She’d asked if he planned to kill her. Never. But that didn’t mean he should honor her by making her his wife and princess.
Maybe if he could eventually teach her right from wrong, he would use her—his mate and therefore his sole option—to continue his line. He felt a duty to reproduce since his family had been winnowed down. Even now, he was his brother King Aristo’s heir.
But that would mean Thronos would have to marry Melanthe first. He couldn’t even explore her body until then. The mere kiss he’d taken from her was an offendment.
He peered down at her in his arms. How could he wed her after everything he’d heard about her? When he didn’t know the extent of her involvement in the atrocities under Omort’s reign?
He remembered Aristo telling him centuries ago, “Your mate and her sister have allied with their brother Omort the Deathless, leader of the Pravus. Reports filter out from their hold. Thronos, what their family is doing . . . it’s beyond appalling.”
Incest, blood orgies, child sacrifices.
Melanthe—the sister of Omort and possibly his concubine—mother to my offspring?
WRATH. He felt like he was drowning in it. Engulfed in it.
“You’re hurting me!”
He found his claws digging into her. He didn’t loosen his grip.
“What are you thinking of to make you so enraged?”
He clenched his jaw, unable even to speak. He listened to her heartbeat, focusing on it. Get control, Talos. Early in his life he’d seen the tragedies even a brief loss of control could wreak.
Glass shards like fangs flaying my skin. He gave his head a hard shake, increasing his speed.
In a softer voice, Melanthe said, “Nïx wouldn’t have sold me out if she’d known you were going to hurt me.”
Debatable. He’d met the Valkyrie a year ago in the mortal city of New Orleans, when he was still regenerating the foot he’d lost because of Melanthe. Nïx hadn’t seemed to be tracking reality when she’d told Thronos where to be to get captured—and when to be there, just a week ago. All those months spent waiting since then had been punishing.
“What did that Valkyrie tell you about me?” Melanthe asked. “What was her advice?”
It’d been one cryptic sentence: Before Melanthe became this, she was that. . . .
The female would say nothing more, no matter how much he’d pressed. “She mentioned nothing about my treatment of you,” he grated as the pain in his wings intensified steadily.
With the pain came equal parts wrath.
Because of the creature in his arms, he’d had lifetimes of both.
FIVE
Numbed to the drizzle and cold, Lanthe was lulled into a kind of exhausted stupor as the flight went on and on and on. When they’d crossed over an expansive forest, the noises of the battles grew dimmer.
She dared a glance back, could still see bursts of spectral light. Soon that melee would spread outward all over the entire island. Thronos had to know that.
His face was tensely set—as if he were concentrating on blocking out his pain. There’d be no talking. Think about something else, Lanthe. Anything else.
Yet now that she was his captive (temporarily), she found her mind mired in thoughts of him. A memory arose of their first day together, when he’d tried to feed her—his idea of courting.
Unfortunately, he hadn’t known she was a vegetarian.
“For you.” Thronos proudly dropped a carcass of bloody meat at her feet.
She burst into tears.
“Why do you cry?” Despite all his confidence, he looked confounded—and pained, as if her tears tormented him. “You don’t like my gift?”
“Th-that was my bunny!” One of the woodland creatures that she called friend.