.
I would die from this kiss.
My body stiffened as his tongue swept brutally across mine in a leisurely, breathtaking spike. My body responded as if I’d been doused in freezing water when I realized we had gone too far.
I pulled away far easier than I thought I could. As commanding as Alec had been, he’d let me go as quickly as he’d savaged me. He was a drug that only would be given to those who asked. It might hurt. It might even kill. But you had to want to die badly enough first.
I pressed away, shivering, as far as I could into the door, hand to my mouth, my voice trembling and trying to recover. “What have you done?” I asked. “What have you done to me?”
He saw my expression and swiftly backed away, his eyes blown wide to black, as if I were the drug instead. “Nothing,” he said. “I...nothing.” Shame hot and sweeping bit into his cheeks until they were the darkest of reds. He would not look at me. “This is what it will be like between us, Freya. Pain. Madness. Can you sense it? You wanted to know; you’ve danced near this flame since you first arrived. But now you see, it is not possible.”
I was too distracted. There was a cliff in the room, and I was tumbling from it. Alec had made me like him. He must have. What was that power that had gripped his heart? It was nothing of my father or mother. I’d felt it beating in my hands! I could have stopped it should I have chosen to.
I trembled, sagging, almost falling. Alec did not reach to aid me.
“The river, Freya. Momentarily you knew your fullness of power. This perhaps is how you will be once you have it all.”
“No. My power is not evil and dark. It is not painful or ...” I didn’t say like yours. But I didn’t have to.
He watched me coldly, retreating bit by bit into his position of enemy. “Truth and visions, Freya,” he said, a cruel smile hovering about his lips. “Rarely are they pleasant.”
Alec’s blood still boiled on my tongue and without thinking, I did what he had before, testing it, sensing his power, learning more. Absorbing it so I might find out where the weaknesses were.
Not like you do with a friend.
More like you do with a foe.
That crushing realization dropped the last ounce of the tenuous want I’d held for my guardian. It slipped away as if on a wind of tremendous doubt. My eyes had been opened. By the river or by the kiss… I could not know. But once awake, I could not sleep any longer.
Mortals could make mistakes like this, but gods and goddesses could pay dearly for thousands of years for a kiss like Alec and I shared. You did not open yourself up in such a way to anyone. Even to those you loved. Especially to those you loved.
Love?
I pulled myself away from even thinking the word. As if it knew, a thrumming heat began to dance through me. Alec’s power, singing through my veins.
“Lies,” I hissed, sensing the leavings of something new between us, though dead before it got a chance to live.
We would murder even the slightest good thing between us, this I now understood. Alec’s gaze grew determined as I waded through my awareness. The first of us to accept that we must never let this happen again would win. I hesitated in my naivety, but the god-king did not.
He moved a hand and his plants latched onto me, wrapping my wrists and my legs while he, the coward, fled through the door as I shouted at his back, burning once more with Apollo’s fire, fighting back his evil plants.
But they won, and the fire cooled. And I was alone with my stupid, silly thoughts of what could have been until that faded, and hatred slowly began to blossom.
I laughed then. I then shouted until I was hoarse. And I had said one word over and over until my voice was gone and then my throat was too raw to yell anymore, tears came, and I wept.
Lies. That was the word I had shouted.
Lies, because there was something else between us other than pain and madness. Something much bigger than either one. And he had, like a coin tossed, flipped it from the good to the bad. And I had helped him.
Chapter 15
Alec returned only once in three days. I had slept and stared out of the balcony, talking myself out of jumping. I would live, but I would be broken into a million pieces and wasn’t sure what that would mean before I had my full power. In his rooms, it was much higher than my own and healing myself was something I had not been able to ever do very well. Th
e plants had finally set me loose, but they would not let me leave the room. Perhaps if I jumped, they’d have snatched me out of the air.
Defeated either way.
Alec dared to visit only once, and we’d struggled together. Physically, like humans, as if neither one dared to lift our power because our fury would maybe spin out of control. When I’d attacked him, he’d refrained from lashing out at me, just barely. Instead, he’d shackled my wrists, looking as if for all the world he wanted to unleash his wrath.
