Page 12 of Vengeance of the Gods

The pleasure rose to a new height, her body quivering like her muscles were begging for the release that would never come. Her desire shot to the highest peak, and before Marlena could safely crawl down the other side, she was thrown off and plummeted to the ground without a parachute.

Marlena gasped as she regained full control of her body, pulling her hand away from the mirror and blinking away the fog.

The wounds on her hands were gone, healed the second she’d finished imbuing the mirror with the power inside her. Blood still coated her hands, but when she looked up at the mirror, she no longer saw her reflection.

Instead, a vast black nothingness with swirling shadows stared back at her. The frame was no longer the dark natural wood it had been moments ago. Now it was made of iron—the same as the halo she wore atop her head.

Both made from the power in her blood, the god inside her head, and the energy of Vega’s curse.

6

Bridger told Meyer everything.

Well, not everything.

He left out the part about the kiss but filled him in on all the other details that didn’t show how torn Bridger was about the ex he should have long since been over. He’d gone through multiple stages of grief and anger over losing the girl he’d once loved.

Was Bridger ready to face those again if this didn’t go the way everyone wanted?

Tossing the thought out of his mind’s window and slamming it shut, Bridger laid out the plan he’d fed Marlena and then spent more time answering every single question Meyer had than Bridger on the entirety of his story.

“Do you believe Marlena can actually make a portal?”

“If she can’t, no one else can.”

“How do you plan on finding Vega when you get there?”

“I’m sure I’ll figure it out.”

“What if Vega doesn’t have her memories?”

“Then I guess it’ll be easier to make her trust me.”

“And all of this is to what… stop dreaming?” The way Meyer asked the question made Bridger feel like he wouldn’t believe him even if it were the whole truth.

Whether Meyer believed Bridger or not wasn’t of any concern to him currently. He had to rid himself of the dreams.

I’ll do anything to stop the fucking dreams. Bridger wasn’t above begging at this point.

“Is that so hard to believe?” Bridger replied with a question of his own.

The thought had crossed his mind while he held Vega’s lifeless body this last time, that maybe if she reset, his dreams would go with her. It had been clear from his first night’s sleep his dreams weren’t going to stop—if anything, they’d gotten worse. Moving into a part of his life Bridger never wanted to revisit.

The time he’d been not only Marlena’s prisoner, but a prisoner of his own mind.

Marlena hadn’t needed to do much to torture Bridger for two years—she knew if he was left alone long enough, he’d do it himself.

Maybe it was the curse causing the dreams, somehow reaching through Vega to him down their bonded connection. Hell, maybe it was their bond doing it! Bridger couldn’t be certain about anything—none of this had ever been definite.

They’d been speculating what had happened to them since the first night. At this point, he was starting to question every little thing he knew.

I can’t keep living this way. Afraid to go to sleep because it always led to the memories he’d voluntarily forgotten.

Here Vega was, fighting to get hers back, to keep them, and Bridger had thrown his away like they never mattered.

Words from the night Bridger visited Vega in her last life, locked in the rickety Aeris dungeon after being tortured for hours by Marlena, rang in Bridger’s head like an alarm: “And how did you escape? By lying to yourself that what we had wasn’t real? You left me! You left me, and you stand here like none of it mattered to you!”

“Are you sure that lightning strike you took on the battlefield didn’t cause brain damage?” Meyer cocked his head so hard it almost touched his shoulder.