Chapter 15
Hecate
I am a fool, a traitor, a terrible friend.
I have compromised what little honor I possess time and time again.
What’s one more instance? Circe is right; I love Atalanta, even if I’ve never allowed myself to act on it, to speak it, to even think it.
I’m at the end of my rope, and that’s still no excuse for kissing Circe again.
I catch her wrists and pin them at the small of her back.
She’s tricked me twice. It should be reason enough not to kiss her now, not to allow her close, but this woman is the unplumbed depths of the ocean.
I want to dive right into her, embrace her shadows, let her crush me in her embrace.
The impulse is nearly suicidal and exclusive only to her, but I can’t resist it any more than the ocean can resist the moon’s pull.
It’s so much worse because she instantly kisses me back, her vicious mouth going soft and sweet as she opens for me. Even knowing what I do, she tastes like home. I’m terrified that she’ll always taste like home to me.
I break the kiss just enough to speak against her lips. “If you move, I’m going to stab you, and I won’t miss.”
Her laughter fills the room. “I’ve missed you so much, love.” Her voice cracks in the middle of the sentence, truth breaking through.
I’ve missed her, too. Even if she’s a different shape than the girl I fell in love with, one with even more jagged edges to bloody myself on. I drag my mouth over her jawline as I pat her down, removing her gun, ejecting the clip, and tossing both parts away.
She lifts her arms so I can wrestle her hoodie off her body, quickly followed by her tank top, leaving her in only a lace bra that looks like a sharp word could shred it to pieces. Circe always did like her pretties, though neither of us could have afforded something designer back in the day.
I kiss my way down her stomach to the band of her jeans, continuing my pat down.
She’s got two knives in ankle sheaths, which is honestly surprising.
Even knowing she held her own against Atalanta, that she orchestrated the downfall of Olympus, part of me can’t help but look at her and see a prissy rich woman like the ones I’ve been surrounded with since becoming Hermes.
Hermes. The title has come to feel like an extension of my identity in recent years. In the last couple days, that’s changed. Now it’s an ill-fitting shirt, tags scratchy and fabric dry and itchy. I want it off.
Just like I want Circe’s pants off.
This is a mistake, but I’ve been making a lot of them lately. What’s one more? I send the knives skating away across the floor and tug her pants down, having to pause to pull off her boots before I can slide them off.
And then she stands before me in nothing but two scraps of lace that do little to cover the woman beneath. Kneeling before her like this, I can see the shadow of her slit through her panties, and there’s a hint of her pale-pink nipples beneath the lilac of her bra.
I suddenly don’t want to lift my gaze farther. If I meet her eyes and she’s got her derisive mask on, I might shatter. This is wrong and right and awful and beautiful and…
“Hecate.” She touches my chin, lifting my face. “Look at me.”
If I were stronger, if we were different people, if I hadn’t spent a decade of my life mourning this woman, maybe I could deny her.
Maybe. I meet her gaze. My breath whooshes out.
She’s both stranger and lover in this moment.
When we were young, we told ourselves how worldly and jaded we were.
It was true and not true. Trauma may strip away childhoods, but it is no substitution for years spent walking this earth.
Circe cups my face, her touch agonizingly gentle, her eyes shining in the low light of the room. “I’ve missed you. So desperately.” She brushes her thumbs over my cheekbones. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to touch you again.”
“I shouldn’t let you,” I whisper. “I shouldn’t want to touch you.” No matter what evil she’s done, it doesn’t change the fact that she once was mine. I close my eyes. “I’ve missed you, too.”
Over a decade’s worth of emotions well up inside me, bursting from my chest as she sinks down to the floor, her knees bumping mine.
The first time we kissed, we were in nearly an identical position, kneeling facing each other as she did my makeup.
She cupped my chin just like this, staring at my mouth with a desperation mirrored in the racing of my heart.
I kiss her now, just like I kissed her then. The past and present lay uneasily over each other as she grabs my hips and jerks us closer together, my arms going around her neck so I can dig my fingers into her hair. Shorter now but still so familiar.
Circe tugs my clothes off with impatient hands, and then the cool marble floor meets my back as she rolls us to settle between my thighs. She kisses down my throat, the edge of her teeth catching my skin in her frenzy.
I pull her back to my mouth. I don’t want to think of anything in this moment. I just want to feel. I shouldn’t be doing this. I know that even as I lift my hips to meet her questing hand.
She slips her fingers between my thighs to cup my pussy. We exchange a shaky exhale at the contact. I press my forehead to hers. “This changes nothing.” I’m not sure I believe my own words.
“I know.”
“Don’t stop.”
She smiles against my mouth. “I won’t, love. Not until you’re coming.”
The years fall away as she parts me and delves two fingers inside, a slow, exploratory fuck as if reacquainting herself with every detail of me.
I’ve never felt more possessed than I do in this moment, a body attached to the thrumming pulse between my thighs, to the pleasure she teases forth with little curls of her fingers.
Circe drags her fingers out of me and up over my clit, and then reverses course, sliding them deeper.
My back bows and I kiss her harder. I’ve had dozens of lovers over the years, some I’ve cared about very deeply and some who were just fun for a short time. With each of them, I took the lead, taking and giving pleasure but never letting my heart bleed for them.
My heart’s not just bleeding right now. It’s sitting outside my shattered rib cage, broken and throbbing for the one woman who can never be mine. Not truly. Not again.
Even understanding that, I know her. I know to pull her close even as she drives my pleasure higher.
How to clutch her hips and urge her to grind against my thigh, angled just the way she likes it.
She’s wet and slippery and hot enough to scald.
I want the taste of her need on my tongue, but there’s no time with the frenzy upon us.
