25. Penelope’s Daughter #2
Her thumbs traced the skin beneath my eyes. For one disorienting moment, Helena was there in the gesture. It was the same type of care, the same fierce protectiveness that my mother had been hiding behind decades of rigid control.
“Don’t be afraid of what you are.” Her grip on my face tightened, and the strength in her fingers was unmistakable. “Make the choice that’s right for you, and you will be free.”
She released me and stepped back. The purple-gold light at her edges was fading, thinning into the amber stillness.
“Wait.” I reached for her, my hand closing on air where her shoulder had been a moment before.
But she was already gone. The light was ordinary Mediterranean gold again. The waves resumed their rhythm against the hull, gentle and indifferent. The breeze moved across my skin.
Orion blinked. His chest completed its interrupted breath. His eyes refocused on mine, still soft, still certain, still waiting for the answer he’d been promised.
I knew what I had to do.
“Yes.” I straightened my spine and let the new power settle into the base of my skull, warm and heavy as a crown. “I’ll bond with you. But I need something first.”
Something shifted in his face—a fracture in that careful composure, a brightness that was almost boyish. He hadn’t expected me to agree. Not truly. For all his calculation, some part of him had been bracing for rejection.
“Name it.”
“Alexander. He’ll come for me. You know he will. His campaign won’t stop at the ports. Eventually he’ll come himself, and when he does, it needs to end. Not with politics. Not with paperwork. It needs to be finished.”
The brightness didn’t leave his eyes. If anything, it deepened. “You want me to fight him.”
“I want you to kill him.” I held his gaze and let him see exactly what he wanted to see—a woman choosing the ocean over the storm.
“As long as he’s alive, the curse has an anchor.
As long as he exists, some part of me will always be tethered to him, and I can’t live like that. I won’t live like that. Not anymore.”
He studied me for a long moment. Then he inclined his head.
“Very well, Andromeda,” he replied. “Stormwright will die. For you.”
The sun hung low and golden over the Strait. I stood on the deck of an Olympian Alpha’s yacht with the power of my ancestors burning in my blood. And now, I was waiting for the trap I had just set to close around us all.
Present day
The light died, and the world came back in pieces.
Sound came first. Water slapped against the hull with a shaky, confused rhythm.
Waves were still colliding from directions that no longer made sense.
Then a rush of countless scents overwhelmed me.
Brine and ozone and the metallic tang of blood, layered over the deep mineral rot of the Strait.
Sensation was last. My hands were empty.
My palms burned where my power had poured through them, my skin raw and tingling.
I was on the ground. I didn’t remember falling.
The yacht rolled beneath me, a long, sick tilt to port that sent seawater sluicing across the deck.
Orion lay six feet from me, crumpled against the base of the foremast. His shirt was torn open at the chest where my hands had been.
The skin beneath was mottled with black veins that branched outward from his sternum.
His lips were moving softly in nearly soundless words.
I crawled to him. My arms shook with the effort, but I got close enough to hear what he was saying.
“She chose,” he murmured. “Penelope’s daughter chose.”
His gaze drifted past me, toward the open water. A faint, bewildered crease formed between his brows. Then his eyes closed, and his body went slack against the mast.
He was breathing. The rhythm was shallow but steady. I pressed two fingers against the pulse point beneath his jaw. The beat there was slow and threadlike but present. I hadn’t killed him. Thank the gods. I’d never intended to, but for a few moments there, it had been too close.
I sat back on my heels. My hands were trembling. The light was gone from my palms, but the power was still in my blood. It was quieter than I’d expected, humming softly.
“Andromeda.”
I turned.
Alexander was pulling himself upright against the port rail, one arm braced across his ribs. His shirt was soaked through and plastered to his chest. A cut above his left eyebrow had bled freely down the side of his face. Blood mixed with seawater into a pinkish wash that dripped from his jaw.
His hair was matted flat, and his breathing was labored. The ocean had beaten him half to death, and whatever was left had been dragged through the wreckage.
He was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
Not because he was golden, or powerful, or any of the things that House Zeus prized.
