by Jenna Black
Jamaal winced but didn’t argue with my terminology. “She . . .” He cleared his throat and broke eye contact. “She liked being on top, so she could see the scars real clearly while she . . . When I couldn’t get it up for her, she gave me more scars. And when that didn’t get her what she wanted, she started hurting other people to motivate me.”
He closed his eyes and swallowed hard again. I willed myself not to cry for him, for his past or for his pain. He huffed out a deep breath and opened his eyes with what seemed like a great effort.
“For more than a century, I’ve lived with that memory, with the image of her on top of me, forcing me to participate to keep her from hurting some innocent bystander. Could you help me replace it with a different image?”
A hint of panic fluttered in my chest. Tonight had been a breakthrough on about a thousand levels, but we could ruin it all by trying to take it further. It was on the tip of my tongue to gently decline, to tell him we should take things one step at a time. I swallowed the words at the last moment, realizing that wasn’t my call to make. Only Jamaal could know when he was ready to face this particular demon, and he said he was ready now. The worst thing I could do was imply that I didn’t trust his judgment.
I lifted my head enough to kiss him gently on the lips. “I’ll see what I can do,” I murmured, trying to make my tone sound more playful than terrified. I hoped like hell I was making the right decision not to protest.
Jamaal held me close and turned us over so that I was on top. Anxiety and bad memories had combined to leach the arousal out of him, and I feared we were already at a disadvantage.
He lay stiff and tense below me as I rose to my knees. I didn’t want to know what evil images were flashing across his mind.
The demons may have been nibbling at him, but Jamaal was nothing if not determined. He reached up and cupped my breasts. I leaned into him, giving him full access. Even with all the uncertainty, his touch was incendiary, and I made a small, needy sound as arousal came rushing back into my system. My nipples hardened under his touch, and if the stirring between my legs was any indication, Jamaal liked that.
“You are so fucking beautiful,” Jamaal said in a hoarse whisper as his eyes raked up and down my body.
I couldn’t help smiling at the compliment. I raised my arms over my head and stretched languorously, pulling all my muscles taut. Jamaal’s hips lifted slightly, letting me feel the erection that was well on its way back to full mast. I’d never thought of myself as particularly pretty or sexy, but his quick reaction made me feel like a cross between a cover model and a porn star.
I wrapped my hand around his erection to steady it, keeping a careful watch on his face in case I accidentally triggered something unpleasant, but his eyes were wide open, staring at me with undisguised desire, and I knew that he was firmly here with me in the present.
Carefully, I lowered myself onto him, and we both groaned with the pleasure of it. Jamaal closed his eyes and threw his head back with abandon, but almost instantly came back to himself and fixed his gaze on me once more. I gathered it was easier not to drift into the past if he could keep his eyes on me and constantly remind himself who he was with.
I began moving my hips in a slow, easy rhythm, teasing us both with the pace. Jamaal’s hands slid down my body, and one of them found its way between my legs and brushed over my sensitized nub. I gasped and couldn’t help moving faster.
“No fair,” I panted. I wanted to make this last, but it would be damn hard to do with him touching me like that.
“You don’t like this?” Jamaal asked with exaggerated innocence.
If he could play with me like this, he wasn’t desperate enough. I forced myself to slow down just a little and reached up to massage my breasts. I was not at all surprised when that made him gasp out a soft curse and his hips bucked beneath me.
“No fair,” he moaned, but not like he really meant it.
Thinking that surely we were now completely clear of the shadow of his past, I ground myself against him and thrust faster. Never mind the slow, languid buildup. I’d had about as much teasing as I could take.
“Touch my scars,” Jamaal panted out, and that threw some water on my fire.
“What?”
“She liked . . . touching my scars while she fucked me.”
He was still hard as a rock beneath me, but I could almost feel his past trying to rush back in and claim him. He meant for me to replace his memories of his bitch owner with images of me, but I had to draw the line somewhere.
