I stare. Always three steps ahead. No wonder Theseus is struggling so much with her. None of the weapons he’s trained with work in the arena where he finds himself fighting. “You’re terrifying.”
“It’s been said before. It’ll be said again.” She shrugs, but the move is a little too tense to be fully uncaring. “Choose, Pandora. Stay or go?”
I drain the rest of my now-cold tea. Really, there’s no choice at all. I desperately don’t want to go back to Minos’s place, and I have nowhere else to go.
Excuses to take what you want.
I ignore the little voice inside me and set my cup down on the saucer. “I’m staying.”
16
HEPHAESTUS
Pandora is long-gone by the time Minos finishes lecturing me on all the ways I’ve failed him. It’s just as well. I don’t have it in me to keep fighting right now. I’ve never been so fucking exhausted in my life. Everywhere I turn, I’m falling short of people’s expectations. Minos. Pandora. Brontes and the rest of Hephaestus’s people. Even my cursed wife. I shouldn’t care about the latter two, but when they become part of a larger problem? That shit is a trend, not an exception.
I stop by Minos’s library to snag a bottle of whisky and tuck it into my jacket. I turn toward the door and stop short.
Icarus leans against the wall. He’s wearing slacks and a shirt that looks like he started unbuttoning and got distracted. He doesn’t look much like his father, aside from his coloring. Light-brown skin and wavy dark hair. But his eyes are wider and doe-like, his features fine and delicate. Like Ariadne, he apparently takes after his poor, dead mother.
He lifts a single brow. “Stealing liquor. How pedestrian of you.”
“I don’t have time for this.” I shoulder past him. The last thing I need is a reminder of everything I’ll never have. Icarus and Minos rarely see eye to eye, but Minos never threatens to disown him.
Not even after that fuckup where he attacked Pan instead of Dionysus at the house party.
No matter how often Icarus disappoints his father, he’s still Minos’s trueborn son. No one can take that away from him, not even his father.
“Crown sitting heavy, Theseus?”
I don’t answer, and his mocking laughter follows me all the way to the front door. Down on the street, I dig out my phone and press Call before I can talk myself out of it.
Adonis answers almost immediately. “Yes?”
“Where are you?”
A hesitation. “I’m at home. Why?”
I hang up without answering. The positioning of the pathetic husband is Adonis’s fault. I agreed to it, but it was his idea in the first place, and clearly, it’s not helping me. I can’t push back against Minos, can’t get a handle on my wife, but I can put Adonis in his place.
It’s not until I’m standing at his front door, feeling like I’m about to come out of my skin, that I can admit that I also just want to see him. I bang on the door. Too hard. Too angry. I don’t know how to be any other way.
He opens it a few seconds later, and the sight of him relaxes something inside me. I fucking hate that he has this effect on me…almost as much as I crave it. It’s worse now. Stronger. He’s obviously in for the night, wearing gray lounge pants and nothing else, his smooth brown skin showing off clearly defined muscles.
Adonis smiles briefly. “Hephaestus. What a lovely surprise.”
“Theseus. I told you to call me Theseus.”
“We’re not in private.”
I walk past him without an invitation and barely wait for him to shut the door to continue. “Now we are.”
“Did you need something?” He leans against the door and crosses his arms over his chest. The move makes his biceps flex, and I have the almost overwhelming impulse to sink my teeth into them.
“I needed to talk to you,” I say faintly, still staring at his body. I shake my head once, sharply enough that it should shake some reason back into my brain. It doesn’t work.
“You could have talked to me on the phone. You hung up and came here in person.” He doesn’t move, though his gaze coasts slowly over me. “Why are you really here…Theseus?”
The low way he says my name feels like he reached out and ran his hand over my bare skin. I take a step closer to him on instinct alone. “I wanted to see you.” I pull the bottle out of my jacket. “Thought we could have another drink.”
“Liar.” His smile widens, taking the sting out of the word.