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I had perhaps half a heartbeat to register the sheer, casual strength of him before the world tipped, and the next thing I knew, the warm and foaming water was closing over my head. I came up spluttering, soap stinging my eyes, to find Aster surfacing beside me with a look of pure murder on his dripping face.
The pair of us.
Thrown into a bath like a couple of misbehaving children, by the very man we had crossed worlds to abduct.
Theron, meanwhile, had stepped neatly out of the water and snagged a towel from a hook. Which he then draped around his neck. Not, I noted, around anything else.
He stood over us, smug, glistening, and roaring with laughter.
The two of us looked up at him from the bath. And, unfortunately, as we looked up, our gazes landed squarely on the weapon hanging quite unashamedly between his legs.
“Um… Mazel tov,” Aster said.
I looked at him, brow raised at a term I didn’t know but could guess the shape of well enough. He shrugged.
“Got to admit. It’s impressive.”
“Yeah, well,” I wiped the foam from my eyes, “So’s mine, but you don’t see me waving it the fuck around, do you?”
The Gorgon King threw back his head and bellowed.
“Well,” he said, once he’d recovered himself, “as entertaining as all this is, gentlemen, if the pair of you don’t fuck off out of my home this instant, I will be sending you both back to your king as a matching set of statues. To decorate those manicured little gardens of his.” His teeth flashed. “With my regards, of course.”
“If you do that,” Aster said, “you won’t get your vow, Theron.”
My head snapped toward him. Then back to the king. Whose smile had gone all at once, whose jaw had set hard as the stone he commanded.
“Five seconds… Explain,” Theron said, quiet and dangerous.
“She’s dying, Theron.” Aster hauled himself out of the bath, dripping, now smelling of an entire fucking flower garden. “That’s what she’s done this time.”
“And this vow is something you neglected to mention to me,” I said through my teeth, climbing out after him,
“Later,” Aster muttered.
“Oh. Later. Wonderful. Shall we say the moment my brother tears you a brand-new arsehole for keeping things from him? Yes. Let’s do it then.”
But that was the moment Aster’s patience ran out. He grabbed me, dragged me in close so I was lodged between his broad chest and muscly arms, and this time, somehow, got a proper hold of the king we’d struggled so hard to keep our hands on. It was as though the bastard had oiled himself before bathing, which currently made him a slippery big bugger!
Then, before any of us could get another word out, Aster pulled the final Way Stone from my sodden pocket, gripped Theron and me in one enormous fist, and without so much as a word of warning, crushed it in his wet, oil-slicked hand.
The world vanished.
A heartbeat later, the portal spat us out into Atlas’s office.
My soggy ass hit the floor. Aster’s dripping bulk also hit the floor. Theron, somehow, landed perfectly upright.
Of course he did… cocky bastard.
He was also still entirely, unrepentantly naked, dripping water and bubbles into a spreading puddle across the stone.
The portal snapped shut behind us.
Before either Aster or I could recover so much as a shred of our dignity, I registered Atlas. He stood at the far end of the office, mid-motion, hauling books from the new shelves and casting them aside, plainly tearing the place apart for anything at all that might help her. A heavy tome on ancient medicine slipped from his fingers and thudded to the floor as his head came up. His mouth fell open at the sight that greeted him.
Or rather, at the sight of one large, naked, soap-slicked Gorgon King, dripping in the middle of his office.
Whatever flicker of amusement might have lived in him hours ago was long gone. He looked exhausted. Hollowed out even. We hadn’t been away long, and yet it was plain that what had befallen Alex was crushing him beneath a weight none of us could truly fathom. Dark shadows pooled beneath his eyes, and every line of him hummed with a tightly leashed and terrible fury.
