Page 119 of The Gods Forbid

I smiled despite my nerves. “Point proven, then.”

Sebastian leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table. “I know who I’m choosing. Are you asking when I’ll do it?”

I nodded. From what my brother told me, the gods had the power to choose and rearrange heirs at their will. All Sebastian would have to do is decide who he wanted to take over, and it would be done.

Sebastian looked at me so intensely, I needed to turn around. I used the excuse of hunting for tea, opening a cabinet. “It’ll be done by the end of the month,” he said, his voice skating over my shoulders and burrowing deep. Okay, so he did know that this was part of what I’d been tasked with.

“Thank you,” I said, though the sound was somewhat lost as I opened up another cabinet and found my tea on the very top shelf. This is what happened when Sebastian wrestled the tea out of my hands when I tried to make it myself. He put it on shelves that even I couldn’t reach.

You know what, he could help if he was going to make this difficult for me.

“Love, can you grab a pot for me?” My voice was strained as I lifted up on my toes, reaching for a new container of tea. By the time I’d wrapped my hand around it and lowered my heels, I realized he hadn’t answered me.

He didn’t sometimes, just silently did whatever I asked, but there wasn’t a pot on the stove. I looked over my shoulder to find Sebastian looking at me with a slack jaw.

I immediately straightened. “What?”

“You called me love.”

I blinked, trying to recall my words. “I did?”

Sebastian nodded slowly, prowling towards me like a lion. I had the sudden instinct to run away from him, but masked it by lifting myself onto the counter top next to the stove.

He stepped between my legs, almost on instinct, and pressed close. “Are you going to start calling me that now?”

“Depends. Do you like it?” This was another thing that needed to stop, the easy banter between us. But if this was all I could take from him, I was doing it.

Sebastian’s smile turned evil. “I’ve called you love since the beginning. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t have used it.”

“Are you sure about that?” I said back. “I’m not sure you liked me at the beginning. You made that quite clear.”

“A mistake I’ve surely remedied,” Sebastian said, placing more weight into his hands, still pressed on either side of my legs and leaning closer.

“You can remedy it further by instating heirs,” I said, then wanted to promptly slap my hand over my mouth. I really didn’t like to bring it up, and for entirely selfish reasons. The more I pretended like he didn’t have to be here, the more I could pretend that he was living here by choice. That the comfortable dynamic we’d built wasn’t an attempt to salvage an otherwise impossibly awkward situation.

Luckily, Sebastian’s grin simply widened. “What will you give me if I do?”

“I’ll let you teach me how to cook.” He’d tried, but I’d never really had the desire to learn before. A large part of that happened to be because I enjoyed staring at his back while he worked at the stove, shifting my eyes in between the way his shirt pulled over his muscles and the book I was reading to him that night, but he didn’t need to know that.

“That sounds like you’re trying to get rid of me,” Sebastian said, and I could have sworn I heard something deeper in his tone.

See, this was the problem. All I wanted was for him to stay, and I was looking for any reason to believe that he felt the same.

That thought haunted me for the rest of the night, drawing out my exhaustion until I damn near collapsed in bed.

This has spiraled far, far out of my control. I’d shown him things I kept firmly to myself, and now I didn’t know how I was going to deal with him being gone.

Chapter 26

Sebastian

There was an odd muffle outside the house, like someone was slapping a tree while groaning that it was hurting their hand. It was concerning enough that I peeled my thoughts away from Persy—nothing particular, just a passing thought about the sundress she’d left the house in—and went to go check it out.

I wish I hadn’t. I really wished I hadn’t, because I found three grown men, gods to be specific, wrestling each other, while a fourth grown-ass man stood by and watched.

“Hey, what the fuck?” I said, arms crossed over my chest. They hadn’t even heard me open the door.

Caught like school children, Dominic, Lukas, and Adrian, snapped up from their wrestling match—and yes, Adrian was doing it in a suit—and looked at Nikolas, like he had anything to say about why they were here.