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His words settled heavily within me.

“I will,” I whispered. “I promise. I’ll tell him.”

“See that you do.”

From beyond the door, the rush of running water cut abruptly into silence. I startled like a thief caught mid-burglary, threw Aster one last wide-eyed look of pure panic, and bolted back inside, dragging the sheet behind me. I had just enough time to fling myself across the bed and arrange the covers into something resembling innocence. Then I calmed my breathing into a passable imitation of someone who had absolutely not been conspiring in a hallway thirty seconds earlier, before the bathroom door opened.

And Atlas stepped out.

Then I forgot, for a moment, how to breathe entirely, and this time for a completely different reason.

He had cleaned away the last evidence of the night, his dark hair pushed back damp from his face, a few stray strands already falling loose across his brow. Gone were the formal layers of before, the embroidered coat and the crest of his kingdom. In their place, he wore a fitted tunic of charcoal so dark it bordered on black. The laces at the throat were left carelessly undone, revealing a wedge of bronze skin and the edge of those red markings that traced his collarbone. Dark fitted trousers. Soft black boots. The sleeves were shoved up to his forearms, revealing the corded muscle and the thin white battle scars I had mapped so thoroughly only hours before.

It was less armor and more man.

Less the distant king of the throne room and more the warrior who had hunted me across a dying world, and somehow, that made him infinitely more dangerous to my poor, hammering heart.

“You’re staring again,” he observed, the corner of his mouth tilting.

“You’re imposing,” I shot back, tugging the covers a little higher. “It’s not my fault. You did it on purpose.”

“I assure you, I dressed with no thought to you whatsoever,” he said gravely, crossing to the bed, the lie so transparent that I nearly laughed.

“Liar.”

“Always, where you’re concerned.” He braced a hand on either side of me, leaning down until his nose brushed mine. “I have to go. My brother waits, and apparently, a king’s duties do not pause because he has finally got everything he ever wanted back in his bed.”

This warmed my heart and made my belly flutter, though I used wit to hide it.

“Tragic,” I murmured. “How ever will the kingdom cope?”

His answering kiss was slow and unhurried, a contradiction to every line of urgency in his body, and when he finally drew back, his eyes had darkened all over again.

“Stay. Rest. I’ll return before you’ve had the chance to miss me.”

“I won’t miss you,” I lied.

“You will, little liar.” He pressed one last kiss to my forehead, that maddening, certain smile playing at his lips. “You always do.”

And then he was gone, the door closing quietly behind him, leaving me alone in the vast bed with the scent of him still clinging to the sheets and a knot of dread tightening slowly in my chest.

Because I lay there, staring up at the painted stars on his ceiling, and I knew, with the same bone-deep certainty that had carried me through visions and labyrinths and wars, that I had not told Atlas the half of it.

Not about the deal.

Not about the price still hanging unpaid over my head.

And the worst part, the part that coiled cold and sharp beneath my ribs no matter how I tried to reason it away, was the quiet, creeping conviction that whatever Theron wanted from me… that vow he’d been so patient, so unbothered to leave uncollected, he had every intention of one day coming to claim it.

A king like that did not bargain for nothing.

He didn’t help out of kindness, just as Atlas had said.

Which meant somewhere out there, beyond the mountains and the ruins and the slowly healing land, the Gorgon King was waiting.

And I had absolutely no idea what he would ask of me when he finally came to call.

When he finally came to collect.