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“A bar. It’s pretty popular around here.”
Where is ‘here’? And will you think I’m crazy if I were to ask?
All I know is that whereverhereis, I’ve never been before. When Rylan still treated me like his mate, he would only ever take me to the best restaurants, the most exclusive clubs, and this part of the city is just a little too grimy and rough for him.
“And that’s the reason for the limes?” I dart a glance at him as we continue down the street. The tension tightening his jaw from our run-in with the pimps has faded, and there’s casual ease to his strides that I could never replicate.
Easy past, present, and future. Must be nice.
He also seems not to notice the attention my hospital gown and bare feet are attracting from the few people standing around smoking or chatting.
Then there’s the matter of the piss. Why hasn’t he said anything about the piss I stepped in when I know he has to smell it? If I can, he must be able to.
He nods. “Yep. Delivery didn’t turn up, and the hounds are perfectionists. Tequila without lime is a sacrilege.”
My brow furrows as, spotting a wet patch on the ground, I veer around it. There are only so many times a girl can step into bodily fluids in one night. Even once is too many. “The hounds?”
Aden turns down a side street and we leave the traffic and the stares behind as the deep pulsing bass I’d heard before draws even closer. We head toward a tall, dark building with blue lights spilling out onto the street, where two men in leather jackets stand guard outside. “It’s just the name a regular gave the owners. The name stuck.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Cerberus was Hades’ watchdog,” he says. “He guarded the gates for the Underworld.”
What little I learned about anything, I picked up in public libraries since school was an obstacle course full of bullies, groping teenage boys, and nosy teachers I could never completely dodge. So I stopped going altogether when I was fourteen.
No amount of visits from social workers and cops could ever get dad to send me back again. He didn’t care when they threatened to take me away from him and put me in foster care, and the social workers didn’t care enough to do it, so I stayed with him. Any time I ran, they’d just take me right back to him, so I learned to find better hiding places during the day. But at night, I always went back home because there were worse things that could happen to a girl that guys liked to call pretty.
When I was too young to work, I hid in libraries, but when I was older, I would beg my bosses to let me work every day just so I’d have somewhere to go that wasn’t home. In the back of my mind, I always knew I’d stay with Dad until I was eighteen and could get a proper job and apartment. Then I’d leave and never look back.
Then I met Rylan.
“He had three heads,” I speak slowly, as I struggle to recall what I read one rainy afternoon years ago. “There was something about a piper who put him to sleep with music to get past, wasn’t there?”
Out of the corner of my eye, I can tell he’s smiling. “Orpheus was a musician who traveled to the underworld to steal his dead lover, Eurydice, back. You know your Greek mythology.” He turns to me with pleasure-filled eyes. “Not many people do.”
I hadn’t thought a guy who looked like Aden would be interested in Greek mythology, but I guess if you have an easy life, you have time to be interested in anything you want.
I shrug. “I don’t know much. Just a little.”
He pauses, so I stop too. His face is so serious that I don’t look at him and see an empty-headed model who should be sunbathing on a yacht in Italy. “A little is better than none. And even if you knew none, that would still be okay.”
Why am I getting the sense I’m looking at another Simon Trevor? And why are my instincts trying to tell me that I can trust him when I don’t know him?
I study the open doorway where dance music, deep and bassy, drifts out. “So what do these hounds guard since there’s no Hades or an underworld?”
“Something even more important than that,” he murmurs.
When I shift my focus back to him, he’s studying me with that same serious expression that warns me there might be more beneath the surface of his pretty exterior than I initially believed. “What’s more important than a Greek god?”
A smile teases the corner of his lips, and he lifts his arm to invite me inside. “Maybe one day I’ll tell you. Or, better yet, I’ll show you.”
The security guards don’t even turn their heads toward me. With dark glasses covering their eyes, I have no idea what they make of Aden, who went out for limes and returned with a girl in a hospital gown who stinks of piss.
Although I brace myself for them to stop me or at the least card me, they let me pass without a single word.
Clutching the handle of my plastic bag a little tighter, I follow Aden—a stranger—into the bar, asking myself what the hell I’m doing.
Maybe I should have let the pimps take me because they’re not just going to let me go.
