did, but I wasn’t asking you, I was asking Nikki.” He turned an unusually grave look toward me. “I’d like to hear it in your own words.”
Anderson raised no objection. I didn’t particularly want to talk about my abduction to anyone, much less Cyrus and his pet. I didn’t want to relive the memory, and I was also afraid I’d let too much emotion show. Showing Olympians signs of weakness was a recipe for disaster. Not to mention that I didn’t like the feeling that I was tattling, and that I was afraid the consequences would be dire. However, it wasn’t like I had a whole lot of choice.
I tried to remain as impassive as possible as I recounted the events of the day before. It’s hard to keep the emotion out of your voice when you’re talking about your own death, and especially about a deranged woman’s plan to bury you alive and leave you to suffer eternal torment. I could hear the occasional quaver in my voice, and there was nothing I could do to control it.
Cyrus made sympathetic faces while I spoke, but I couldn’t help noticing that Mark seemed to be enjoying the story. There was an eager glint in his eye, and he even licked his lips like a dog looking forward to its meal. I decided Cyrus had creepy taste in men.
There was a long silence after I finished my story. I took a moment to glare at Mark while Cyrus frowned thoughtfully.
“I knew she was unstable when I invited her to join us,” Cyrus finally said. “I could hardly blame her after what my father did to her. I thought that perhaps her moods would even out over time.”
“That’s what I thought, too,” Anderson agreed grimly. “But her actions yesterday tell me she has been irrevocably altered. The Emma I knew died years ago when your father raped her and drowned her in that pond.”
Anderson was keeping control of himself, but there was no missing the fury behind his words, and something about the look in his eyes raised the hairs on the back of my neck. Whatever it was, Cyrus saw it, too, and his face lost just a little of its color. If he knew what Anderson really was, he’d be curled up in the fetal position.
“I am not my father,” Cyrus reminded Anderson. “And you won’t have to go medieval on my ass to get me to honor the treaty, if that’s what you’re thinking.” He looked over his shoulder at Mark. “Go fetch our other guest, will you?”
There was a visible flare of excitement in Mark’s eyes as he nodded and then hurried from the room. It occurred to me that he might have been present for reasons other than to try to make Blake jealous. Like maybe Cyrus planned to give him Emma’s immortality. The fact that Emma was already a “guest” in Cyrus’s house did not bode well for her.
Anderson and Cyrus stared at each other, and the tension in the room was so thick it was hard to breathe. I wanted to say something in protest of what I feared would happen, but the atmosphere was so oppressive I couldn’t find the courage to speak.
Moments later, we all heard Emma’s voice raised in annoyance. “I’m getting really tired of being jerked around!” she complained, presumably at Mark. “I could have—”
Both her voice and her footsteps faltered when she stepped through the library door and saw our little gathering. Her eyes darted from me, to Anderson, to Cyrus, and she seemed to shrink in on herself. There was something naturally fragile looking about her, though perhaps that was just because I knew how badly she had suffered when she’d been Konstantin’s prisoner. No matter what she’d done—or tried to do—it was hard for me to forget that she’d been a victim.
And maybe, in a way, she still was. I didn’t like it when Anderson made excuses for her, and I didn’t think she’d ever been a truly nice person. But today, when she hadn’t been expecting to see Anderson and me and therefore had obviously not bothered to dress to impress, or even put on makeup, I could see more plainly than ever that she was still suffering. Even if she brought some of that suffering on herself. Her face was gaunt, and her clothes hung loosely on her thin frame. Her eyes were red around the edges, as if she’d been crying when Mark had come