So, we’d manipulated, tricked, and trapped to get exactly what we wanted.Her.
Regret crushed my chest, a heavy weight of shame.
I moved Alexis, so she was leaning back on me, and grabbed some conditioner, slowly working it through her long tresses.
“We don’t deserve you,” I whispered, as if saying the truth aloud could atone for what we’d done. “Angels don’t deserve this … You’re so much better than us.”
“No shit—ow—fuck.” Kharon stumbled naked into the dark shower, collapsed onto the bench beside me, and tipped his bloody head back, groaning as he leaned against the wall under the spray. “We’ll never deserve her as long as we live.”
I glared over at him. “Stop shouting.”
He rolled his eyes and tapped his missing ear.
“Figure it the fuck out. Don’t agitate her.”
Instead of getting mad, Kharon raised an eyebrow. “Get out of your head—I can practically see you thinking from here.”
Gritting my teeth, I focused on separating her curls with conditioner. “We’re bad for her,” I said, the words hanging heavy in the hazy darkness. “She deserves someone … nice.”
Kharon laughed, a harsh cruel sound. “Oh, fuck off with your melodramatic, self-loathing, eldest heir bullshit.”
His voice was too loud in the quiet shower, his words jarring.
My fingers stilled.
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me.” Kharon dumped the bottle of shampoo over his hair, hissing as the suds burned his wound.
When he’d finished grunting through the pain, he looked at me pointedly. “Alexis isourwife. No, we aren’t good for her … We’re cruel, possessive, aggressive—”
“I got it,” I snapped, cutting him off.
Kharon sprawled with his legs wide on the bench, and our knees knocked together as he lathered soap across his scarred chest.
“The point is,” he said darkly. “She’s too good forallof Sparta, not just us. Achilles and Patro fuckingabandonedher.”
We both fumed.
They’d be dealt with.Brutally.
“So—what do we do with someone who’s too pure for this world?” Kharon’s white teeth flashed in the dim. “We protect her. We make her so irrevocably ours that everyone isafraidto look in her direction.”
I shook my head. “That’s a fool’s dream.”
“No.” Kharon’s voice rose. “That’s what Hades did with Persephone. No one dares look at her wrong, and we need to do the same.”
I paused.
He had a point.
Kharon reached over and wrapped one of Alexis’s curls around his finger.
“She needs monsters,” he said, turning his head to reveal the mutilated side of his head. “Precisely because she’s not one.”His smirk was rabid, a carnivore in the body of a man. “That’s why she has us.”
I cleared my throat.
“So, you … gave her your ear.”
