by Olivia Dade
Book!AeneasWouldNever: I don’t have a ton of friends—maybe three? And they’re all coworkers. But they would never do that to me. You deserve better.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Given how kind and funny you are, I’m shocked you don’t have an enormous circle of close, loyal friends. But quality over quantity, right?
Book!AeneasWouldNever: Honestly, I’m still surprised sometimes to have ANY friends. I didn’t growing up.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Being a kid is so awkward.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: Yes. Anyway, I’m forever grateful for the friends I do have. Definitely including you, Ulsie.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I feel the same.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Thanks for listening, as always.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: Any time.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: I don’t let everyone in, and it hurts to do it and be disappointed.
Book!AeneasWouldNever: I’m an expert at disappointing others, sadly.
Unapologetic Lavinia Stan: Well, you’ve never disappointed me.
25
APRIL WAS CRYING AGAIN. WITH HURT, YES, BUT ALSO RAGE.
So much goddamn rage.
Marcus was Book!AeneasWouldNever. At one time, that would have been her most fervent wish, to have the two most important men in her life somehow merge into one. To not have to choose between them. But now—but now—
All this time. All this time, he’d pretended they’d met as strangers at a restaurant. All this time, he’d fucking lied to her.
“April, I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.” When Marcus tentatively reached out to dry her tears again, she slapped his hand away.
“Why?” That single syllable was so choked with betrayal, she could barely understand herself. “Why didn’t you say something?”
He raked a hand through his hair. Gripped it in his fist so hard he must have ripped some out. “I wanted to, April. Fuck, I would have done anything to let you know.”
Jesus, what bullshit. Exactly how gullible did he think she was?
“Anything.” She laughed, a horrible, scraping sound. “Anything except tell me.”
Such a small slip-up he’d made. So easy to dismiss, to explain away, if his stumble hadn’t involved something she couldn’t second-guess or doubt.
She’d decided months ago not to mention being fat-shamed on dates to Marcus. It was a very deliberate, very conscious omission, one intended to spare her pride. She’d told herself that part of her past didn’t matter, really, not when he did love her body exactly the way it was.
If she hadn’t caught that damning little slip, would he ever have told her? And how long, precisely, had he known the truth?
“Did you know who I was when you asked me out on Twitter?” Her tone had hardened now. Turned colder, as her tears dried.
He frantically shook his head. “I had no clue who you were. I swear. Not until you told me at dinner.”
That blank look of shock when she’d shared her fanfic name. Those initial, probing questions about Marcus—about himself, and how she felt about him—on the Lavineas server. All those conversations where he pretended to know almost nothing about fanfic.
“You’ve been keeping this a secret from our very first date,” she whispered. “From our first fucking date.”
He grabbed the back of his neck, squeezing hard. “April, you have to understand—”
“Oh, how wonderful.” She’d never used that voice, rich with sarcasm and disdain, on him before. Not even once. It made him flinch, and she was savagely glad. “Yes, please tell me what I have to understand. I can’t wait to find out.”
“If anyone knew I was writing fix-it fics in response to the show, if anyone knew the things I said about the scripts on the Lavineas server . . .” He sounded so sincere, each word a heart-wrenching plea. A hell of a good actor, as always. “I could have lost the role of Aeneas. I could be sued, potentially. And no one would want to cast the guy who—”
Enough. She didn’t need a lecture on how grave the consequences could have been, or how grave they could still be. Of course his showrunners would be unhappy. Maybe even his colleagues. But he’d lied to her, and she wasn’t letting herself be dragged off-topic.
She held up a steady hand. “I get it, Marcus.”
“I don’t think you do.” His lips tightened, just for a moment. A flash of anger, when Marcus was never, ever angry at her—at least, not until he was caught in a lie. “Not really.”
Ignoring that attempted feint, she cut to the most crucial, most hurtful part of this absolute shitshow. “I also get the real issue here.”
“The real issue?” It was almost a growl.
“You don’t trust me.” She sat back in her car seat and laughed again, and the sound was just as horrible, just as sharp, as before. “We were friends for over two years online, and you’ve been living with me for months, and you don’t trust me.”
She’d been so sure of him. Of them.
And from the very beginning, she’d been building a relationship on quicksand.
The anger had faded from his expression, and the desperate shake of his head must have hurt his neck. “No, April. No. That’s not—”
She bit her lip, her cold, calm facade cracking. “I w-would never have told anyone. Not a soul. Not my coworkers. Not our friends on the Lavineas server. Not my mother. No one.”
The honest fucking truth, and she hoped he recognized it.
“I know that!” He flung his hands in the air, his own voice breaking. “Do you honestly think I don’t know that?”
The air seemed simultaneously too thin and too thick to breathe, and she wanted to fling open the car door and run. Instead, she stayed and faced him dead-on.
“Right. Of course.” Her lip, now bitten red and raw, stung as she gave him a mean little smile. “Except for one problem: if you knew that, if you trusted me, you would have said something.”
He clawed at the seat belt as if it were strangling him, finally stabbing at the release to fling it free. The violence of the motion didn’t seem to satisfy him, though, and his chest heaved with labored breaths.