We are a tangle of bodies and limbs and need. She carefully winds my braids around her free hand and buries her face in my throat. “Come for me, Hecate. I want to feel you.”
“You…first.”
Her chuckle sends me over the edge. I moan and shudder, ripping apart at the seams. She doesn’t stop finger fucking me, though; she just shifts her touch a little to give me a moment to recover, to focus on her own pleasure. It’s too much. To have her this close and not… “I need to taste you.”
“Please.”
A distant part of me is horrified that we’re fucking on the floor when there are plenty of perfectly adequate pieces of furniture around. Or, gods forbid, a bed. There’s no space for that kind of pause, to slow down long enough to move positions. To think.
Her mouth finds my pussy just as I lick her clit.
If kissing her tasted like home, she tastes like home here, too, albeit in a different way.
She’s close to orgasming. It’s the most natural thing in the world to rub the flat of my tongue against her needy clit. She gasps against me, losing her focus.
I may not be able to win our larger confrontation, but I know how to make Circe come.
Hers was the second body—after mine—I learned to bring pleasure to.
The first love I wanted to make feel just as good as she makes me feel.
First with awkward fumbling and low laughter, and then with moans and whimpers as we figured out what the fuck we were doing.
I clutch Circe to me even as I drive her closer and closer to orgasm.
I need to feel her come undone, need to be the one to cause it.
Her tongue is slick against my clit, clever and wicked.
No matter how good I make her feel, she’s in control enough to drag me alongside her into oblivion.
She’s always been too damned good at that.
Pleasure builds inside me, a bomb waiting to detonate, even as I drink down her taste.
Don’t stop. Just a little longer. We can pretend just a few seconds more. Please.
I’ve always been too damned good at pretending. Sometimes I fool even myself. Maybe that’s what I’ve been doing from the moment I took the Hermes title.
When she comes, I’m seconds behind her, my orgasm exploding through me and leaving nothing but rubble in its wake. I rest my head on her thigh, panting. “Circe—”
“Not yet.” She presses a gentle kiss to my aching pussy.
For a beat, I think she means to continue, to nudge us over the edge and back into the frenzy, to hold off reality for a few hours at least. Instead, she sits up slowly, careful not to dislodge me.
She traces her fingers over my forehead and down the side of my face.
“The rest of the world will still be here in the morning.”
But I won’t be.
I’ve already been away from Atalanta too long. I never should have come here, drawn by a presence I was half-sure existed only in my imagination. Except then I heard familiar footsteps in this house I built for us, and I was lost.
I sit up and kiss Circe, tasting both of us in the process. Once upon a time, it felt like a promise of the future we dreamed of together. Now, it just hurts. “Let’s move this to the bedroom.”
It’s a testament of how thoroughly she just orgasmed that she doesn’t question the statement.
She simply rises, tugging me up with her.
We walk hand in hand down the hallway and into the primary bedroom.
Every step is a dagger in my heart. The sensation only gets worse when I force myself to smile at her. “I’m going to freshen up. Wait for me?”
Circe’s smile fades a little, leaving her looking so much like the girl I fell in love with all those years ago.
I don’t know if I can stand it. It’s on the tip of my tongue to offer to run away together, to leave this all behind, to chase down the future we always promised each other. It’s far too late for that.
We part ways there, me slipping into the bathroom and closing the door, and her moving to the bed.
I avoid my reflection in the mirror as I pace.
My body still thrums with the pleasure of her hands and mouth.
Each step threatens my resolve, tempting me with the memory of what we just did.
I do my best to distract myself by counting down from sixty, over and over again, until it’s been fifteen minutes.
Not so long in the grand scheme of things, but an eternity in this place filled with the promise of memories I’ll never get to create.
Not with Circe. Not with Atalanta, either.
Guilt wraps thorned vines around my throat and digs deep.
I wasn’t thinking about Atalanta when I kissed Circe.
Or during anything that came after. I might have walked through this door with fury in my heart, but Circe’s presence chased it from me the way it always seems to eclipse the thousands of other things I should be focused on.
When I finally emerge from the bathroom, Circe is sleeping in the bed I bought for a future I was still mourning. It’s unspeakably cruel to see her there now, her face relaxed in sleep, her arm thrown over her head and leaving her fully exposed.
I could end this now.
Without Circe, her people will crumble and falter.
The mobs will continue to be a problem, but without someone escalating things, eventually their energy will fade.
Maybe that will be the moment to finally reach victory, to dismantle the Thirteen and set up a new form of government that serves all the people of Olympus instead of just the few at the top.
I actually take a step toward the bed. Circe gives a faint cry that makes my body lock up.
I’ve heard this woman happy and devastated and angry.
I’ve never heard her terrified…until now.
Because that’s what she’s feeling right now as she shifts on the bed, tangling the sheets around her body.
Terror. Her beautiful face furrows as she whimpers, clearly trying to get away from whatever haunts her dreams.
My heart wants to climb into bed, to wrap my arms around her, to pull her away from the nightmare plaguing her. Circe never had nightmares when we were together before. I didn’t, either.
My mind, spinning and planning and plotting, whispers that this is my chance to end things once and for all.
She’s helpless. She trusts me, at least enough to fall asleep.
All it would take is to grab a pillow and shove it over her face.
A quick, brutal death. I’ve delivered that before.
I can again. It won’t solve the problems plaguing Olympus right now, but it would…
I can’t do it. I stare at my shaking hands.
I can’t hurt her, even knowing how much devastation she’s caused—how much she intends to cause.
Even with all the years between the woman I knew and the one in the bed before me, I can’t look at her and not see the Circe I loved enough to bring Olympus down.
She’s still there, beneath the scars and pain and rage.
And that scares me more than anything else.