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Sure, the impatience was there, along with a sharp tongue that no other besides Kali dared have with me. She was built for sin and death. Wild to her very core. But there was also an emotion that I’d never seen in her before in all the years I’d known her: regret.
Adora regretted getting in the way so that the shifters could approach us. She regretted the deaths of those people.
Not for the first time, I wondered if she was this way before I met her.
While every life was different, there were two commonalities that never changed.
The first, that I found her as a baby and didn’t see her again until she was a grown woman who’d regained her godhood.
The second was that I killed her.
Sometimes it was difficult, excruciating even, and others, nothing more than numbness. I was able to let it go because what redeeming qualities she’d had—whatwe’dhad—had diminished over time. Eventually, her destructive nature had vastly outweighed all else.
Now, I wasn’t so sure.
Light disappeared beneath the horizon, bathing the cave in shadows of the past. I shook my head, clearing those thoughts away.
My mission was simple. Find Kali and return her home.
Flora and Fauna would be returned to me. My soul would be restored instead of splintering. I would regain what sanity I lost and put an end to the madness. The call to the wild that drove shifters to become monstrous versions of themselves would end.
That was my job. My duty, as god and king of Arcadia.
So why did I find myself making a distinction between Kali and Adora?
“Are you going to keep watching me sleep like a creep?”
I jolted, no less shocked than if she’d slapped me. “I wasn’t watching you.”
“Sure you weren’t.” She opened those mischievous brown eyes, focusing on me instantly. “Are you going to deny being a creeper next?”
I pressed my lips together. ‘Creeper’ wasn’t a term I’d ever heard before, but it didn’t take much to get the idea. “We need to get moving. There’s only eight hours of night and we need to make up for the delays we ran into yesterday.”
Adora arched off the slab, stretching her arms high above her head, drawing her shoulders tight together. A flash of a memory where I had Kali tied up in my tomb while I sucked on the flesh between her thighs made me stifle a groan.
I may have hated her in past lives, but that didn’t stop me from taking her to bed in most of them. And there were ones we loved before we hated. Sometimes for years. Decades.
It physically hurt to think of those times when she was here looking at me with those fuck-me lips parted in a seductive smile.
After last time, I swore her off for good. Every life thereafter. We were bound by fate, but the harm she did was too much. Every fuck and affair ended in a catastrophe between us, even though we were continually drawn together like magnets.
But that was Kali, not Adora.
I needed to suffocate the part of me that dared even think that.
“Delays,” she mused. “That’s an understatement if ever I’ve heard one. Care to tell me how we ended up here?” She motioned to the cave, dropping her arms and sliding off the rock.
“You passed out during the vigil.”
“I must have hit my head harder than I thought.” She frowned, taking in her clothes for the first time. “You washed me.”
“Washed is a stretch.” I jerked my chin toward the mouth of the cave. “There’s a small stream that goes down this part of the mountain. It sprays enough off the rocks to get the blood off without too much trouble. Last thing I wanted was you waking up in the middle of the day and getting me up because you couldn’t find a shower.”
It was a lie. Partially.
I didn’t want her waking up. I also couldn’t stand seeing blood on her. It made the madness worse.
I’d seen Kali drenched in blood enough for even my infinite lifespan.