“I was scared.” It was a blunt, rough statement, unvarnished enough that her desolate sneer faded despite her best efforts. “When we met in person, I was cautious about sharing something so damaging, and I think that’s understandable, even though you may not agree. Then I knew I could trust you, but I didn’t—”
Jaw clenched with frustration, he seemed to search for words.
“I didn’t trust that I’d say the right thing when I explained. I didn’t trust that I’d be enough to make you stay, once you knew I’d been hiding something so important all this time. From that first date.” His brows had drawn together, a mute plea for understanding. “I love you, and I was terrified you’d leave me.”
Her sudden inhalation removed all the remaining oxygen from the car. Dizzy and sick, she stared at him.
I was scared.
I love you, and I was terrified you’d leave me.
Even desolate and enraged, she couldn’t dismiss the naked honesty in the admission. Couldn’t pretend to herself that he was playing her, misleading her, wheedling for her forgiveness through strategic, manipulative vulnerability.
At long last, he was letting her see him without any barriers, any artifice, any deception between them.
And it was too late. Too goddamn late.
Outside the car, children shrieked in a game of keep-away from across the park’s expansive grassy field. The sound was distant, almost inaudible over the ringing in her ears, the subtle creak of her seat as she sagged into it all at once.
Her voice wasn’t angry or disdainful anymore, but still thick. Still despairing. “For months, you’ve known much more about me than I realized, and you kept that information from me. It’s a horrible violation of trust. You realize that, right?”
It was disorienting. Sickening.
Every conversation they’d had, every moment of their relat
ionship, she’d now have to revisit and question. When had he lied? When had he simply not told her the truth? When had he used his knowledge as BAWN to further his own purposes as Marcus?
He’d definitely pumped her for information about Marcus as BAWN, she knew that for certain. And then—and then he’d cut off contact on the Lavineas server. Just like that.
“When BAWN s-stopped”—she inhaled through her nose, exhaled a hitching breath through her mouth—“when you stopped writing me on the server, I told myself I’d done something wrong, or you’d finally seen me and realized I wasn’t anyone you c-could want. You were m-my—”
Her sob shook her shoulders, and he bowed his head.
She sniffed back more tears. “Y-you were my best friend, and you just . . . left. With no good explanation, only some dumb excuse that was obviously untrue. You lied to me as Marcus, but you lied to me as BAWN too. You a-abandoned me.”
Tipping her head back, she stared at the gray fabric of her car’s ceiling and waited until she could speak intelligibly again. “You hurt me, lied, and violated my trust because you were scared.”
“I’m so sorry.” He sounded agonized. Helpless in the face of her despair.
“Your public persona.” Fretfully, she rubbed her forehead. “You said you’ve wanted to drop it for years, but you haven’t. For the same reason, I assume. Because it’s too hard, and you could lose everything, and you’re scared. Too scared to pick your next role, because you’d have to decide which version of you would show up on set.”
The statement didn’t require an answer, and he didn’t give her one.
Instead, after a deep breath, he squared his shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”
The question was gruff, his eyes glassy as he met hers.
She opened her mouth, then pinched it shut. Once. Twice.
When she continued staring at the ceiling, silent, he spoke again. “You don’t owe it to me. I know that. My love doesn’t buy me absolution, and I didn’t say it to sway you. I said it because you should know. No matter what happens between us now, you should know that you’re loved. Even if you don’t forgive me.”
Her cheeks were already tight with salt, and she was crying again. Still.
He loved her. She believed that. And in some ways—in many ways—he really was such a good man. So good, she’d almost believed they could make it work, against all odds.
But she knew the answer to his question, because she knew herself.
She didn’t want to say it, but she would. She had to.
“No,” she finally said. “I can’t forgive you.”
He made a raw, wounded sound, and that only made the tears come faster.
Rolling her head to the side, she finally looked at him again. He was a blur through her flooded eyes, his expression indistinct, and maybe that was for the best.
She knuckled away the wetness from her chin. “I want to go home.”
His love for her didn’t buy him forgiveness, and hers didn’t mean she’d offer it. Which meant this would be their last time alone together. Ever.
When he reached for her hand, though, she didn’t pull away.
Her fingers were trembling and cold, and so were his. He pressed a tender kiss into her palm, then carefully placed her hand back into her lap.
He clicked his seat belt and put the car in drive. “When we get back to Berkeley, I’ll pack my things.”
Her breath hitched again, hard.
But she didn’t argue.
Gods of the Gates: A Howl from Below (Book 2)
E. Wade
“Build a pyre,” Dido told her sister, Anna, as the wind snapped the sails of Aeneas’s fleet and speeded him away and away and away. “Upon it, place all the possessions of our life together. Our bridal bed. The clothing he once wore. All the weapons he abandoned.”
As he abandoned me.
Once, she too was a weapon. A sword, shiny and sharp and lethal. The Berber king Iarbas had found her so, when she’d arrived in North Africa and begged from him a small plot of land, a place of refuge before she resumed her travels.
“Only such land as can be encompassed by an ox hide,” she’d pled sweetly.
