Chapter 11
ELEVEN
ROMULUS
Twisting back into consciousness is always disconcerting, but this transition slams into me with the force of a siege engine.
I’m buried inside a woman. Deep. Still pulsing with the aftermath of release that isn’t mine.
What the actual fuck has my brother done this time?
I wrench myself free, my body shuddering with aftershocks I have no right to feel, and the woman beneath me scrambles backward like I’ve burned her. She yanks the bedding up to her chin.
“Who are you?” Her voice cracks on the question.
I’m already off the bed, snatching my trousers from the floor. “I could ask you the same thing.” The words come out colder than I intend, but I’m too busy trying to access our shared memory to soften them.
Nothing. There’s... nothing there.
That’s not possible.
“Bring him back!” She’s not asking. She’s demanding, and the sheer audacity of it makes me pause as I yank on my small clothes.
“It doesn’t work like that.” I force myself to meet her eyes. Beautiful eyes, I notice, despite everything.
“I’m Romulus. Did he tell you about me?” Of course he didn’t. “Who are you? How did you even get here?”
She’s breathing hard, tucking a sheet beneath her arms like armor. Dark chestnut hair falls across flushed cheeks as she scrambles up against the headboard, adjusting a pillow with shaking hands.
“How could he just—” Her voice breaks. “How could he just leave like that? When we were in the middle of—”
She clutches the sheet tighter.
I drag a hand down my face and immediately regret it, because I can still feel everything. The slickness of her. The heat. The way she’d been clenching around—
No. Absolutely not.
This is a line we’ve never crossed. Not in thousands of years. We had an unspoken agreement, my brother and I, because obviously swapping bodies mid-coitus would be traumatic for everyone involved. But apparently two centuries of imprisonment makes a god forget even basic fucking courtesy.
“Where did he even find you?” I glance around the room, cataloging the damage.
Clothes scattered. Furniture askew. The scent of sex thick in the air.
“ I apologize if he didn’t fully explain our.
.. situation.” I gesture to the dual faces on our shared head.
“Just tell me how much he owes you, and I’ll return you to wherever you came from—”
Her mouth falls open. Then snaps shut. Then opens again.
“How much he owes me?” Each word is a dagger. “You think I’m a—”
She makes a sound that’s half-hiss, half-growl, and if she could breathe actual fire right now, I’d be ash.
I hold up a hand. “Wait. Just... wait a moment.”
I close my eyes and push harder into our shared consciousness, searching for any scrap of memory that might explain this disaster. There has to be something. Some fragment of the last three days that—
Nothing. Still nothing.
My eyes snap open to find her yanking a nightgown over her head with furious, jerky movements.
“Maybe he wouldn’t talk about you because you’re such an asshole,” she mutters.
My mouth actually drops open. “What lies has he told you?”
She whirls on me. “Remus never lied to me. Not once.”
“He obviously didn’t tell you about me.”
“I knew you were there. Sleeping.”
I scoff. “I never sleep for long. We swap constantly—every few hours at most. You couldn’t have spent more than a handful of hours with my brother.” I glance meaningfully at the wrecked bed. “So you’ll forgive my assumptions about the nature of your... arrangement.”
Her cheeks flush scarlet, but her eyes are pure fury. “I’ve known him for three days. Three incredibly long, intimate, intense days.”
“Three days.” I shake my head slowly. “That’s not possible.”
The longest Remus ever held me back was during the Battle of Thebes—forty-eight hours of blood-soaked chaos with Alexander the Great. But seventy-two hours? That’s beyond our capabilities. It shouldn’t be possible.
She plants her hands on her hips. “So now you’re calling me a liar and a whore?”
“I don’t—” I drag both hands through my hair this time. “No. I’m saying I don’t understand what’s happening here. If you’re not a prostitute, where exactly did my brother find you?”
She throws her hands up. “He flew down to a fountain in the center of my city and asked if anyone wanted to volunteer to be his consort.”
The world tilts slightly.
“He did what? Flew down? In front of humans? In broad daylight?”
“Yep. Really freaked people out. Most of them ran away screaming. Well, a lot pulled out their phones first—” she waves a hand vaguely, “—but yeah, mostly screaming and running.”
