Scarred By Lightning (Olympian Alphas #2)

Prologue

Odysseus & Penelope

In the age when gods still walked among mortals, a man named Odysseus sailed home from war.

He had been gone for twenty years. Ten spent fighting at Troy, and ten more lost to the wrath of Poseidon, the god he had angered by blinding his son.

When the sea finally swallowed him whole, Poseidon offered no mercy.

Only transformation. He poured the essence of the abyss into the drowning man’s lungs and remade him into an Alpha of the deep.

Odysseus clawed his way to the surface. He sailed home on stolen timber and walked into his own palace. He slaughtered the hundred men who had spent years courting his wife and threatening his son. The water in the walls obeyed him. The wine in their cups became a weapon.

When the last man stopped screaming, Odysseus climbed the stairs and found Penelope watching from the gallery. She did not run. She let him claim her above the dead, and the bond snapped into place.

The cost was everything. The sea screamed in his bones every waking hour. His instincts turned the people he loved into territory to be defended. When he nearly broke their son’s arm for the crime of embracing his mother, Penelope made her choice.

She went to Hera’s altar and begged the goddess for a way to save her family. Hera taught her a power no Omega had ever wielded — the ability to sever a mating bond. That night, Penelope held the man she had waited twenty years to touch, and she cut the thread that tied his heart to hers.

Odysseus walked into the sea. Penelope sat on his empty throne and ruled alone.

Her power passed to her daughters. They became House Hera. His descendants became House Poseidon — Alphas who lived on the water because the land could no longer hold them. Both lines carried the memory of what had been lost, and the wound between them never fully closed.

This is not their story. But their story is the reason this one exists.