“Aengus… Diarmuid…” I whispered.
I had never been so grateful to see anyone in my life.
It didn’t matter that they’d held me captive and made me exercise for over three weeks. The space between my legs demanded filling. “Please help me.”
“We are here,” Aengus said while Diarmuid lifted me up into his arms without another word.
I was a mess, but Diarmuid kissed my sweaty forehead as he ferried me back toward the room I’d run away from. “We will put you on the bed so Fenrir Prime may attend to you.”
I didn’t even need a bed. My body throbbed. I was so far gone, they could have taken me on the floor.
Yet still, I had the presence of mind to make one thing extremely clear.
“Only you two!” I gasped out. “Not him.”
I lifted my head up just long enough to glare at the male still standing by the open door of his Goldilocks bedroom.
The one who’d tried to kill me because his experiment kept failing.
“Not you!” I spat the words out. “Don’t touch me. That’s an order.”
Silence filled up the gallery. And no one moved.
But both Aengus, who’d stopped at the threshold, and Diarmuid, who was cradling me in his arms, turned their glowing green stares to Fenrir Prime.
Funny, how I’d thought they were the same person up until a few hours ago. Now that they were all together, I could see how different they were, even though they looked exactly alike.
Aengus’s gaze held an empathetic softness that the other two just didn’t possess.
While the hard line of Diarmuid’s jaw once again locked, as if that was its default position.
And as for Orpheus, he stood there, his face a mask of stone and completely devoid of expression—save for his eyes, which burned like two green fires inside a bank of snow.
“Dorcas,” Aengus began to say, as if he’d drawn the shortest straw and had been chosen to facilitate this conversation. “We can’t attend to you without our pri?—”
“It is fine.” Orpheus’s ice-cold version of their smoke-and-glass voice cut Aengus off. A great set of green wings suddenly appeared at his back. “You may attend to her. I will be in my lab.”
“You’re being unfair! You have no idea what the Widower’s Madness has wrought within my brain!”
That was what he’d said. He’d insinuated he’d suffered after the other Dories’ deaths.
But in that moment, I knew that he’d lied.
Because without so much as another glance my way, he launched himself into the air, his great wings creating a single powerful downdraft that stirred Aengus’s and Diarmuid’s long white hair as he flapped toward the door in the ceiling.
He was gone. Just like that.
Good.
I refused to think about why a tiny part of me wanted to scream “wait.”
Past-life conditioning was obviously doing my head in, and anyway, my body knew what it wanted.
Making up for a lifetime of feeling absolutely nothing below the waist, I curled a hand around Diarmuid’s neck and picked up where we’d left off that morning.
I kissed him, inviting his forked tongue into my mouth, and it RSVPed, tangling with mine as he carried me through the door. He somehow navigated the room while we kissed.
Aengus was right behind him, and then the huge bed was rising to meet my burning skin like a cool drink of water.
