Dark Destiny: The Fates’ Bargain (The Children Of The Gods #110)

1. Annani

ANNANI

F irst kiss, if done right, left an impression to last a lifetime, or in Annani's case, multiples of them. Five thousand years, give or take a few hundred.

At some point, she had stopped counting.

Age was irrelevant when you were that old. She did not look much different today than she had at seventeen, when she had gotten her first kiss, the one that had changed not only her life but altered the course of history, affecting the destiny of gods, immortals, and humans.

Annani smiled at the memory. She'd had to coax that kiss from Khiann.

"I want you to kiss me," she had told him on that first meeting, when she had snuck out of the palace to talk him into marrying her.

She had been promised to Mortdh, and she would have done anything to get out of that arrangement, but she had pursued Khiann because she had always known he was the one for her.

Her truelove mate.

It had taken some effort to convince him, though, and not because he had not felt the same. It was because he had not wanted to start a war.

Had he been right? Would the chain of events that had followed their marriage have still unfolded if she had not broken her engagement to Mortdh?

There had been a time when Annani had believed that yes, history would have taken a different path if she had not been so selfish, and in those moments she had blamed herself for the demise of her people and all the suffering that had befallen humanity as a result.

Now, she knew better.

"What?" Khiann had spluttered, shocked by her bold proposal.

"I have never been kissed," Annani had admitted, looking at him from under lowered lashes and hoping that he would find her irresistible.

She had been a seventeen-year-old girl who had never tried to seduce anyone, but she had witnessed it done, and it had not looked too difficult.

His eyes had gone to her lips, but he shook his head. "I cannot."

The rejection had been a hard blow, and for a moment she'd allowed herself to feel defeated, but then she had remembered who she was.

She was Annani, daughter of Ahn, the most formidable god among gods, and Nai, the goddess who had seduced him and convinced him to marry her.

Annani was a princess, and she had inherited her indomitable will from both her parents. She never accepted no as an answer.

She had been about to tell him that when Khiann smiled and hooked a finger under her chin, lifting her head back up. "But you can. I cannot refuse the princess."

Had he read her mind?

Whatever had made him change his mind, she hadn't been about to question it.

"You are too tall for me to reach," she had told him. "If I am to kiss you, you need to sit down."

He had dropped to the bench as if it had risen up to meet him.

She had sat on his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck. "I think this will work." Pulling his head down, she'd pressed her lips to his, and the universe had tilted on its axis because history's trajectory had just been irrevocably altered.

"Mother?" Kian's voice reached her as if traveling through a tunnel, and in a way it had, a tunnel built of five thousand lonely years.

"I am sorry. What did you say?"

"I said that you are falling asleep in your chair. You should go home and get into bed. The mission is almost complete, and the chests are on board the submarine. There is no reason for you to torment yourself any longer."

Everyone in the war room, including Annani herself, had been up for nearly forty-eight hours, but she refused to abandon her vigil so close to the end.

"I have been here this long. I will stay until everyone is safely onboard the other vessel. It should not be long now."

Kian nodded. "No, it shouldn't. But if anyone had encountered any difficulty, we would have been notified, so we can assume that everyone is doing well."

She smiled. "As you like to say, assumption is the mother of all mess-ups."

"That's not how the saying goes, but I'll let your version stand."

She arched a brow at him. "I would advise you to adopt proper language instead of using profanities. They add nothing to the essence of what this saying conveys."

He snorted. "I beg to differ. A well-placed f-word carries a lot of oomph."

"Then we will have to keep disagreeing." She leaned back in her chair and offered her cup to Ogidu for a refill.

The banter helped ease some of her tension, but most of it was still very much in effect.

Kian might think the mission was complete, but it wasn't.

They had the chests containing Khiann and his four companions, but until all five chests reached the village clinic and Bridget approved their opening, Annani would not know whether the bodies were truly inside those sealed containers, nor whether one of them was Khiann, nor whether he still lived.

The doctor was right to exercise caution and not allow the chests to be opened without medical personnel and proper equipment at the ready, but that did not make the waiting and the not knowing any easier.

Thankfully, Annani had the best minds available to keep the vigil with her, and if anything happened, they would know what to do.

She was so grateful to Kian, Onegus, Turner, and Lokan, and also to Amanda and Alena, whom she had sent home hours ago. They had not wanted to leave her side, but Annani had insisted. Both her daughters had little ones at home who needed their mommies more than she needed their emotional support.