“I’m not her,” I told him. “I’m doing this my way.”
Maybe he would have tried harder to get me to follow his script, but I leaned back to get a better angle, and that apparently pressed his buttons in just the right way. He forgot all about giving me stage directions, his hips lifting to meet me as he toyed with my nub with one hand and used his other to clamp on to my butt with a death grip.
Desire and pleasure crowded out every other thought and emotion. Our bodies moved in tandem as we thrust, the bed creaking beneath us in a way that would have made me self-conscious if there were room for that in my mind. Jamaal was breathing so hard, the cords of his muscles so tight, that I was sure he was going to come any moment.
But he was a man of his word. He’d told me I would be going first, and he waited until I was already tipping over the edge myself before he cried out in climax.
ELEVEN
Jamaal and I were a little stiff and awkward with each other in the morning, trying to adjust to the new dynamics of our relationship. There would be no more fighting our attraction, no more trying to act like there was nothing more than friendship between us. It was new, it was different, and I was glad our flight back home didn’t leave until the afternoon so that we had a little time to get used to it.
I checked my phone obsessively to see if Violet had had a change of heart, but there were no messages. Jamaal and I stopped by her house again, but she didn’t answer the door.
“I can go in anyway,” Jamaal suggested, referring to his ability to pass through doors when he wanted to.
“And do what?”
Jamaal shrugged helplessly. Breaking into her house would not endear us to Violet, and pissing off a goddess wasn’t going to help our cause. Maybe she just needed a little more time to think things through.
Going back home with no progress to report sucked, but what else could Jamaal and I do? We told our housemates what had happened—including our attempt to enter the Underworld—and though we were met with disappointment, no one seemed especially surprised by Violet’s attitude.
“Why would we expect a goddess to be less selfish than the Olympians?” Logan said with a shake of his head. “So, what’s our next move?”
I fought to quell a surge of panic as everyone looked to me. As if I was somehow more likely to come up with a plan to save the world than any of them.
“I don’t know what to do,” I was forced to admit. “I think Violet was right about one thing: renewing the altar in Bermuda doesn’t address the primary problem.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing,” Blake said. “I don’t know if it’s even in our power to stop Niobe, but we can get that altar taken care of.”
“Not as long as Violet is more interested in protecting herself than protecting mankind,” I countered. “I’ll spend some time this afternoon trying to get a hint where we can find another sister, but I don’t know whether we’re likely to get a better response from one of the others. Not if Niobe is sending them gruesome photos of what she did to Rose and Jasmine.”
“And meanwhile the clock is ticking,” Blake said. “How long do you think it’ll take before people start noticing a sudden lack of pregnancies and the panic begins?”
It was hard to know, especially when the effect wouldn’t be geographically isolated, at least not in any way that made sense to ordinary people. “Any answer I give would be only a guess.”
“Considering the time that�
�s already passed, I’d say we don’t have more than a week or two before the first signs start showing up,” Blake answered for me. “The number of new pregnancies will start declining, and it’ll seem like a fluke at first. But when it keeps declining . . . My guess is that within four to six weeks, the panic will start building and the conspiracy theorists will start coming out of the woodwork. That’s when it’s going to start getting ugly.”
I rubbed my eyes, tired both from lack of sleep and from stress. “I don’t know what else I can do but start another search and hope I find a sister who’s willing to cooperate. I haven’t had any luck finding Anderson yet, and as long as he’s hanging out in the Underworld, I don’t expect that to change.”
Blake made as if to say something, then changed his mind and clamped his jaws shut. He looked away from me and shook his head.
“What?” I asked him. “What were you about to say?”
Blake squirmed. “You’re not going to like it,” he warned, still not meeting my eyes.
I’d always thought Blake’s moral compass was just a bit bent, and he rarely showed discomfort like this unless he was talking about his relationship with my sister, Steph. I knew that meant he was right, that I wouldn’t like whatever he’d chosen not to say. But I also knew that at a time like this I had to hear it whether I liked it or not.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Don’t!” Maggie interrupted suddenly, snarling at Blake.
