They waited for him. Cerberus glared at Hades and was met with a bored smile.
Furious, Cerberus stepped from the dais, near shaking with disgust.
“Sweet Cerberus, I’m thrilled,” Melinoe whispered up at him with even more apparent devotion than before.
He bowed his head and took her hand. Melinoe’s long nails grazed him. She froze his skin, even through his glove—a stark contrast to the mortal’s heated touch.
Melinoe beamed up at him, delighted to have a willing dance partner for once (none of the others would dare), and his face went blank. From the corner of his eye, he saw Cyane hesitantly accept a cup of nectar from Hermes.
The music roared back to life, and Cerberus pulled the daughter of Hades close.
“Areyou certain we haven’t met before?” Hermes said.
Cyane watched through a blurry haze as Cerberus brought Melinoe close and sharply moved with the goddess to the slow-building drum of music. His armor, paired against Melinoe’s revealing dress was in as sharp opposition as the beautiful music was to the terrible men who forced Cyane to dance with them against her will.
A snap and pull, a push and tug.
Melinoe laughed, and the sound of it twinkled through the room.
Envy filled Cyane. She didn’t understand why. But she hadn’t laughed that way when she’d been thrown into the dance. Instead, she had been passed off from one groping disturbing man to the next, knowing she had no one to rescue her as they contorted her body into unwanted shapes. They pressed up against her, took away her space with glee, and laughed when she struggled to pull away.
Men with wings, men with dripping horns, men that smelled like rotten death, and others that smelled of vinegar and roses. She still hadn’t caught her breath from their brutality. Her skin crawled with molestation.
She’d hoped against hope, as her world had spun, that Cerberus would take her hand and guide her from the maelstrom. To tell her not to be afraid like he had before.
“What?” she said distractedly. Hermes had asked her something?
But why would Cerberus save her? Or even say such comforting words to her ever again? He wasn’t beholden to her. What distinguished him from all the others in the room was that he didn’t look at her like she was a piece of entertaining meat, and he’d been there when she was at her most vulnerable. When her last ember of resistance had finally been quenched by the unforgiving river, it had been his hand that had come out of nowhere and returned her to the surface.
The memory fueled her envy.
Melinoe pressed herself against Cerberus. Those around her barked out another wave of snickers. A flash of red light bled from the openings of Cerberus’s helmet.
Did it mean anger?Lust?Did the fire in his eyes even have meaning? Or was it chaotic, like everything else?
Why do I care?Cyane frowned. But as she watched Melinoe, in blooming mirth, the goddess’s beauty beyond earthly description, so joyous—living each moment in Cerberus’s attention—Cyane didn’t think she could ever compare. Not in a billion years.
A human’s never won over a goddess in anything.
Something nudged her thigh, and she peered down to see one of the dogs from earlier. It sat regally next to her leg, its head level with her waist, and stared out over the dancefloor. She tentatively trailed her fingers over one of its pointed ears. The dog growled, and its nostrils flared. She yanked her hand away.
Maybe it doesn’t like to be touched?
“I said, I swear I’ve met you before,” Hermes said.
Cyane startled and finally turned her face toward him. He was studying her curiously.
His golden beauty and honed muscles were hard to look at, especially next to the shadows and formless darkness that seemed to drift over every surface. The miasma touched him too, but in an eerie, incomplete way, like rustling bushes blocking a distant fire.
“It’s not possible,” she said, fiddling with the cup of nectar he’d given her. She’d know if she’d met a god before. She was sure of it. Doubt began to creep forward. But would she? The things she had seen in the last day made her question reality. Sometimes sanity needed to be put on the backburner when there was something larger at stake.
“Perhaps it is not, but it does lend to why Lord Hades requested my help in bringing you here.”
The dance, the music, Cerberus and his warrior’s armor, and Melinoe’s damselled allure fell from her mind.
“You?” Cyane said. “You know why I’m here?”
The corners of Hermes’s lips lifted. “No. I don’t know why, only that you are.”
