Eternal Rider - Larissa Ione [146]
God, she was gorgeous. And that mouth… made to make a man beg for mercy. So he kissed her. Didn’t even realize he’d done it until his lips were on hers. He hadn’t thought she could be any more shocked, but her eyebrows shot up so far it would have been comical if he hadn’t been rocking his head up to put them into a more serious kiss. That was the thing about him—no half-measures. He might not have realized he was kissing her, but once he did? He was taking it as far as she’d let him go.
Command and conquer.
For a brief, sweet moment, she kissed him back. Her lips softened and her tongue met his, hesitantly, as though she wasn’t sure what she was doing but wanted to take what she could as fast as she could. And then, his world turned upside down.
Limos reared back, and with what he was pretty sure was all her strength, she slammed her fist into his cheek. Pain spiderwebbed across his face, along every bone, through every tooth. He’d been tasting her, and now he was tasting his own blood.
“What the hell?” he shouted… or at least, he tried to shout. His words were mushy, thanks to his mashed lips, cut tongue, and, likely, badly fractured jaw and cheekbones. He heard something more like, “Nut da bell.”
“You kissed me.” She backed away so fast she lost her flip-flops. “You fucking bastard, you kissed me!”
Son-of-a—
All around him, the ground began to rumble, and then there were giant, spiny arms punching up out of the dirt. Hands seized him, a dozen maybe. Agony wrenched through him as his limbs were twisted and pulled, and his skin was shredded.
Consciousness became a fluid thing, something he couldn’t quite reach. His vision went dark, but his ears still worked, and before they shut down, he heard Limos’s panicked voice, but what she said made no sense.
“Don’t say my name, Arik. No matter what they do to you, don’t speak my name!”
Limos was utterly frozen, terrified in a way she had never, ever been. And given that she was five thousand years old, that was saying something.
Her brothers and Kynan charged out of the house, weapons drawn, and then they skidded to a halt.
“Jesus Christ,” Kynan shouted. “What the fuck? Arik!”
“Limos!” Thanatos tugged her against him, and she realized she’d been moving toward the behemoths that had grabbed Arik and were dragging him down into the earth.
“He kissed me.” She said the same thing over and over, her voice a high-pitched, terrified wail.
Wordlessly, Ares produced a blade, and in one smooth motion, launched it at Arik. Limos’s first instinct was to stop him, but the blade was already in the air, on a course for Arik’s heart.
The whistle of an arrow cut the night, and Ares’s dagger shattered. Pestilence, his ice-blue eyes glowing in the light of the moon, stood near the cliff, his bow in hand, a satisfied smile on his face. “You’ll thank me later, sis.”
Thanatos roared in fury, and a black, furry blur streaked past them both. Before Hal, Cara’s hellhound protector, reached Pestilence, he opened a portable Harrowgate and stepped through it.
He was gone, and when Limos turned back to Arik, he was gone, too. The only sign that he’d been there was blood in the sand.
“What the fuck just happened?” Kynan rounded on Ares. “Why did you try to kill him, you cocksucker?”
Limos couldn’t speak. Funny how she’d been screaming incoherently, but now she couldn’t dredge up a single word. Ares, for his part, stayed calm despite the fact that Kynan had called him a cocksucker and was now fisting his shirt and snarling in his face.
“He kissed Limos,” Ares said, his voice rough as sandpaper. Maybe he wasn’t as calm as she thought. “She wasn’t allowed to give her affections to a male in any way.”
Kynan released Ares to turn his murderous glare on Limos. “Explain.”
There were still no words. None. The night, which she’d always hated because it reminded her so much of Sheoul, closed in on her. How could Arik have done that? How dare he think it was okay to kiss her, one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse? And how long could she go on blaming him, when she had wanted it just as