Bonds of Hercules (Villains of Lore, #2)(43)

She’d been much smarter than the idiot Olympian boys, but she never bragged, even though she had the type of mind that scholars searched for centuries to find.

Pine would never admit it aloud, but while half starved and delirious, she’d solved complex Thagorean problems that even he couldn’t. And he’d spent over a century teaching Thagorean at the highly competitive Rhodes Olympian University.

Her intellect was astonishing.

Pine had whispered with awe that she was a prodigy, the likes of which he’d never seen.

Alexis was an enigma.

An angel.

So, we’d manipulated, tricked, and trapped to get exactly what we wanted. Her.

Regret crushed my chest, a heavy weight of shame.

I moved Alexis, so she was leaning back on me, and grabbed some conditioner, slowly working it through her long tresses.

“We don’t deserve you,” I whispered, as if saying the truth aloud could atone for what we’d done. “Angels don’t deserve this … You’re so much better than us.”

“No shit—ow—fuck.” Kharon stumbled naked into the dark shower, collapsed onto the bench beside me, and tipped his bloody head back, groaning as he leaned against the wall under the spray. “We’ll never deserve her as long as we live.”

I glared over at him. “Stop shouting.”

He rolled his eyes and tapped his missing ear.

“Figure it the fuck out. Don’t agitate her.”

Instead of getting mad, Kharon raised an eyebrow. “Get out of your head—I can practically see you thinking from here.”

Gritting my teeth, I focused on separating her curls with conditioner. “We’re bad for her,” I said, the words hanging heavy in the hazy darkness. “She deserves someone … nice.”

Kharon laughed, a harsh cruel sound. “Oh, fuck off with your melodramatic, self-loathing, eldest heir bullshit.”

His voice was too loud in the quiet shower, his words jarring.

My fingers stilled.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.” Kharon dumped the bottle of shampoo over his hair, hissing as the suds burned his wound.

When he’d finished grunting through the pain, he looked at me pointedly. “Alexis is our wife. No, we aren’t good for her … We’re cruel, possessive, aggressive—”

“I got it,” I snapped, cutting him off.

Kharon sprawled with his legs wide on the bench, and our knees knocked together as he lathered soap across his scarred chest.

“The point is,” he said darkly. “She’s too good for all of Sparta, not just us. Achilles and Patro fucking abandoned her.”

We both fumed.

They’d be dealt with. Brutally.

“So—what do we do with someone who’s too pure for this world?” Kharon’s white teeth flashed in the dim. “We protect her. We make her so irrevocably ours that everyone is afraid to look in her direction.”

I shook my head. “That’s a fool’s dream.”

“No.” Kharon’s voice rose. “That’s what Hades did with Persephone. No one dares look at her wrong, and we need to do the same.”

I paused.

He had a point.

Kharon reached over and wrapped one of Alexis’s curls around his finger.

“She needs monsters,” he said, turning his head to reveal the mutilated side of his head. “Precisely because she’s not one.” His smirk was rabid, a carnivore in the body of a man. “That’s why she has us.”

I cleared my throat.

“So, you … gave her your ear.”

“I did.” His eyes flashed as they met mine. “Do you have a fucking problem with that?”

I raised an eyebrow at his hostility. “Just an observation.”

He smirked with satisfaction.

“So,” I said. “Do you want to talk about why you—”

Kharon slumped over and fell onto the shower floor. Water splattered on his naked sprawled form as steam rose.

He was out cold.

I sighed.

Thirty minutes later, Alexis and Kharon were dry, warm, and asleep in the middle of the bed.

I’d given them each a shot of purified adrenaline mixed with an insanely expensive sleeping agent. It was the newest Olympian technology and there’d only been two vials in the medical kit. It would send them into a light healing coma, but they’d wake up almost fully healed.

Afterward, I’d sprayed a healing mist on all their wounds, the Rod of Asclepius golden on the sides of the container, signifying it was Olympian medicine. Finally, I’d wrapped them both in fresh bandages and placed them under the covers.

Taking my time, I tucked the covers under Alexis’s toes and legs, just like Helen always liked.

I tossed the other side haphazardly over Kharon.

He snored, wrestling a pillow from my hands in his sleep, and then he turned over, wrapping his arms around Alexis. He held her like he was afraid someone was going to take her away.

Poco clambered up onto the bed. His gray fur was still wet and plastered to his little form, and he was shivering.

“Come here,” I said, and he held up both his hands like he wanted to be picked up.

I obliged.

After another thirty minutes in the shower, this time scrubbing Poco’s fur with shampoo until he was clean, I wrapped him in a towel and sat him on my lap, then brushed him in long strokes until he was fluffy.