Red Mortal (35 page)

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Authors: Deidre Knight

Tags: #Man-woman relationships, #Goddesses, #Gods, #Paranormal, #Delphian oracle, #Fiction, #Romance, #Paranormal romance stories, #Immortalism, #Daphne (Greek deity), #General, #Leonidas, #Contemporary

BOOK: Red Mortal
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“What are you scheming?”
“My time is ending,” the king said softly, indicating his weathered face. “As you can plainly see. But before I depart for the afterworld, leaving all of you behind—my Daphne, your Sophie . . .” He gestured toward the club, his voice growing even quieter. “My warriors . . . and you. I want to ensure that all of you are safe from Ares’s cruel hand.”
Sable couldn’t meet the noble man’s gaze. He worried about Sable’s own safety, as well? He bothered to list him in that gentle litany?
Staring past the king’s shoulders, Sable murmured, “I might know some . . . who would follow. Understand a plan such as yours.”
Leonidas reached upward, clasping his shoulder in a gesture of fidelity and friendship. “I knew that I could count on you. I’ve been banking on it. The god has held all of you, us, under his sadistic hand for far too long. I want to lead a mutiny, meet kind with like kind.”
Sable didn’t understand those words, and his confusion must have showed.
Leonidas elaborated. “Ares has always used the underworld against us. He harnessed your demonic power. He bartered with us in Hades itself. We must meet him with the same weapons. Even the playing field, that’s the warfare that’s needed.”
Sable thought of his one-time minions Krathsadon and Mirapish, and how despite their recent mockery of his transformation, they’d seemed to miss his leadership, too. Not only that pair, but his mind riffled through at least two dozen other demons of his acquaintance, some of them antsy in the past years, wanting more than servitude and humiliation.
“I know some creatures.” Sable met the king’s gaze steadily. So strange, but his heart surged in his chest, a strange pride taking hold. For a man of Leonidas’s stature to believe in him, place faith? He wanted to live up to that responsibility. “I believe I can help,” he offered quietly.
The sturdy Spartan gave only one nod. “Good,” he said. “Let’s meet again tomorrow. At the compound training field. We can strategize then, once tonight is behind us.” Leonidas glanced toward the club entrance. “Once we’ve freed two good men.”
“Yes,” Sable heard himself agreeing. “We must secure them first.”
The Spartan began to walk away, but Sable couldn’t help calling after him.
“How is Sophie?” He raked a jittery hand over his short hair, pretending it was only the most casual of questions. “I’ve not seen her today.”
The king turned back, gracing him with another genuine smile. “Waiting for you to come home,” he said, his scarred lower lip pulling awkwardly. “Sophie is waiting for you.”
Somehow, mystically so, Sable heard the words that Leonidas of Sparta didn’t utter: Sophie was waiting for his light side to truly emerge. For the realest part of him to stand tall.
Chapter 27
 
