“Funny. Fucking funny how you just made yourself into a collar.”
“Nyssa.” Dreven’s voice is outside the door.
“I’m fine,” I call, which is a lie dressed as a reassurance. “Just annoyed with dead boy.”
“He apologises.”
“Through you? Coward,” I scoff.
Dreven chuckles. “Okay, that was me trying to create peace. He isn’t sorry. He is right. Gods and mortals are different. It’s the way it has always been and will always be.”
“Unless the Devourer comes and eats us all.”
“Facts,” Dastian pipes up.
I open the door a crack, just enough for Dreven’s silver eyes to cut through the gap. “He’s still wrong,” I say, because I’m petty and tired and wearing a homicidal necklace.
Dreven’s gaze drops to my neck, and I put my hand up, feeling skin. But I know the snake is there. Dreven looks back at my face with a sigh.
Okay, can he not see it?
“Where is the crown?” I ask, stiffly.
“On the bedside table,” he says.
“Nope,” Dastian says, hovering behind Dreven. “It’s gone.”
“Gone?” I ask slowly.
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Who knows?” Voren says, marching down the hallway. “I am sorry I hurt your mortal feelings, slayer. But put these on and accept that shit has changed.” He throws my granniest of knickers at me. I catch them and stare at them in horror. They are the saggy ones that are a last resort if I’m behind on laundry. Which newsflash, I never am.
Except that one time I had the flu.
I bunch them up in my fist. “Do you always use props to make your point?”
“Sometimes.”
“Do not go through my underwear drawer again,” I said haughtily.
He snorts indelicately. “My cock has been in your arse, in your cunt, and I’ve dumped more cum inside you than a mere mortal can handle, and you are concerned about me going through your knicker drawer?”
“What is that supposed to mean?” I ask, eyes wide.
“Gods and mortals are not supposed to procreate,” Dreven says with a world-weary sigh. “But you aren’t mortal, Nyssa. You never were.”
Never was.
My whole life has been one big lie.
Chapter 8
Dreven
The effect my words have on her is both worrying and insulting. She should be exultant to be a goddess, but instead, she finds it distasteful, as if she is better than us. It smacks of her ancestors’ attitude, and I don’t like it. But I push it aside because the crown going missing is bad news. For all of us.