Because he was here. He had knowingly walked into a trap, on water where his power meant nothing.
He’d gone against an Alpha who outmatched him in every way that mattered.
He had come for me, just like I’d known he would.
He took a step toward me and swayed. He shot his hand back to the rail, catching himself. His knuckles were scraped raw.
“Are you hurt?” His gaze raked over me, cataloguing damage. A month ago, that possessive inventory would have infuriated me.
“No.” I got to my feet. The deck lurched, and I braced my stance wider. “Are you?”
“Nothing that matters.” He pushed off the rail and crossed the distance between us, each step careful and deliberate on the wet deck.
He stopped a foot away. His eyes searched my face.
I waited for the paranoia to appear, to claw up through my stomach.
Any moment now, the curse would twist his presence into something suffocating and repulsive.
It didn’t come.
Alexander lifted one hand toward my face and stopped himself.
His fingers hovered at my cheekbone, trembling with the effort of restraint.
He was waiting for permission. This man had been raised to take what he wanted and justify it later.
He was bleeding from the head, standing on a wrecked yacht, and he was asking me if he could touch me.
“I’m sorry.” His injured hand reached for me and fell back to his side, fingers curling into a fist against his thigh. “For everything. For the yacht, for the curse, for every moment I made your life worse by existing in it. If I could take it all back—”
I leaned forward, closing the space between us, and turned my cheek into his palm. His skin was cold from the seawater, but beneath that was his familiar heat and the scent that I’d missed so much.
My whole body recognized him the way it recognized shelter after a storm.
“Don’t be sorry.” I covered his hand with mine, holding it against my cheek. “You were only an Alpha, trying to protect your Omega. I understand now.”
Something broke in his face. His mask of control slipped. Underneath it was a man who had been terrified for months. He was only now letting himself feel the full weight of it.
“Andie.” His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. His other hand found my waist, tentatively, as though I might shatter or change my mind. “What did you do to him? Was that… House Hera’s power?”
“Penelope taught me,” I explained. “My ancestor. She taught me how to sever a bond. The incipient bond Orion had been building since I arrived… I cut it. I made a choice. The only one I could.”
For a few moments, he just stared at me, something akin to awe on his face. “You… You chose me? But… the curse…”
Of course I’d chosen him. I’d chosen him from the very beginning, that first night we’d met. I just hadn’t realized it. He was my Alpha, and I was his Omega.
I kissed him, and there was nothing gentle about it. I grabbed the front of his ruined shirt and pulled him down to me. His mouth met mine, and his arms locked around me, crushing me against his chest. His heart hammered against my ribs, and the storm in his blood answered the power in mine.
He kissed me back with everything he had. His hand cradled the back of my skull, fingers threading through my tangled hair. His other arm tightened around my waist until there was no space left between us. The yacht rocked beneath our feet. The Strait churned. None of it mattered.
When we finally broke apart, his forehead dropped against mine. We stood there, swaying with the deck, breathing each other’s air.
“Alexander,” I whispered.
“Mm.”
“I can’t feel it.”
He pulled back just enough to search my face. His brows drew together. “Can’t feel what?”
“The curse.” I reached for the place inside me where Alexander’s presence had always triggered a storm of its own. I found nothing there. Only silence, clean and ordinary. Or rather, a deep sense of peace.
“It’s gone.” My eyes burned with an emotion I couldn’t even begin to process. “Alexander, it’s gone. I can’t feel it anymore.”
Alexander’s eyes widened. “You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” I took a deep breath, waiting for the scent to overwhelm me like it had in the past. But I no longer saw him as my enemy. “I don’t know when it broke. I don’t know if it was the severance, or Penelope, or this. But it’s not there anymore.”
His eyes closed. His arms folded around me, and he buried his face in my hair. He said nothing more. No more words were needed.
As I held him, the ocean finally started to calm. Behind us, Orion breathed against the foremast, unconscious and diminished, his chest rising and falling with the slow cadence of deep sleep.
For the first time in months, my mind was quiet.
For the first time in my life, I was not afraid of what I was.