head back, staring at the ceiling of the cavern. “I cannot remember what stars look like… I only remember I found them beautiful, but melancholy.”
He frowned and leaned forwards, resting his forearms on his bent knees. “Why melancholy?”
She sighed, her chest expanding with it, attempting to lure his gaze downwards. “Such slender light… travelled from so far across the universe… alone… constantly striving to make contact with another.”
When she put it like that, it did sound melancholy. He wasn’t sure he had ever taken the time to look at the stars. If he had, he was sure he wouldn’t have seen them in the same light as she did. Her view of the stars seemed to reflect something he was coming to feel about her.
She was lonely.
“Did you ever look at the stars with Calistos? I do not think I ever took the time to look at them, not even with Hypnos.” He moved the stick in his right hand, toyed with the other end of it with his left as he thought about his brother.
Calindria sat up. “Hypnos?”
“My twin. Like your twin, he is alive… but I have not seen him in some time.”
She frowned now. “Alive. I saw him die. How am I to know what is real and what is the lie?”
He had the feeling that she already knew which was which, and that was why she had stopped trying to make him leave her alone and had accepted his company. Either that, or she was still trying to manipulate him into carrying out her vengeance.
He realised he would if she asked it of him, only he wouldn’t kill the ones who had apparently killed her brother. He would slay the ones who had killed her. Every single one of them, no matter how small a part they’d had to play in her death.
All of them would die.
And in the veil, he would make sure they suffered unimaginable torment, were held there for centuries before he allowed their soul to pass on.
His expression must have darkened with his thoughts, because Calindria pulled her legs up to her chest again and drew patterns in the dirt with her right hand. Not patterns, he realised. Words.
“You draw your brother’s favour mark upon the ground. Why?”
Her head jerked up, her gaze colliding hard with his before it fell to her hand and her eyebrows rose high on her forehead. “I had not realised.”
“It does not contain the power without the favour behind it, if you were thinking of escaping me by casting a portal.” Thanatos smiled tightly when she frowned at him. He had meant his words to be teasing but could see she had taken them the wrong way. His smile faded. “A poor joke. I am out of practice.”
He was sure he had never been in practice when it came to making jokes. He teased others, ruthlessly at times, but always to deflect attention away from him, and always when he was uncomfortable about something. It didn’t take a genius to see what he was uncomfortable about at that moment.
Being near her.
Alone with her.
“I heard you have a favour mark too.” He meant it as a gentle conversation starter, an innocent way of learning more about her.
She shot to her feet and twisted her hands in front of her hips. “It is none of your business.”
He arched an eyebrow at her reaction, at the heat that bloomed on her cheeks, turning her as red as the fire that shone in her eyes. He cringed as he made sense of it. If he had known her favour mark was somewhere intimate, he never would have asked about it. He was trying to direct the course of his thoughts away from her too-alluring body, and all he had done was make it even harder to stop thinking about her. Where was her favour mark that she blushed so deeply when asked about it?
Would she have blushed in such a way with another male?
Darkness seethed inside him at the thought of her with another and he clenched his fists so hard he snapped the twig he held. She tensed, didn’t relax even when he tossed the two halves of the twig in the fire, acting as if he had meant only to add fuel to it and hadn’t snapped it out of anger.
“I never knew favour was bestowed upon you by the Moirai until the day your family found you.” Thanatos barely stopped himself from saying ‘your body’, instead choosing a