L
eo arrived home from downtown, weary, and hoping that Nik and Ari would be freed from captivity later tonight. Jamie had urged him to go home and get rest, promising to text a report.
When he’d come home, he’d gone straight to his chambers, and found a present waiting for him. Hanging from the knob was a small pouch, filled with a delightfully smelling mixture. A note was attached, penned in simple, broad strokes, and all it said was “Seek our Oracle once again. And please, please use these bath salts to help your knee.”
Sophie, he’d known it in a moment. Something about the sweet wisp of a girl made him want to be obedient to her care. So now he poured the healing salts into his garden tub, the one he almost never used. He stood there naked, watching them fizzle and dissolve in the warm waters, afraid of catching a glimpse of his changing body in the full-length mirror along the bathroom wall.
At last, drawing in a strengthening breath, he rotated slowly to examine the day’s damage. The usual, lifelong scars were still there, a parade of victories and losses engraved upon his skin, but new ones had emerged, as well. Wounds that had been healed in the waters of Styx now appeared as scars. Biggest of all the marks was the scar from the long belly-knifer that had disemboweled him after his death. The Persians had taken great pride in parading and abusing his fallen body—for hours they’d tossed him upon their spears and shoulders and shields. The worst damage had never even healed in the waters of Styx upon his bargain.
He touched that scar along his abdomen tentatively, not surprised to find it hotter than the surrounding flesh, but he was shocked, however, to discover how tender it was to the touch. That was a new effect. It seemed every day and hour held its own perverse surprise.
He faced the mirror again, letting his gaze travel the length of his body, noting another new scar now sketched the width of his upper thigh, looping it like a tourniquet.
That one he remembered, he thought with a wry laugh. He’d gotten it while training with Ajax long before Thermopylae. The Spartan had been horrified, apologizing the entire time he’d watched Leo being stitched up. Those had been carefree times, looking back upon them. Simple days. No demons; no gods; no weight of eternity. No loving a woman whom he could never really deserve.
Oh, Daphne, why couldn’t I have known you in those ancient days?
You fool of a king, even then she was a demigoddess and you a blood-soaked warrior. You’ve always been too tarnished for someone as pure as she.
He stretched his arms overhead, turning to face his bath and yelped like a woman when he discovered Daphne sitting on the edge of the tub.
“Daphne!” he clapped his palms over his privates, heat crawling all over his body. She’d seen him when they’d become lovers, of course—all of him—but he’d evolved for the worse since then. He hated the thought of her glimpsing the horrific truth of him, nothing concealed, and every striated battle mark proving all the death and darkness that he’d lived through.
“You . . . you . . .” He had no words, especially because his ugly, disfigured body was naked and she wore only a bath towel for covering. “You . . . should not . . .” His chest heaved, his lungs sucked at desperate gasps of air. “I am . . . naked.”
“We are lovers, Leo.”
“We were.” Past tense; two wondrous joinings. But lovers no more.
She ignored that comment, instead tilting her head, studying him through flirtatious eyes. “When have Spartans ever minded nudity? You used to race that way on the open tracks of Sparta.” She smiled, lowering her lashes. “Too bad
I
wasn’t there.”
“I . . . I was a young man then,” he blustered. “And you were not, most decidedly, there.”
“I bet you let Gorgo watch you. With satisfaction.” There was no jealousy in the statement, only honest observation.
His jaw tightened at the memory, at recalling how he had once been proud of his masculine, honed body—a body that was vanishing before his very eyes with every passing day. Oh, how he ached for Daphne to see him as he’d once been.
“No snappy comeback, my king?” Her smile widened, dazzling him with its rare beauty. It seemed she’d grown even more beautiful during their absence. He dropped his gaze to the tiled bathroom floor, more ashamed than ever of what he’d become—of how ugly he must appear to her.
“As I said, Oracle. I was a young man, then. I’d not lived through wars and battles and mutinies. I was innocent in my own way, full of youthful vanity and stamina.”
“I don’t think you’ve lost either,” she whispered huskily, and he glanced up, aroused. Heated for her, through and through.
“You can plainly see that I have.” He adjusted his hands, attempting to conceal his rapidly lengthening erection.
Her gaze tracked with the motion. “Yes, quite the stamina you display, dear Leo.” She laughed huskily. “Won’t you let me take you on for a race? Or a wrestling match, perhaps?”
He shook his head. “Not when I’d emerge the loser, my lady. The shame would be too great.”
“Ah, but the thrill is in the challenge, no?” She adjusted her towel and for a moment, his hands itched to strip it right off of her—for it to be his hands moving across the fabric, unwinding the towel, not tightening it as she was doing.
