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Behind me, the wounded doe disappears into the trees.

“The fire wanted more.” His hand is still pressing mine against his chest, his heartbeat hammering under my fingers. “I kept feeding it, and it felt—” His jaw locks, and he takes a shallow, almost desperate breath. “It felt right. I thought I was protecting us.”

The admission hits me harder than the boar attacking my shield.

“The only reason I stopped is because you were standing in front of me.” His green eyes are bright, searching mine for answers I don’t have. “If you hadn’t been there, I would have burned the entire forest down. Every creature in it. And I would have felt justified the whole time.”

I keep my hand on his chest, because his heartbeat is the only data point I need right now. He’s telling me he would have burned the forest and enjoyed it, and my first reaction should be fear. Some of it is. My heart rate is elevated, my palms are damp, and my scanning keeps flagging his temperature as a threat. But the rest of me is watching a man confess the worst thing about himself while holding my hand against his chest, and that data point outweighs every other reading in the clearing.

“I’ll always be here.” My hand presses harder against his chest, and I don’t blink, because he needs to see that I’m not saying it to comfort him. I’m saying it because it’s true. “Every time the fire wants more, I’ll stand in front of it. You’ll have to go through me, and you’ll stop, because you already proved you can.”

His eyes move across my face like he’s searching for a flaw in my logic and can’t find it. When he finally speaks, the words come out carefully, as if he’s measuring each one for damage before releasing it.

“You can’t spend your life standing between me and whatever I’m about to destroy,” he says slowly, his eyes never leaving mine. “That’s not a partnership. That’s a containment strategy.”

My chest tightens, because he’s giving me an out. He’s telling me the cost up front so I can walk away clean—and there’s no way in hell I’m taking it.

“I’m an analyst,” I remind him, refusing to back down. “Containment strategies are my specialty.”

“Evie.” His grip tightens over my hand. “This is going to get worse. The Geryon told me the war-blood will claim me. Everything I love will be tested. I killed gods know how many innocent animals in a sacred forest, and the only emotion I felt while doing it was satisfaction. You’re so confident that I won’t hurt you, but what happens when you’re standing in front of me and the war-blood decides that going through you is an acceptable cost?”

“It won’t.” My fingers press harder against his chest. “The blade stopped six inches from my face. You were gone, your eyes were burning amber, and the fire was running the show, but the blade still stopped.”

“Six inches is close.”

“Six inches is the difference between the war-blood controlling you and you controlling it.” I give him the truth, because Kieran has never needed comfort from me. He’s needed honesty. “The hand holding the blade is yours. The choice to stop swinging is yours. You’ve never let steel decide where it cuts, and today, you didn’t let fire decide, either.”

His eyes close, his chest expanding against my palm in a deep, shuddering breath. When they open, he lifts his hand to my face and traces my cheekbone with his thumb like I’m the divine one in this forest instead of him. The touch is so different from the blazing demigod who was burning animals thirty seconds ago that my heart aches.

Then a branch snaps to our left, and my hand drops from his chest. My heat sensing picks up eight thermal signatures as elevated as Kieran’s, their unnaturally tall forms rising from low positions in the undergrowth and forming a tight circle around the clearing.

The Amazons.

32

EVIE

Kieran’s body shifts into combat readiness, but his hands stay at his sides.

Neither of us speaks. One wrong word could be the difference between life and death, and I’ve had enough imminent death for the day. Instead, we just stare them down, like wolves in a fighting ring, ready to strike.

Finally, a woman steps forward. She’s the tallest of the group, with dark hair pulled back from a face that’s all sharp angles and harder edges. The bow slung across her back is taller than I am.

I can barely breathe as she scans the clearing.

Ash drifts across the scorched circle where the boar died, embers winking orange in the blackened grass. The bodies of the animals Kieran cut down are curling smoke into a canopy that’s gone gray with it. Finally, there’s Kieran, standing with empty hands and war-blood in his veins, looking seconds away from creating fire blades again to defend us.

“We expected the boar to last longer,” the Amazon woman says, her voice carrying across the clearing with the flat authority of a woman who’s used to being obeyed.

“You sent the boar,” I say simply.

“Yes.” Her dark eyes move to Kieran and stay there. “We needed to see what you’d do when stripped of your steel and pushed to the edge.”

“And the other animals?” Kieran asks. “Were they part of the test?”

The woman’s expression doesn’t change. “Everything in this forest is part of the test. The boar tested your strength. The creatures that came after tested your restraint.”

Kieran’s jaw tightens. “Which means I failed.”