Her sudden vehemence surprised us all—except for Blake, who met her narrow-eyed gaze with one of his own. Tension crackled in the room, and I took a quick glance around at my fellow Liberi. Everyone looked as baffled as I was, except for Leo, whose face had gone white and who was staring intently at the floor as if trying not to be noticed. Not that the latter was rare for him with his distinct lack of people skills.
In a burst of insight, I realized that the tension was emanating solely from the members of our band who were ex-Olympians, and that clued me in to Blake’s intention without him having to say a word. If I were an Olympian—someone completely self-centered who found moral codes inconvenient and irrelevant—what would I suggest under the circumstances?
“You think we should kidnap Violet and force her to renew the altar,” I said.
I’d thought there’d been tension in the room before, but it was suddenly ten times worse.
“I told you you wouldn’t like it,” Blake said. “And I don’t think the situation is that desperate yet. But in a couple of weeks, if we haven’t found another solution . . .”
“That is not an option,” Maggie spat, and if she squeezed the arms of her chair any harder, she would probably break it. Her head whipped around in my direction and she aimed her fiery stare at me. “Tell me you don’t consider this an option.”
My stomach flopped like a grounded fish, and images of my sister lying battered and naked in Blake’s arms after she’d been raped by Alexis hammered at me. What Blake was suggesting lacked the malice and cruelty of what had happened to Steph, but I doubted that or the presence of a good cause would make Violet—or the rest of us—feel better. It was an unthinkable solution, but the alternative was pretty damned unthinkable, too.
“Keep in mind that Violet is a goddess, not a human being,” Blake said. “She doesn’t think like us, and she doesn’t have the same psychology. Remember, she thought it was worth killing every human on Earth to punish Anderson. It wouldn’t necessarily be traumatic for her like it would be for a human woman.”
“I can’t believe you’re suggesting this!” Maggie spat at him.
“I don’t like it!” he shouted back. “I’m saying if the choice is do something awful to one person or let something even worse happen to millions of people, maybe it’s better to do something awful.”
There was a tremor in Blake’s voice, and I realized with some relief that it was costing him a lot to voice this particular option. If he’d suggested it with cool pragmatism, I’d have been tempted to kill him on the spot. He’d made rape threats before, both to men and women, using his powers to force an unnatural lust on people. I called it weaponized sex. He’d told me once that he would have followed through with the threat as long as it was against an Olympian who had done as much or worse, but I wondered if that had just been bluster. We hadn’t exactly been on good terms at the time, and he had been trying to intimidate me.
If you looked at the situation with cold logic, Blake’s argument made all kinds of sense. The good of the many and all that. But everything within me recoiled at the thought. Any answer I came up with in my own head seemed wrong. Never mind my doubt that it was even possible if Violet turned into a pillar of white light. Blake had never seen a god or goddess without the human disguise, didn’t fully understand how nonhuman they truly were.
“I think we all need to take a step back from the edge,” Jamaal said. His voice was remarkably cool and even compared to the angry vibe in the room. “Violet didn’t object to the idea of renewing the altar. She’s just scared to take the risk of going there. If we can get her there safely, I have the feeling she’d be willing to renew it. After all, she wants the population to be healthy so the gods will let her rejoin them someday.”
I sucked in a shaky breath, stepping back from the edge just as Jamaal suggested. He was right, and though Violet had once been vengeful enough to try with her sisters to kill off all mankind, she now had a personal interest in keeping the status quo.
“We’d still have to get her to the altar against her will,” I said, looking at Jamaal. “You saw her when she stopped pretending to be human. How do you suggest we kidnap that?”
“And what do we do if you’re wrong?” Maggie asked. Anger still sparked in her eyes, and her chin still jutted out stubbornly.