The hurt was sharper than a knife and for a moment I wished he were dead. I wished he’d have slapped me instead of throwing me onto the bed, before staring down at me anew. He was someone else now. He had spent time carefully building up a hedge and I could not penetrate it. He was a stranger to me.
I knew I looked mad when I demanded, “Where is my sister? Certainly, she’s furious at my imprisonment.”
“What?” he said carelessly. “Between her courtships.”
“Courtships?”
“Apollo has left off chasing her like a youth but there are more. Always, for her.”
My face turned cold. I would gut him where he stood!
His gaze was as sly as it was furious. A cutting remark for the bleeding cuts I’d given him during our struggle.
He waited, his breast moving fast, his nose flared. He…he liked the challenge! The bastard enjoyed this battle more than I.
I took three measured breaths to restrain myself.
“Apollo has left off. But, why?” I straightened my mussed hair with thought, still on my knees, on Alec’s bed. I made to move, then knew better of it. I’d only attack him all over again. My fury was endless.
I wanted us to strangle one another just to see if it would work and he knew it. He maybe wanted that too.
My mouth opened to demand what this was. What strange violence held us enthralled. But I snapped it shut in defiance and lifted my chin, tossing my long hair like a wild mare.
Alec’s lips twitched. “He has….other things on his mind, now doesn’t he?” he asked. “The very son of Zeus has already made his move, as I knew he would.”
His mood was as black as my thoughts when he turned away.
I glared at his back, my blood boiling. “Do not make an enemy of me.” Was it a plea? When he ignored my words, I repeated them twice more in the ancient way of threes. I stood, straightening my dress and spine. “Do not make an enemy of me, Alec.” Silence. “Do. Not. Make an enemy of me.” Spitting. “King of men.”
He spun back around and flashed those crazy green eyes, and suddenly I knew him once more. It made me smile a vile flit of lips. There he was. He couldn’t hide emotionless from this battle forever.
He would admit his own defeat. I would make certain of it. He was bound as much as I to this…dance.
For the first time I realized that that very thing was what Alec feared, maybe not most, but certainly it was a fear. That he had drawn close to the titan-blood and she would reveal something other than a young ward to be kept under lock and key.
Something other than a simpering virginal goddess who feared her own self and others, and needed his might like a shield.
Perhaps he would leave me in this prison, much as he himself was left, and she would be reborn of scales and teeth.
Perhaps…perhaps she would be his undoing.
“Let me go,” I said.
“No.” Alec’s tone was as finite as mortality and the thought made me very afraid.
Would I be someday mentioned in history, spoken of only in hushed and worried voices like other titans? Did you hear about Freya the Fallen, one human would ask another, She crossed the son of Acheron and ever has she been high up in her tower for all eternity.
No!
“Why not!” My hands curled and already my control cracked.
“Despite what you might think of me, Freya, I am not the monster here. Or if I am, then so be it, because I’m the only monster who isn’t monster enough to take what could be given.” He leant meaning to each word. He borrowed censure with every syllable.
I stepped back. This was worse than a slap. It was worse than him breaking. This was…this was…unfair.
“What are you saying?” My voice didn’t shake or quiver, it did not fail me in this moment for once.
He sighed, shrugging, as weary as I was. “Make of it what you will. You have already divided my own self more than I need on this day. And perhaps for all days, Freya, my young ward, you have undone much while utterly unaware.”
“Then why trap me here? This will only make whatever it is worse. I promise you.” Already my powers itched to be free. But they would not heed my commands yet. They would not obey me as I needed them to.
What good was a goddess who could not even command her inheritance?
Alec’s gaze was sad. “Is it truly the worst?” He motioned to his room. “Locked up here or locked up there, is this not at least in the company of someone who does at least see you, Freya?”
And there it was. I had pried and demanded to know all that made this god-king the sullen individual that he was and stormed into his self-loathing punishments along his side without invitation. Into his very mind, and did not check myself. Still, his very slight—brush of a wing really—touch to my pain shifted something inside of me. A thing so wounded and frail, that the tears leaked ceaselessly from my eyes even before a moment had lasted between the understanding and the feeling of the meaning behind his cruel words.
