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She needed to pummel something or someone—anything to release the infuriating tension she felt sitting on the sidelines while her father struggled. And Lucas knew that because he knew her. Helen let her arms relax. Her hips swayed slightly toward him, like a challenge.
“Let’s go,” she said, her voice humming deep in her chest.
A muscle in his jaw pumped as Lucas clenched his teeth. Heat rolled off his skin like his blood was boiling. Helen could smell him—baking bread and new snow, hot and cold, sunshine and darkness—all opposites that should cancel each other out, but that somehow managed to live next to each other inside Lucas. Helen shut her eyes and breathed him in shamelessly.
Lucas pulled away. He ya
nked hard on her arm and snapped her out of the spell. It really ticked her off when he bossed her around like that, and she had no doubt he knew it, too. She wrenched her wrist out of his grip and shoved him toward the stairs. His back stiff in front of her, Helen stormed after Lucas as he led her through the house and down to the fight cage.
As soon as they reached the steps to the basement level, they started stripping off clothes. No shoes, no jewelry, no belts, no hard or sharp objects of any kind were allowed in the cage, but they couldn’t be bothered to put on softer gear to replace what they shucked off so frantically. Every time Helen removed another article of clothing, all she could think about was how much she wanted to tear into him.
The jumble of “other” Helens inside her head made it worse. In most of her memories, he’d been forbidden to her, dangling just out of her reach over and over again. She was so frustrated, she didn’t need the Furies to want to kill him anymore. And she could tell by the sound of ripping fabric as he wrenched his shirt off, and the slap of leather as he yanked his belt from the loops on his jeans, that Lucas was just as fed up with their impossible situation as she was.
By the time they got to the ring, they were so worked up they barely shut the door of the cage before they began to whale on each other.
Helen started it. She threw her right and punched Lucas in the face. At the last second he deflected most of the blow and swept her legs out from under her, trying to bring the fight immediately to the floor, which was his specialty.
She rolled and leapt up before he could capture her under him, taking another swing at him as she did so. He brought his arms up to block, ate a few more shots as he pulled her into a clinch, and then pushed Helen back against the chain-link fence. He leaned his shoulder into her sternum, pressing the air out of her lungs as he tied up her hands.
“What did you and Orion talk about in the hall after breakfast?” he hissed into her ear.
“Who said we were talking?” She said it on purpose to get to him, and it worked. A pained look crossed his face, and Helen took the opportunity to break one of her wrists from his hold and hit him in the gut.
Lucas grunted and lunged down to take her leg out. He slammed Helen into the mat and, wrenching her thighs apart, he took position between them. She pulled guard under him—wrapping her legs tightly around his waist and squeezing hard to cut off his air.
“I heard you talking,” he growled through gritted teeth. He was using all his strength to try to pin her arms down. “And it’s kinda hard to talk when your tongue’s in someone else’s mouth.”
She glared up at him, not answering his question.
“Tell me what you told him, Helen!” he yelled into her face.
If this were an MMA fight, the guy on top would start hammering on the guy under him in a move called “ground and pound.” But Lucas didn’t hit her. In fact, Helen realized that although his cheek was bruised, and he was bleeding from a cut over his eye, he hadn’t taken one swing at her. He was doing this for her, so she could work out her frustration. He was trying to help her.
When she realized this, Helen’s anger evaporated and she went still. She didn’t need to be able to see through his chest to know how much he loved her. He was constantly proving it by how much of her crap he was willing to take.
“I can see emotions, like someone from the House of Rome can, and I have no idea why,” she admitted with an exasperated sigh. Lucas stared down at her with a startled look as she struggled to continue. “And I didn’t tell Orion this, but I think I can control other people’s hearts, too.”
“Keep going,” he said when she paused again.
“I made the police officer who was guarding Andy let us into her room—and he didn’t even ask us our names. At first, I just thought it was the whole ‘face that launched a thousand ships’ thing. It happens sometimes with men. But the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced that wasn’t it. I did something to his heart. It feels wrong to do that to someone.”
“Huh.” Lucas released her slowly and sat back on his heels, frowning.
Helen sat up and rubbed her sore wrists, waiting for him to be ready to share what was going on in his head.
“Look at me,” he said suddenly, leaning close and locking eyes with her. “You’re the only girl I’ve ever kissed.”
“Liar,” Helen said so fast she practically cut him off. He flashed a grin at her and quickly dropped it again, gazing at her levelly.
“How do you know I’m lying?”
“Apart from the fact that I’m pretty sure you’ve done a heck of a lot more than just kiss other girls? Something was wrong in your voice, I guess. Also a feeling, like . . .”
“Like you’d lost something. And you needed to find it.” She nodded, agreeing with him. He stared at her for a moment, blank-faced. “You’re a Falsefinder, Helen. You can hear lies.”
“But how?”
“Our blood,” he said, nodding his head as if he could hear the truth in his own words. “When you, Orion, and I became blood brothers, you absorbed some of our talents through our blood. I haven’t noticed any new talents in myself, and I don’t think Orion has either or he’d have mentioned it while we were healing together. But apparently, you got something from both of us. You took Orion’s talent to control hearts, and my talent to recognize lies.” He cocked his head to the side. “Maybe you took even more than that,” he whispered to himself, still mulling it over. Helen stared at him.
