Page 79 of Somnium

Her question faded, a slow sinking beginning in her gut as she took in the uneasy glances exchanged between the others.

“What?” she asked, looking between them. “Who is it?”

A beat of silence settled over the room.

“The high priest,” Seth finally answered, stepping from behind the bar. “He has as much of an axe to grind with Oneirios as the rest of us. Some might say more, considering what our brother continues to put him through.”

Cadi let out a sharp breath and pinched the bridge of her nose as the throbbing behind her eyes intensified. This was … a lot.

“But his access is limited,” Kai added. “It turns out the higher up someone is in the ranks, the fewer places they can wander into without setting off alarm bells, and he has to be careful to avoid suspicion. The last thing we need is for him of all people to wind up on Oneirios’s radar. Our only hope now is to find where our power is being stored. Only then would we have any chance of breaking his bindings or disrupting his power. But we can’t do that without⁠—”

“That’s enough, Kai,” Elias interjected, eyeing Cadi with growing concern. “We can talk about that later.”

Cadi blinked rapidly, her mind going fuzzy with the massive amount of information she was trying to process. She leaned forward to massage her temples. Her brain hadn’t felt this numb since she studied for her boards. And why was the air so stuffy in the apartment?

Elias’s palm rested against her back, and she turned her head to look at him from the corner of her eye. He watched her carefully, assessing every micro expression and breath, waiting for her final reaction to everything she had just learned. Everything that he had always known.

And never told her.

It was damn near impossible for her to think with everyone staring at her. What she needed was space. She needed air.

“I need to step outside for a second,” she said, standing from the love seat and heading for the door. Her shoulders stiffened when she heard Elias begin to follow her.

“Do you want me to⁠—”

“No,” she said, faster and harsher than she had intended. “No, I just need to process all of … this.”

She waved her open palm in a circle in the general direction of the living room and the three deities still sitting on the sofa enjoying their refreshments. That was going to take a while to get used to.

Elias hesitated for a moment, and Cadi worried that he would try to stop her, but instead, he just nodded and took a step back to let her go. She gave him a tight smile before turning around and stepping out into the silence of the hallway.

24

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CADI

Cadi pushed open the glass door that led to the street, grimacing at the wall of warm, damp air that slammed into her. The late summer evening was thick, but even the barest hint of a breeze was a welcome relief from the stifling apartment she had just left.

The tips of her fingers wouldn’t stop tingling, even as she shook out her hands and wedged herself between two potted cypress trees to lean against what appeared to be the only section of the ground floor that didn’t double as a window. Angling her head back against the black stone, she let her eyes drift closed. The low sun was warm on her skin, but the pleasant heat did little to calm the way her mind was threatening to short circuit in its frantic attempt to align her competing realities.

There was the life she’d known approximately thirty minutes ago, and the life she had just been catapulted into. Sure, she had essentially climbed onto that catapult and all but demanded Elias pull the lever, but it was still a lot to take in.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket, and a tightness pinched behind her ribs when she pulled it out to see a message from him:

This isn’t how I wanted you to find out. I’m so sorry.

Cadi read his words over and over, but they did nothing to stop the hurt that came from knowing he had kept this from her. Regardless of what he’d wanted, the fact remained that he’d had almost two months to tell her. Two months to trust her the way she had trusted him, and he had decided not to. She had opened herself to him fully, let him see every broken, scarred, terrified piece of her, and the whole time he had been picking and choosing the parts of himself that she got to know.

The brutal realization made her chest ache.

Her thumbs hovered over the keyboard. A hundred responses stood poised at the front of her mind, not a single one of them productive. So instead, she locked her phone, shoved it into her pocket, and let her head fall back against the wall.

All she wanted to do was disappear. To go home and hide in her bed and pretend the world didn’t exist. No gods, no boyfriends, no shady power-stealing religions. But she knew that wasn’t an option. Not anymore.

No, she had wanted to know the truth. She didn’t get to hide from it now that she did.

For all the good that knowing did her.