“The thrill with you, Daphne, is in just beholding you,” he admitted softly, unable to bite back the confession.
“Then why do you keep me away?”
He shook his head. “You already know my reasons,” he growled. “I won’t hurt you. Won’t have you watch me . . . change.”
“Change is life, Leo!” she smiled up at him, her eyes sparkling. “That’s part of love, you know that. You are not new to this; you had a wife, a family. I have never loved another besides you, and even I know that patience and acceptance and change are all part of any love affair that matters.”
“You’re asking for the impossible, my lady!” He shouted, slamming a palm against his chest. “I won’t have you see me die! Allow me my pride . . . my warrior’s honor. I wish you to remember me as vital and strong and, gods help me, at least passably handsome, in my own perverse way.”
“I don’t believe you.”
He blinked back at her. “I don’t understand. You know precisely what I mean.”
She shook her head vigorously. “You wouldn’t turn me away, not for this. Something’s not adding up here. With as much as
you
hurt when
I
left you, you’d never try and push me away like this unless there was something else. Something more than male vanity.” She squared her shoulders. “Like you said, we’ve never had secrets between us. So tell me, Leo.”
He wouldn’t tell her the rest, couldn’t—his growing awareness of
all
that separated them, not just their age difference. The darkness he’d been exposed to and carried with him when she was all that would ever be pure and lovely. If she wouldn’t listen to his more immediate objections, she definitely wouldn’t heed those. But it was more than that, too. He didn’t even want to dishonor her by speaking of the things he’d lived and seen.
Daphne stood in the bath, facing him. Waiting for him to explain.
When he kept silent, she sighed wearily. “All I have ever lived for was to grant your desires. It’s been my nectar for more than a thousand years, my sustenance. But no longer; not in this.” Her eyes were sad as they met his. “You’re in too much pain for me to stay away any longer, my lord.” She shivered slightly, drawing the towel about her a little more tightly. “I refuse to obey your order. Refuse to serve your need to protect me.”
“You do not know of my pain,” he ground out accusingly. “You cannot fathom my suffering.”
“I know every ounce of it, Leonidas,” she countered with just as much resolve. “You forget what I am.”
He trembled. A demigoddess. He loved and cherished and desired a woman with the power of Olympus in her veins. “It is easier to forget.”
“Oh, and why is that?” She tossed her hands in the air. “Because then you can forget me? Is that how it is?”
“Because then my love for you, already so terrifying, is at least something I can reason with.”
Because then I can pretend I might be worthy enough of you, one day.
Backing against the counter, he continued using his palms to cover his manhood like some pitiful fig leaf, but what he most wished to hide from her was his
face.
“You honestly think I haven’t come to you before now?”
“You wouldn’t have betrayed my wishes,” he said, his hands trembling. What if she’d already seen? Already known how far gone he was? For all he knew, she’d witnessed him flailing around on the ground earlier today, had seen his pathetic helplessness. “Daphne, tell me you’ve not come to me when I plainly asked you to stay away.” He shook his head. “I don’t believe you’d have done that to me.”
“You know me very well.” She glanced away, pain written across her features. “I have used my power to feel your pain, to know your heart and mind. But I have stayed away as you asked, my king . . . mostly.”
“Thank you.”
She tossed her black hair over her shoulder defiantly. “You were cruel to ask it, however. And I never thought you a cruel man . . . until this. Until you drove me from you. Now I know that you do have a fault, and it is this terrible, unfeeling part of you that would torture me thusly.” She sobbed, bowing her head, still averting her gaze. “And yet I love you for your pride. For your strength. For being willing to do what I could never have done . . . drive you from my presence.”
He forgot all about propriety, rushing to the edge of the tub. “Daphne. Love. My dearest. You do not understand my motives.” He splashed water wildly as he stepped toward her, needing to be right at her side. She turned away, sliding to the edge of the tub; he settled next to her, facing her back. Now she was the one hiding her face, turning away. He liked it even less than having to push her out of his life. She released a horrible, choking sob. With tentative fingers, he reached to stroke her hair away from her nape.
“Daphne, I’m sorry. If I didn’t love you, I wouldn’t have asked—”
“Don’t. Leonidas, please. You have your pride? I have mine as well.” She sobbed again, her small, delicate shoulders heaving. He slid his arms about her waist, wrapping her tightly within his grasp. The rough fabric of the towel shifted slightly as he embraced her, drawing her right up against his chest. He pressed his mouth against the top of her head, loving the scent of her, the silky feel of her black hair against his face.

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