His agreement had come after the amused, tolerant laughter of his men. His wise advisers.
Silly woman. Silly request.
First, she honed her blade until a fingertip’s pressure could quarter a man where he stood. Then she took that smelly hide and cut it into such fine, thin strips that she could encircle a substantial fertile hill.
There she’d settled, she and her subjects, before expanding her rule outward and outward again.
A ruler. A queen. Respected and beloved by her people, by Aeneas.
Amidst her fevered passion, her people had grown restless. So had he.
When the pyre was built, she climbed atop and lifted the sword he’d once presented to her while kneeling, the blade laid flat on both his palms. The flat no longer interested her. Only the point.
Her lips, mouthing final words no one would hear, stilled at the sight of him.
Another demigod, equally a trickster. Cupid.
His wings folding gracefully behind him, he glided to a halt atop her mountain of grief. Watched her, sorrow in his expression.
“Have you come to increase my devotion?” Her laugh was the screech of metal, cold and terrible. “It has already driven me to destruction. What more do you intend?”
“No, betrayed queen.” His voice was low, resonant with determination. “I come to free you.”
She tried to laugh again, but it emerged as a helpless sob instead. “I was poised to free myself.”
“Not like this,” he told her. “Not like this.”
The arrow he loosed into her breast then wasn’t sharp or hot. It was blunt and cold. Lead.
And for the first time since she’d caught sight of Aeneas aboard his ship, brown curls caressed by the breeze as he neared her shores, she was once more a blade. So much of one, she had no need of the sword still pointed toward her heart. Not anymore.
The thought of Aeneas brought only disgust, not lust. Not frenzied longing.
Cupid inclined his golden head. “Thus, we are both freed. You from a doomed love. I from the selfish dictates of my treacherous mother.”
With a flick of his wings, he gathered her up and deposited her at the base of the pyre.
“I must return to Psyche.” His hand reached to steady her, but she needed no assistance. “You know what you must do.”
She did. She did.
She would don the mantle of her reign once more, guarding her people from threats without and underneath. Human transgressors, and those who’d crawl from the depths of Tartarus through the gate that gaped within her city walls.
As Cupid become a gilded smudge on the horizon, Dido took a torch and set fire to her life with Aeneas.
26
MARCUS’S HOUSE KEY STILL WORKED. EVEN THOUGH IT felt like it shouldn’t.
Somehow, over the past months, April’s small in-law apartment had become his home instead. A place that was theirs, not just hers. A place he wouldn’t have to leave, not ever.
He’d let himself wallow in that fiction, until he almost forgot it was fiction.
When his front door opened, the frigid air-conditioning within hit him like a slap, and he shivered. Inside, the chill tightened his lungs, but he hadn’t taken a deep breath in almost twenty-four hours anyway.
April had shunted him aside—rightfully; of course rightfully—nearly a day ago, and he was still short of air. Still claustrophobic in a trap of his own making.
Nevertheless, he forced himself to walk inside and shut the door behind him. Lock it. Set the alarm, because his home was filled with valuables, even if he currently felt worthless.
His keys and wallet went on the console by the door, in a hammered bronze bowl. His shoes belonged in the entryway closet. His broken heart . . . well, he couldn’t organize that away.
He shoved his shaking hand
s in his pockets and contemplated the airy expanse of the first floor, all open floor plan and high ceilings and sunlit windows and impeccable furnishings. White walls and metallic accents and minimalist, low-slung furniture.
He’d never really felt at home anywhere before meeting April. Not even here.
His throat ached. He headed to the kitchen for a glassful of chilled sparkling water from the dispenser in the refrigerator door, his footsteps faintly echoing in the spartan space.
The cheap water bottle he’d bought at a gas station had warmed during the trip from Berkeley to Los Angeles, and he’d left it in the car. He didn’t need any unnecessary reminders of today, however inconsequential.
Every time he let his mind wander, April was crying again.
In another age, he’d have knelt before her then. Prostrated himself. Anything, anything that would serve to appease at least a small corner of his endless, ever-unfurling self-loathing.
He’d wept too, of course—but not until he’d left her home, because damned if he’d cry in front of her. Not like that. It would be inadvertent manipulation, because she cared about him. He knew it, even if he also knew he didn’t deserve it.
If she ever forgave him, if she ever took him back—and she’d do neither—he didn’t want her to do so out of pity. Never seeing her again would hurt less.
Probably. Maybe.
He sipped his water, the carbonation an irritant to his already-raw throat.
Beneath his palm, the polished concrete countertop was smooth and cold. Laying his phone on top of it, he idly scrolled through recent messages on his cell.
Texts from Alex about the optimal thickness of hot-water crusts for savory pies, as well as complaints about Lauren’s dampening disregard for both British baking shows and pegging. An obscenity-laden screed from Carah via DM, something to do with the upcoming awards season. An email from his father, which Marcus deleted without reading. A half dozen more emails from his agent, which he kept but didn’t open. A missed phone call from Summer.
The cast chat had been active the last few hours too. Active and on edge, probably because of the upcoming convention.
Carah: SURPRISE, SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS