hated because it made her feel weak.
He thought she feared him touching her because she had been abused.
She didn’t correct him when he backed off, when he lowered his wings and furled them against his bare back, and dipped his head.
“Very well, I will not touch you.” He twisted at the waist to look at the narrow tunnel and then around the cavern, his gaze seeking something. “But let me escort you away from this place.”
She weighed up the pros and cons of accepting his presence.
If he was lying, he could be leading her to another cage, as males had before him. If he wasn’t lying, and was here to help her, and guards came after her, then he could prove invaluable in a fight. Pleasing her father seemed important to him. Important enough that he would do whatever it took to protect her?
She eyed the sword sheathed at his hip and then him. He was a warrior. The god of death. The thought of killing turned her stomach, but he had been born for it.
She drew down a breath and sighed it out, resolve flowing through her as she met his gaze.
“You may escort me.” She pivoted on her heel, seeking a tunnel that would be big enough to accommodate him as she made a few changes to her plan.
Find the one who had killed her brother.
Have Thanatos kill him.
And then convince the god of death to turn against his king.
Chapter 4
Thanatos wasn’t sure he was making progress with Calindria. He had tried to walk beside her in the tunnel and she had turned on him, had forced him to walk behind her instead.
Thirty feet behind her.
She turned skittish and jumpy whenever he moved any closer to her than that, cast fearful looks at him that wrenched at his insides, stirring the guilt he couldn’t shake. According to what her brothers had learned, she had been captured and killed by a necromancer.
That foul breed had come from his loins, although he’d had no choice in the matter. A demigoddess had defeated him in battle many centuries ago and had held him captive. She had attempted to seduce him many times over the course of his captivity, had resorted to drugging him when he had resisted her, and in the end, it had worked. She had stolen his seed and used it to form a new breed within her wretched womb.
Necromancers.
If he had been stronger, perhaps Calindria would never have been captured, would never have been killed.
Perhaps she would have never been similarly abused.
He cast his gaze down at his boots, unable to bring himself to look at her as his dark thoughts and his memories weighed him down, attempting to break his spirit. He mustered his strength and shored up his walls, purged the heaviness that infested him and focused back on his task.
Getting Calindria out of this realm.
It was going to be harder than he had anticipated. He couldn’t teleport with her and he couldn’t fly with her, not without touching her.
He lifted his gaze and looked at her again, studying her as she sipped her water and led the way. She had courage, but then that was something she had never lacked. None of Hades’s children were weak, fearful fools.
But none of them were as dark as the female marching ahead of him either.
She exuded darkness as if she had been moulded from the same clay as her father, had not even a trace of her mother in her.
When he had known her as a child, she had been like her mother. Sweet. Bright. Dazzling almost. Now, she was the opposite of the girl he had known. She was darkness, calculating and distant, her heart closed off to everyone.
He could understand why.
He had emerged from his own captivity a different male.
Untrusting. Cruel. A hardened warrior who had shunned everyone, preferring to be alone.
She huffed and stopped, and so he stopped too, keeping the distance between them steady. When she lifted her right foot and brushed stones from the sole of it, guilt churned his stomach again and he despised the feeling and how often it bothered him when he was around her.
But couldn’t shake it.
Whenever he looked at her, at the small crudely made sky-blue bandeau that barely covered her breasts and the matching tiny shorts, and her bare feet, that guilt returned. He hadn’t thought to bring clothes or supplies on his mission, hadn’t considered she would be in need of anything despite the fact she