“Including you?”
“Oh.” Her cheeks turn pink again. “No. I didn’t run.”
I notice, for the second time, how extraordinarily attractive she is. My body—our body—is still responding to her in ways I’ve never experienced. My trousers are uncomfortably tight, and I force myself to focus on her words instead of her curves beneath that thin nightgown.
“Wait.” I blink. “You didn’t run. You...” The realization hits me like a battering ram. “Are you telling me you volunteered for my brother’s madness?”
She’ll laugh now. She’ll tell me he chased her down and kidnapped her. That’s the only explanation that makes sense.
Instead, she nods. “Exactly. I volunteered. I’m Lauren, by the way.”
She extends her hand like we’re at a gods-damned garden party.
“Why would you volunteer?” My voice sounds strangled even to my own ears. “Couldn’t you see what he was?”
“Well, I couldn’t see you on the back of his head at first—he was wearing a hood. But yeah, I saw the wings and tail.” She shrugs. “I was intrigued.”
“Intrigued?” My voice cracks upward. “A terrifying, half-mad creature drops from the sky—”
“He said he was a god,” she interjects cheerfully.
“Even worse! And you volunteered to be his consort?” I’m pacing now, unable to contain the rising panic. “Did he even wait to get you back to the castle before ripping your clothes off?”
I gesture at the carnage of rumpled sheets and her thoroughly disheveled appearance. Have they been in this bed for three solid days? Is that what kept me unconscious?
Her hands return to her hips, and she straightens to her full height. “You make a lot of assumptions. And you know what they say about people who assume.”
I stare at her. “No. What?”
She narrows her eyes. “You make an ass out of u—” she jabs a finger at me, “—and me.”
Despite everything, my lips twitch. Clever. She’s clever, or thinks she is. She has no idea what she’s volunteered herself into the middle of.
“My brother broke approximately one hundred rules. We don’t reveal ourselves to mortals. Ever.”
“Why not? If you’re actually gods?”
“We value our peace. We’re retired.”
“Why?”
“Because this isn’t our world. It never was. We have no business affecting mortals or interfering in their affairs.”
She huffs. “Wow. How noble. Because the way Remus tells it, you used to be all up in human affairs. Running wars and secretly guiding empires for thousands of years.”
Reckless. He’s been completely reckless, sharing our history with a human.
If there were a way to carve his face off the back of my head without killing myself in the process, I would have done it millennia ago.
He actually thinks he can just steal himself a consort. Even if she volunteered—and I still can’t fathom why—I share half this body. A consort is an absolute impossibility for a creature like us. Something my brother knows perfectly well.
“What else happened at this fountain?” I need to understand the full scope of the disaster. “You volunteered, and then he brought you here?”
“It was amazing.” Her face transforms with a smile that hits me somewhere in my chest. “I’m actually surprised I was the only volunteer.
Especially after he said the part about being a god.
I don’t think people took him seriously at first. I mean, I didn’t, not really.
But then the cops came, and everyone started running, and I figured I must be half-crazy to stay there, but—”
I hold up a hand, the other going to my temple. How much damage has my brother caused? And how has the rest of my family not returned home to put him back in check?
Remus clearly needs to be locked in the basement again. Immediately.
But first, I need information.
“Let me understand this correctly.” I speak slowly, precisely. “Three days ago, you volunteered. And in all that time—seventy-two consecutive hours—you’ve been with my brother, and this is the first time you’re seeing me awake?”
She nods, eyes wide. “He told me all about your other brothers. But he wouldn’t talk about you.”
Of course he wouldn’t. Was he afraid saying my name would summon me? And how—how—has he managed to keep me unconscious for so long?
The answer crystallizes with uncomfortable clarity.
Of course he made a play for a consort. Ever since Abaddon and Kharon claimed theirs, he’s wanted one. Been obsessed with the idea.
Well. I’m awake now.
Time to do what I always do: restore order to whatever chaos my brother has created.
I look at this beautiful, foolish, brave woman standing before me in her nightgown, and I say what must be said.
“It’s time to get you back home.”