then, he’d been a kid. Innocent. Naïve. Blameless in the grand scheme. Now, he wasn’t. Now, his choices—his mistakes—were his own. And, skata, there had been so many fuckups over the years since he’d found his family and gone to live with them in Argolea.
Pain lanced his chest. Mixed with the agony and guilt already swamping him. Every mistake, every epic failure stemmed from one thing: his asinine belief that he was special. That he was a hero like his father and the other Argonauts. When the reality was... He was just one major disappointment.
Spineless...
Atalanta had said that to him. Too many times to count when he’d been young. And she’d been right.
He hadn’t been able to stand up to the evil goddess, to stop her from murdering innocents. He’d failed to rescue Elysia when she’d been abducted by the Sirens. And this time...
This time he’d done nothing when the Prince of Darkness had taken Talisa right in front of him.
He deserved to be in this cell. Deserved to rot here in the dark. Part of him... Part of him hoped no one ever tried to find him and that the Argonauts focused their energies on rescuing Talisa instead.
Talisa...
She was his cousin, his closest friend, the only person who truly understood him. And because of him, she could be suffering indescribable torture right this very moment. Or she could already be dead.
Dead...
A searing pain lit off deep in his chest. He gasped, opened his eyes, and stared into the darkness. Only to realize...
It wasn’t her death he felt.
It was his own.
Talisa’s eyes widened as Zagreus pushed her up several rock steps edged with moss toward the stone archway.
It was a portal of some kind. She felt the energy radiating from the stones as strongly as she felt Zagreus’s wicked heat seeping into her spine.
He could take her anywhere through a portal—anywhere in the human realm, the cosmos, Olympus, even the Underworld. And several of those were places the Argonauts would never be able to follow.
At her back, he muttered ancient words she didn’t understand. The portal’s energy snapped and grew stronger.
“Wait.” She dug her heels into the stones beneath her feet and tried to push back, but with her gifts bound, it did nothing to slow him down.
He pushed her right up to the edge of the portal. She gasped in a breath...
Only to let it out when he forced her under the archway and no energy rushed through her body, indicating they hadn’t used any kind of portal at all.
Her eyes widened as she took in her surroundings. The dark forest she’d seen through the stone archway was gone. Instead, the trees opened to a giant pool of crystal blue water fed by an enormous waterfall, which roared over a rocky cliff at least a hundred stories high.
At the top, set back from the edge of the falls, a white castle with spires that reached toward the sky gleamed bright in the moonlight. She looked back down, realizing the pool narrowed to her left, transitioning to a fast-moving river where water swirled and gurgled and disappeared into the forest.
Shocked, she turned to look behind her. The archway was still there. Through it she could see the steps and dark forest they’d come through. But this...
Wide-eyed, she looked back at the waterfall and castle high above. This had been camouflaged. By magick, she realized. Zagreus’s magick.
Without a word, he stepped around her, grasped her bound hands, and pulled her with him down a slight hillside. Skirting the pool, he drew her toward a sheer rock wall. Mist from the waterfall sprayed over both of them. He brushed vines and tree limbs aside, moving toward the cliff. When they were five feet from the rocks, he tugged her to a stop and turned to face her.
She eased back, unsure what he had planned. But she didn’t make it far because the second his dark eyes locked on hers, she felt a tug toward him, right in the center of her chest.
The same tug she’d felt in that club when he’d looked at her, and she’d climbed off her barstool then crossed the dance floor.
His scent surrounded her—spice and citrus and rum—and her head grew light, her limbs heavy. The blood pounded in her veins and warmed in a way she both craved and didn’t understand. And before she realized what he was doing, the long line of his body brushed hers, and his arms closed tight around her back.
“Stay still, princess.