Ogidu was also a blessing, ensuring that everyone was properly caffeinated and making rounds to deliver sandwiches and pastries to keep them fed. He might not be the best equipped to provide the kind of emotional support that her daughters had, but his familiar presence was still soothing.

For thousands of years, he and his brothers had been the only ones Annani could lean on, and they had become family despite being machines, not people. The biomechanical constructs had been created to serve the gods, but somewhere along the way they had become so much more.

"The women are being pulled onto the boat," Yamanu announced on the comms. "They all made it here in one piece, including the eight soldiers."

Annani released a relieved breath. The chests were already secured in the submarine, and the chemists and their lab assistant had been taken there instead of the fishing boat because of Doctor Petrov's injury.

Their equipment, however, would be hauled aboard the boat because there was not enough space for it in the sub.

She was still waiting for confirmation that everyone was accounted for, and then she might take Kian's advice and catch a few hours of sleep. The submarine and the boat would take many hours to reach Safe Harbor, and there was no sense in her staying awake for that.

It took another half an hour or so before Yamanu's voice came across the comms again. "It's done. Everyone is safely on board. We are heading to Safe Harbor."

"Thank the merciful Fates." Kian rose from his chair, crossed to the side console, and lifted the untouched bottle of whiskey that had been waiting just for this moment.

He had said that he would not open it and toast a victory until everyone was safe.

Now he broke the seal, and the sound it made carried across the silent room like the promise of a new beginning.

He poured and passed the glasses around the table. The first one he put in front of her, despite knowing that she was not a great fan of whiskey.

Annani looked at the amber liquid, and then at her son's triumphant face, and lifted her glass even though she was not ready to celebrate yet.

Not with the chests still sealed and the question of whether Khiann was alive inside one of them still unanswered.

But her son and his crew deserved to celebrate their victory, no matter the end result.

They had achieved the unachievable for her.

Kian lifted his glass. "To pulling off an impossible mission once again.

" He clinked it with Turner's. "To finally bringing down the Doomers' island, even if temporarily.

" He clinked it with Onegus's and Lokan's.

Then he turned to her. "And most of all, to finally bringing Khiann home. " He clinked his glass with hers.

Annani drank, feeling the whiskey burn down her throat, and did not let her face betray that the warmth of it could not melt the knot of anxiety that refused to go away until she saw Khiann's eyes open.

She set the glass down half-finished, watched the tired smiles break across faces that had not dared to smile until now, and she was glad that at least this part of the mission was over and everyone was coming home despite all the setbacks they had encountered.

Operationally, the next part would be the easiest, but emotionally it would be the most nerve-wracking.

She would have to wait while the chests made their way home, and then weeks more while the bodies slowly regenerated, the emaciated forms filling out and the features slowly emerging, until at last she could know which one was her lost love.

Annani was strong.

She had survived, fought, and singlehandedly kept the gods' vision alive, bringing light into the world when darkness did everything it could to extinguish it.

But there was a limit to her strength, and she was exhausted, not from the vigil, but from five thousand years of fighting and grieving and hoping, despite it all.

Dear merciful Fates. I thank you for what you have done, for all the impossible threads you have woven to bring me to this day. I implore you to fulfill your promise and bring Khiann back to me .

She traced the events in her mind, the improbable chain, marveling at how impossibly it had been wrought.

None of this would have come to pass had Tula not conceived a child and refused to surrender that child to Navuh.

From that refusal had come the rescue of the harem, and from that rescue had come the moment on the cliff when Tula had slipped and screamed despite the harness holding her.

Areana, reacting instinctively, had reached over the edge to catch her best friend, who was in fact not falling, and had slipped over herself.

She had been miraculously caught by Yamanu, who had held on to both women.

Navuh, seeing his truelove mate go over the edge and believing her lost, killed on the jagged rocks at the bottom of the cliff, had thrown himself after her.

And so, the head of the Brotherhood, her archenemy, had fallen onto the rocks and into the hands of the clan.

Captured, he had revealed that he had Khiann, that he had kept his body in stasis for thousands of years, and he had offered the one thing he believed would get him free. He would trade Khiann for his release.

Annani had been tempted because nothing was more important to her than getting her truelove mate back, but in the end, she had not needed Navuh to find where he had hidden Khiann.

They had found the answer without him, piecing it together from what the rescued ladies remembered and what Elias and Tony had told them.

In the end, Navuh's one card, the bargaining chip he had kept against exactly such a reckoning, had bought him nothing.