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Eons Ago
Eons ago
Thunder boomed and lightning flashed in a storm-blackened sky. Rathbone the Only removed his helmet, uncaring as violent winds pelted icy rain in his face. His blood-soaked hair whipped, obscuring his vision. He wiped his eyes, but the image before him never altered.
Lorelei the Incomparable, goddess of desire and his beloved bride, lay on the field of slaughter, motionless atop a pile of slain demons and their assortment of severed parts. Her crystalline irises stared at nothing. Her perfect lips remained parted with a silent scream. A drenched sable mane stuck to ashen skin, molding to exquisite features able to inspire lust in all who gazed upon her. But....
Something with claws had ripped open her chest and plucked out her heart.
Rathbone couldn’t bring himself to accept...hoped... “Lore!” Though he’d fought on the front lines for twenty-one straight days and nights without wavering, there’d been no one strong enough to fell him. Here, he dropped to his knees, his armor clanking. His weapons rolled from a once iron grip.
With a shaky hand, he gently caressed Lore’s glacial cheek. “Wake up, sweetness. I need you.”
They had plans. Toast his victory with a glass of ambrosia and make love. An adored custom. But nothing changed. Lore didn’t regrow a heart, as a deity of her capability should. She didn’t smile with delight and coil her arms around him, the way he so desperately longed. Didn’t tell him not to worry because she was soon to make his dreams come true.
“Wake up!” he bellowed, his voice hollow and broken. “Your king has issued a command.” They had agreed. He would fight until achieving victory, and they would rule this Underworld kingdom together. Mere minutes ago, that victory had finally come. This was to be a time of celebration, not devastation. “I completed step one of our plan. Youmustwake.”
Minutes passed in silence. The storm continued to rage, but she never revived, never responded.
Tears scorched his cheeks, mixing with freezing raindrops. His precious wife couldn’t be dead. She was the mate chosen for him by fate, and herequiredher. He’d accepted it at their first meeting when she’d oh so sweetly requested his aid.
“Lore. Please,” he croaked. “You must return to me.”
Still nothing.
A roar brewed deep in his chest, grief attempting to tear its way free of his insides. What had happened? Why had she come to the combat zone? She might be a goddess of desire, born with incredible power, but she was a gentle soul. Afraid of blood. Terrified of blades. She should be tucked away in the safety of their hideout, awaiting his summons.
“I’m sorry, Rath.” Hades, King of the Dead, patted and squeezed his shoulder. “She’s gone.”
Rathbone didn’t spare the sovereign a glance. He loved the sovereign like a father and even owed the male his life, but Lore wasn’t a subject they could discuss without coming to blows.
“You aren’t sorry.” He gathered the beauty close, her limp body hanging in his arms. “You hate her.” His jaw clenched.Hated.
“True. But I love you.”
That, he knew. Again and again, Hades had proven the truth of his claim. Though Rathbone’s mother had considered him a great disappointment, the King of the Dead had seen something special in him. Hades took him under his smoky wing and spent centuries training him to be a soldier without equal. Today, that training had paid off. After a gruesome year-long war, Rathbone won the right to rule the kingdom neighboring Hades’s. The Realm of Agonies.
Rathbone had lost much along the way. Soldiers. A fortune. His moral compass.But I will not lose my mate.“I committed the vilest deeds to defeat the former king,” he rasped. A famed warrior named Styx. “His land is now my land. The palace he built is mine to lay at the feet of my wife,so that is what I will do.” Rathbone’s volume grew until his speech overshadowed the newest clap of thunder.
Hades swiped his fingers over an increasingly frustrated expression. “You wed her, yet you maintain a stable of one hundred mistresses. Why is this lone female so important?”
“You answered yourself. They are my mistresses. She is my queen.” No one mattered more.
Lore was the one who’d encouraged Rathbone to establish the stable in the first place. As an ancient, she understood the customs of the gods in a manner he did not. Deities of their ilk kept paramours, she’d said, and a warrior of his renown should enjoy more than most.
Was any female more perfect?
“You cannot bring her back to life,” Hades said, giving his shoulder another pat, “but in time you’ll recover from her loss.”
Bring her back.The words echoed inside Rathbone’s head. Yes! He could do it. The ancients possessed a way, and Lore had taught him how as a just in case.
“Give me your chisel,” he commanded. The King of the Dead was never without one; Hades relished carving his initials into the bones of his enemies.
The sovereign frowned at him. “Why?”
“I will etch the Song of Life into her bones.” Rathbone kissed Lore’s brow before easing her to the rain-soaked pile of dead demons. Instinct demanded he teleport her somewhere safer, drier, and cleaner, but she’d told him location mattered. Death screeched its evil at him here, so here was where he must respond. “We’ll be together again, sweetness. I’ll give you more time—then I’ll give you the world. I swear it.”
“Rathbone—”
