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Devon knew plenty of men, brothers in arms, whose disposition switched between lively and deadly serious. The change usually happened when the gunfire started.
When the room emptied, he watched her take a seat at the head of the table. She didn’t bother with goodbyes to Grumpy, Dumpy, Lumpy, and Pervy. An assistant, a plain young woman, guided them through the door. As Pervy passed by Devon, he tripped over his feet and stumbled into the hall.
From the corner of his eye, Devon caught sight of a forest green haze following Pervy from the
room.
He blinked, and it didn’t disappear.
Devon looked around to see if anyone else could see the flicker of color. No one watched Pervy, the potential hallucination trailing him, but Devon caught Thanatos’ eyes. The Reaper was watching him. Did he see Devon’s interaction with the perv?
He took a deep breath. As he calmed, the green blur dissipated. Was he hallucinating?
“Devon,” Persephone hissed. Her pale, slender hand suddenly grasped his wrist, and he jerked his gaze to her.
Her eyebrows lifted, and she canted her head toward an incoming group of people. The next
meeting.
“Careful around the humans,” she warned.
Careful?
Devon’s head snapped to look at her, but Persephone was already accepting the next meeting’s attendants. It was his power. The deep green mist around him had been his power, the very thing that made him immortal.
He glanced at Thanatos, who leaned back in his seat as his eyes flicked between Devon and Persephone.
Devon sighed and made himself comfortable against the wall again. He allowed himself to be distracted by watching her work. He was fascinated by her body language, the steepling of her fingers or a tilt of her head, and the power she wielded over the room with any slight movement or glance. Here was the woman who had ruled the Underworld, and apparently parts of the human world, for thousands of years in her natural element.
Some of the men tried to posture and act like they were the ones in charge, but they only met her cool disregard. When one of them spoke out of turn, she easily put them in their place with a simple raise of her eyebrow. How was this the person, this predator, the same woman who sat and sipped whiskey with him? And even more, how was she the same Goddess who plucked his childhood home from his mind and showed him a new world?
As interested as he was in detangling Persephone’s personas, he lost attention as the meeting
droned on. Devon imagined Thanatos was similarly distracted.
He could still feel Thanatos’ thoughtful stare on him throughout the meeting. Perhaps he was
figuring out ways to make Devon uncomfortable, as he had the entire day so far.
The leaning into her during lunch (Devon tried not to stab him with a knife), and the secret looks when a client said something that had obviously brought some internal joke to the surface (flipping a table during a business meeting was most likely prohibited, but he came close to doing it). Devon came the closest to losing his cool when Thanatos had leaned in dangerously close to whisper something in her ear and pulled back to give her a too-big smile. He could not kill Death, but he could probably give him a world of pain. He knew if Thanatos kept this up, it would happen very soon. Very, very soon.
Devon was mad at Thanatos for his behavior. Mad at himself for not controlling whatever it was inside him that begged to fight anyone who even glanced at Persephone.
While lost in his thoughts, Persephone finished the meeting. The group mindlessly nodded and agreed to whatever was said. Shaking hands, making after-work plans, all happy with the conclusion.
The woman introduced to him that morning as an assistant to “Korinna” looked thrilled by the closing of the meeting. As the last member left, the young woman praised Persephone and promised to ready the contracts by the next morning.
The assistant headed to the door with an armful of papers. As she passed Devon, she moved close enough to brush his arm, and he caught her eye.
He returned a little smirk of his own. As he watched her leave and disappear down the hallway,
he glimpsed back at Persephone’s face from the corner of his eye.
He wondered if she even realized she had narrowed her eyes at the assistant.
When he faced her again, Persephone quickly angled her face away from him, leaving him to wonder what all was going through her head. Was it the same territorial feeling he had felt when Pervy watched her like she was his next meal?
She silently finished putting her notes away. Her back jerked as she shoved the papers into her case and shouldered the bag a bit too aggressively.