“We don’t have to answer that now,” Jamaal said, still calm. People were starting to look at him funny, unused to him being anything resembling a peacemaker. “Like Nikki said, part one of the plan still has a gaping hole in it. No need to worry about the rest if we can’t patch that hole.”
“Well, I want to know what part two would be!”
“Why?” Jamaal countered. “There’s no right answer here, no answer that will satisfy anyone. So let’s concentrate on making sure we never have to answer it.”
“Who are you, and what have you done with Jamaal?” Blake muttered just loudly enough for everyone to hear.
The question made more than one of us smile, if only faintly, and a little more tension eased out of the room. Maggie seemed to be the only one still struggling, the rest of us content to run away from the moral dilemma as fast as we could.
“I think Jamaal went and got himself laid,” Jack said. He’d been unusually silent throughout our meeting, and I’d thought maybe even his sense of humor had been affected by the dire subject matter. Too bad it hadn’t.
I shot Jack a glare that would have done grumpy-Jamaal proud. You know, just in case someone in the room thought Jack was just kidding or dead wrong. Always cool under fire, that’s me.
Jack grinned unrepentantly. And then Sita appeared in the middle of our circle of chairs, looking straight at Jack and snarling. More than one chair was hastily pushed back—Sita is one hell of an intimidating creature—but of course Jack stayed right where he was. I took a quick peek at Jamaal’s face, making sure his expression wasn’t genuinely murderous, and was relieved to see no sign of an imminent explosion.
Sita snarled again, the sound deep and rumbling, triggering every avoid-being-lunch instinct in my body even though for once it wasn’t directed at me. She took a menacing step in Jack’s direction, and though he was trying not to show it, I could tell that even he was feeling the fight-or-flight instinct.
One thing I’ll say for Sita’s appearance: she instantly put the kibosh on any speculation about whether Jamaal and I had done the deed. Which I suspect is exactly what Jamaal intended when he summoned her. Jack had a unique skill for getting on his nerves, but the new calmer, more rational Jamaal wouldn�
��t kill him for it. Probably.
“I think Sita objects to your tone,” Jamaal said. “Maybe that’s a sign that it’s time for you to shut the fuck up.” There was a surprising lack of heat behind the words, and I was pretty proud of his restraint.
Jack opened his mouth for a response, and Sita’s roar made the paintings on the wall rattle. His eyes widened in mock fear that probably wasn’t as mock as he wanted us to believe, and he made a zipping-his-lips gesture. My guess was that Jamaal wasn’t convinced, because Sita lay down on the floor about a yard from Jack’s feet, her eyes narrowed and fixed on his face while the tip of her tail twitched.
I cleared my throat, drawing attention back to myself, though it was hard to ignore the irritated tiger in the room.
“I don’t think kidnapping Violet is a viable option, no matter what,” I said. “She’s too powerful for us to handle. The only person who could drag her to that altar against her will is Anderson. Which means we have to find him.”
“How?” Jamaal asked. “I think you’re right and he’s in the Underworld, and we’ve already established you can’t follow him there.”
I let out a whoosh of breath, because I really didn’t like my own idea. “I can’t get there without the help of a death-god descendant who can open a gate. You might not be able to do that, but maybe Cyrus knows someone who can.”
Anderson had made it sound like the ability was fairly rare, but there were a lot of Olympians out there, so maybe I’d get lucky.
“Seriously?” Blake said. “You’re going to ask Cyrus to help you save the world after everything he’s done? He might help you get to the altar because it helps him capture and punish his defectors, but he doesn’t get anything out of lending you one of his people.”
“You have a better idea? Because we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel as it is.”
“Just because I don’t have a better suggestion doesn’t mean asking Cyrus for help is a good idea.”
“A bad idea is better than no idea,” I said, and Blake had no argument for that. “I’ll try to find another of Niobe’s sisters first, see if one of them is willing to cooperate. If not, then I have no choice but to talk to Cyrus one more time.”