“You didn’t choose the decor.” I’m not asking.
His eyes squint ever so slightly. “This is all Addie’s doing. Her tastes tend to be a bit over-the-top.” Only now there’s a subtle layer in his voice that sounds almost like affection. For Aphrodite? The goddess he warned me about.
I wrinkle my nose. “I guess she didn’t get the memo about you abhorring expectations.”
Hades chokes on a sound that might be a laugh. “I don’t think I ever told her that.” He looks away. “Besides, I don’t spend time here, and it made her happy to do it.”
My chest warms, but I push down all soft sentiment immediately. The last thing I want to do is think of Hades as anything more than what he is—the god of death who callously dragged me into this mess.
I shouldn’t be thinking he can be sweet.
“Now.” He straightens his shoulders. “Lyra Keres, I confer upon you two gifts to aid you in the Crucible.”
“So formal. Can’t we just do this quickly and be done?”
He considers me. “I could just not give you any gifts.”
I give him a flat look. “You know, a gift isn’t a gift if you have to earn it. We should call them prizes.”
He sighs, expression descending to boredom. “Do you want your gifts or not?”
17
To The Dubious Victor…
If I’m not careful, I’ll have run up those stairs and vomited on his shoes for nothing. So I pin a sweet smile on my lips. “Of course I want my prizes.”
“I thought so.” Now he’s back to being an ass. “The first gift chooses you.”
“Are all the others doing this in their individual houses?”
Irritation at my interruption crosses his features, then fades. “Yes. If we don’t know what gifts the others have given, it makes things more—”
“Challenging. I get it.” I roll my eyes. “You gods truly do like to have your fun.”
His gaze turns derisive, and his perfect lips curl. “Don’t include me with them. I had nothing to do with the Anaxian Wars and nothing to do with their Crucible, either.”
Which means his entering this time is deliberate and not just to punish me. Curiosity kicks in so hard, the rest of the room fades, my focus narrowing on him and him alone. “Then why now?”
Hades’ face tightens, just for a heartbeat, before he smooths it back. But I caught it. He slipped, telling me that.
“Let’s just say I have a different game to win.”
I blink back at him. “And I’m your pawn?”
After a second, he shrugs, the action so uncaring, so callously casual.
I blow out a long breath, trying very hard not to lose my cool and knee the god of death in the balls. The more I’m around him, the more I forget who and what he is. That’s a dangerous thing to forget. “How about we get on with the prizes?”
“Watch it,” he warns, and I think maybe the fires in the braziers in the corners curl toward me a little. “You amuse me…for now.”
In other words, I’m not reaping consequences as long as I keep amusing him.
I’m too tired to deal with this, so I do what I do with Felix when he throws his weight around. Lowering my gaze timidly like a dutiful little mortal, I clasp my hands in front of me and wait.
A heavy sigh reaches me.
“You’re a menace,” Hades mutters, then takes off his suit jacket. He rolls up his sleeves like he could only stand being confined by those clothes for so long.
I glance away. Forearms aren’t sexy. They are just body parts.
“Here.” He takes my right hand in his, clasping them palm to palm, then closes his eyes and whispers a few words I don’t catch. Almost immediately, he jerks his gaze down to our hands.
No, not to our hands. To his arm.
As if he’d roused sleeping spirits, lines appear in the wake of his touch, and I stare as tattoos that weren’t there a second ago materialize on his skin. Not tattoos, though—not black lines of ink. These are colorful and glittering, and each set of simple lines forms a different animal—a blue owl, a green panther, a purple fox, a red tarantula, and…a tiny, adorable silver butterfly.
As if they are alive, they move across his skin, the tarantula greeting the butterfly with what seems like a little wave of one of its legs, the owl flapping its wings at the snarling panther. I can’t look away, fascination holding me in thrall.
The owl in particular looks at Hades in question. Asking permission, I think?
“It’s okay. Go to your new mistress and help her,” Hades commands.
The tarantula, closest to our clasped hands, is the first to move, scuttling across his skin and onto mine, and I gasp at the sensation of tiny bubbles as it finds a new home on my wrist. Then the fox slinks forward, its tail the last thing to disappear around Hades’ palm before it sits on my arm and wraps that tail around its paws, cocking its head in curiosity. The other animals follow, picking their places on my skin and blinking up at me.
All except the butterfly.
