“Despite popular belief around here—” She pinned me with a pointed look, leaving no question whose belief she was referring to. “—I don’t go around just matchingpeople on a whim. There’s more that goes into it than that.”
She shifted with what seemed like discomfort, her face falling from the brightness that I had just seenwhen she came apart beneath me. Charlee opened her mouth, but the wordsdidn’tcome out. After pressing her lips into a thin line, she finally spoke. “And for your information, Ican’tbe matched.Soyou’resafe from any eternal state of tangled heartstrings.”
It was an attempt to brush it off as casual conversation, a shitty job of deflection at best. Catching myself stroking my fingertips over her arm idly, I forced them to still.
“Sounds tragic. How does that even work? Got a heart, don’t you?” I raised a brow at her, feigning casual conversation to cover curiosity getting the better of me as to why she thought she was unsusceptible to her own powers.
A bittersweet smile tugged at her lips as she suddenly seemed more fascinated with tracing the artwork on my ribs, depicting spears and battle-worn helmets.
“I do. At least, I think I do.” The response came out uncertain, like she didn’t even know herself.
Then, she tilted her head back to look at me, and a playful glint returned to her eyes. “For someone who works as a divorce attorney, you seem awfully concerned about my heart.”
A quiet scoff escaped me. “As they say in my line of work, ‘Marriage is grand, but divorces are a hundred-grand.’” I let that sink in before I added, “Heartbreak is inevitable. See it all the time.”
She propped herself up on her elbow to get a better look at me. “So you capitalize on it,” she stated, unimpressed.
Tucking an arm behind my head, I attempted to look at ease in what was becoming an increasingly charged topic.
“Someone has to. Might as well reap the coin from it,” I replied, shrugging nonchalantly with just one of my shoulders.
Charlee stared at me for a minute, eyes searching for something, but fuck if I knew what.
“I don’t think that’s why you do it at all.” She sounded certain, like she’d unlocked some secret that I hadn’t given her the key to. “I think you do it because you enjoy stirring up the discord.”
I laughed, genuinely amused. “God of discord at your service, sweetheart.”
Determination filled her face, not buying my indifference. Her finger poked my chest with barely enough force to crush an ant.
“Nyx may have embraced discord to create you on her own, but that doesn’t mean that’s all you are or all you have to be. Inflicting chaos on others because you’re too scared to understand your own, too scared to understand how even discord can be beautiful in its own right?—”
I bolted upright, the movement stopped her mid-rant, forcing her to sit back.
“Enough!” I snapped at her.
Scared? Chaos didn’t know fear. People feared it.
Still, her words poked at an open wound with alarming accuracy. The message behind it? I wasn’t sure if the pain was from ripping me open further or from trying to cleanse it.
“Please, Eryx, I’m just trying to help you understand. You can be more than this.” Her voice was achingly tender.
Grabbing her arm just above the elbow, I dragged her off the bed with me. I marched her back over to the open cage. The scraps of my clothes on the floor mended themselves together, dressing me as they did so.
After shoving her roughly to where I tried to tell myself she belonged, I slammed the barred door shut with a loud clang. The lock engaged with a loud click.
“We’re done here. Playtime is over,Heartspite,” I coldly declared before turning my back to her. I couldn’t look at her, I couldn’t let her look at me.
To avoid changing my mind, I stormed towards the bedroom door, snapping my fingers halfway. The clothes she had arrived in landed in a heap at her feet.
Stopping at the door, I looked over to my right. Somehow, the gilded mirror mocked me with a reflection of my true self, wrapped in tendrils of nether and shifting facades of chaos I had caused over the years.
It drew me closer, wanting to examine the changing reflections of myself. One particularfacade of myself displayed the man who had dragged the goddess of desire into his home for petty revenge.
With a savage roar at what I saw there, my fist crashed into the mirror. The glass shattered alongside every shitty reflection of myself it had shown me.
Without turning back to catch Charlee’s reaction, I left the room, leaving her with nothing but pieces of a broken god.
CHAPTER TWELVE
