She didn’t want war either. “What can I do to help?”
Cerberus drew back, and she took a much-needed breath of air from the space he’d provided. Cyane hadn’t realized how hard it had become to breathe.
Silence fell between them. He’d stiffened as if her question was a surprise.He thinks the worst of me.He thought she didn’t care, but that wasn’t it at all. She cared. She cared too freaking much. She’d barely accepted this new reality—and that had been quite the feat alone—but Cerberus didn’t seem to realize how different her world was to his.
Perhaps I’ve been too selfish.
His eyes roamed over her. Cyane curled her arms around her middle, hiding from his gaze, diverting her own.
The thrill was back.
It surged through him like stolen lightning the moment he’d sensed Cyane’s desperation to leave in the ballroom, and it had thundered when he’d heard her ask Hermes for help.
Hermes was a trickster, a thief, and a lackey to some of Hades’s most powerful opponents. The winged god’s loyalties were easily swayed, and to think Cyane could’ve slipped from the realm in Hermes’s arms made the primordial beast in Cerberus furious. If she’d escaped with him, war could’ve easily happened.
It’s my job to do Hades’s bidding.
But as he stared down at Cyane, hiding behind her arms, he wasn’t sure if he had chased after her out of duty. He didn’t have a name for the way she made him feel—the thrill was not always the same.
She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
The damnable pounding inside him grew.She wants to help.
Toserve.
Hades’s words came back to him.Serve.Hades?
The same feeling he’d discerned as he’d seen her next to Hermes returned to him now.
“You wish to help?” Cerberus asked if only to hear her response.
“I don’t want anyone to die on my behalf.”
It wasn’t the answer he wanted, but he took it all the same.
“Would you swear such a thing to Styx?”Would she dare?
“Like an oath?”
“Yes.”
Cyane licked her lips, and his gaze was drawn to them. It was such a strange thing for him to want to watch.
“I will if you will,” she said.
She dares.
He reached forward and grabbed her wrist, drawing her against his body as he called the darkness. The next moment, they stood on the rocky shores of Styx. Cyane pulled away from him with a shudder, and he grudgingly let her go.
He turned to the black and red waters. The gatehouse he resided in was up and to their left, and Hades’s castle to the right in the center of the beginning of the ocean of blood. Harpies swarmed so high above that they could be mistaken for birds by the human.
Cerberus sensed her hesitation. An oath was no small thing, but an oath to prevent war was not such a hard one to make. He knelt at the water’s edge. “Don’t be scared.”
She gingerly joined him on his right and lowered beside him. “What happens if an oath is broken?”
“Divine punishment.”
“Will you let me leave when this is all done? Will you believe me if I make it?”