“Oh,” I sobbed, my voice a wretched stranger. “So, because my father was cruel to me and he hid me away, yes, Alec he did. But then now you can be only slightly less so and still the hero? Is that it? Because my life was full of neglect, my enemies can have their way or even if they do not, they are kind to me if they chain me to their bed but do not force me upon it? You…you have visited me what, once in three days? My. What a benevolent ruler, indeed.”
I stepped up to Alec, and he reached to touch my cheek, but I forced his hands away before spinning him towards his own mirror. “Look closely, my king,” I said with only slight mockery and all gentleness, “Because I see you as well.”
We both looked long and without breathing. We both saw indeed what we wanted to see but struggled to see what the other might have as well. Me, my hair unbound and unkempt, my dress torn and burned, and my face drawn and aged in just the three days of morose dwelling. A lonely, dark spirit held strongly in my eyes. Alec, dark as well, and beautiful as ever but…a façade. A steel trap for one such as I. I should have been asking Aphrodite for advice, for she’d been his first dance. “At least my reflection is true,” I said, embarrassed and stricken by how poorly I appeared compared to the beautiful god.
Had I always been so…wild?
And why was my vanity now again distracting me from being close to something worth so much more. I had felt my power before. Wielded it like a weapon. If the frail human emotions that clouded my thoughts would let me go and I could too be the cold god that Alec was. It was within my reach. I just knew it.
Alec shrugged me off and returned to his place near the door. “Are you hungry? Have you any needs?” Cold and direct.
“No.”
The trap closed long ago. The noose tightened a notch around my neck.
Why wouldn’t he think that keeping me bound and tied and hidden was anything strange? Wasn’t he, the perceived menace, locked away himself? Ah. But I had visited it. I had now seen the chaos ridden mind of the King of the Seven Islands. I was aware he had trialed through something unimaginable. It softened me but did not weaken me, as he no doubt thought.
Oh yes, I should’ve been so kind and sweet unto my doom. But I was not Cenia. I was not selfish. But neither was I soft. I was not the god he thought me.
We were more the same than he knew.
“What?” he snapped.
“What?” I repeated, terrified that I’d spoken aloud.
“You murmured something. It sounded like a threat.”
> “Perhaps it was, Alec,” I said. “Or a curse.”
He seemed rather tired at the remark, maybe a little hurt. “I know you, Freya. You’ve less curses to give out than even the most basic of human witches. Your power is something else. Have you ever wondered…”
“Wondered?”
“No. It’s nothing.”
I gaped at him. He was keeping a secret, something I should know.
But like always, he fled the room before I could find out more. I pounded my fists against the door until I felt like my hands would crumble.
Then I fisted them in my skirts and dared to lean out into the rising wind as it howled down and up to me on the balcony. I pictured myself floating across the sea. I could almost do it, I felt.
Coming to my senses, I backed away and sat on Alec’s bed in thought. I pushed at the covers that were probably never used other than in his weakest moments. The anger still remained.
If he forced me to my breaking point, perhaps he would be surprised to find that there was a hardness there not unlike his own. I’d be terribly un-surprised to find it. Some unyielding property of myself that was cold and alone and even now slunk to the edges of my mind, begging for release. Did skin not grow calloused where it is bruised? Did it not thicken where you blistered it most?
I had survived only a few things in my life. Rejection being the biggest. That Alec would keep serving me up such an acute amount of what I hated most only began to gap us beyond reaching. However, I was not afraid of change. Which was definitely his own weakness.
That I could adapt. That the king of humans did not. It remained to be seen who would dare to hold the other. For now, he could force my hand.
But the calloused heart beat on.
For now.
Persephone freed me after two more days in my prison. She stood in the room at once, her mouth pursed into a sad bow, and she held out her hand to me.
Numb. Furious. Sad. Despondent nearly, I had taken her hand and let her lead me through the palace, sure that I was changed through and through. I could not trust any of them. I could not trust myself.
Beware the Fallen: Young Adult Mythology (Banished Divinity Book 1) Page 17