23. Better The Cock You Know #2
Atlas turned, snatched a book from the nearest shelf, and hurled it at him.
“That’s a start.”
Theron caught it one-handed, looked down, and read the title aloud. “The Rot of the Flesh, and the Curing Thereof.” He turned it over in his hand and chuckled low before setting it carefully aside. “I think not. My cock deserved better than that.”
Atlas narrowed his eyes and flicked them to Aster, who took the cue, nodded, and slipped out of the door.
“Lazaros.” Atlas’s gaze came to me. “Thank you for your swift return. A successful one, no less. Minus the clothes, and do I want to know why you’re both wet?”
I inclined my head. “You asked, and we delivered, and no, you don’t want to know.”
Theron laughed at this and countered, “Oh, I bet he does.”
“Perhaps when I’m feeling less murderous,” Atlas replied, the tension in his jaw easy to see.
An awkward silence settled over the office after that. Theron, meanwhile, had begun to wander it, idly, entirely unconcerned by his own nudity, pausing beside the wreck of Atlas’s desk. Or what was left of it after he’d half-destroyed the thing only days before.
The room was halfway through being put right since Atlas’s outburst. A new bookshelf stood where the old one had been reduced to splinters.
Several deep cracks still scarred the stone walls, and for all someone’s best efforts, ink stains lingered across the floorboards.
Theron trailed a finger along a particularly impressive gouge in the wall near the desk.
“Redecorating, are we?”
Atlas folded his arms. “It wasn’t exactly intentional.”
“No?” Theron examined another crack with apparent interest. “I rather like it. Very expressive.”
Atlas’s jaw tightened. “Yes, I can imagine a man like you would appreciate raw fury, as I was rather angry at the time.” I scoffed at this, as that was one way to put it.
“I gathered.” Theron’s eyes wandered the room once more before returning to my brother’s. “I find I am rather angry myself, especially when dragged from my home and my kingdom,” he said, despite not looking half as murderous as I would expect. Regardless, I rested my hand on my dagger all the same.
“You send your failure of a brother and that bull to my home and demand I attend you at once.” His gaze slid to me, cool and unhurried. “Did you forget who I am so quickly, little prince?”
The words came out shaped like a threat, and Atlas took a step forward. So, I took one too, ready to throw myself between them if it came to it, just as Aster came back through the door.
“That,” Aster said, “is King to you.”
“Ah. Yes. And yet didn’t you wander off and vanish for a good long while?” Theron mused, plainly enjoying himself. “A sabbatical, was it?”
“This is fucking pointless!” Atlas snarled.
“He knows exactly who you are,” Aster said from the doorway, hurling a pair of breeches and a loose white shirt across the room at Theron. “Which is precisely why he needs your help. Now get dressed.”
Theron caught the clothes, holding the sandy breeches up between two fingers with open distaste. “Gentlemen. We were all born naked. Why on earth should we trouble ourselves to cover it up?”
“I will not have you anywhere near Alexandra with your cock out!” Atlas spat; every last shred of his patience gone.
“So, she is conscious, at least,” Theron noted, his tone far more serious this time.
“No,” Atlas snapped. “But your cock is not coming anywhere near our bedchamber.”
“Well, that would prove rather difficult,” Theron said mildly, stepping into the breeches at last, “given that it cannot be detached, and tends, as a rule, to follow me wherever I go.”
Atlas glared, unamused.
Theron, still the very picture of calm, cast a slow look about the office.
“Is she in this room?”
“Obviously not,” Atlas ground out.
Theron shrugged. “Then I fail to see the issue.”
Judging by the murderous look that crossed my brother’s face, he was about three heartbeats from killing the only creature who could potentially help us.
I shut my eyes and dragged in a breath. “Theron. Please. We have rather more important matters at hand than me trying to keep my brother from strangling you.”
Theron rolled his eyes but pulled the shirt down over his still-damp torso, a smug little smile fixed on his face the whole while. But then I nudged my brother and gave him my silent, ‘go on, tell him’ face.
“We think Alexandra is dying,” Atlas said, “and we need your help to understand why.”
The pain in his voice cut clean through the room.
And Theron’s amusement vanished. For the first time since I’d laid eyes on him, the Gorgon King looked entirely, deadly serious.
“What happened?”
I studied him then, narrow-eyed. I knew he had helped Alex and Aster lay hands on the Weaver’s Torch, but there was something in that look of his.
Something in the speed with which all his careful games had fallen clean away told me Alex was a great deal more to him than simply another soul he’d struck a bargain with.
And if I had seen it, then so, most certainly, had Atlas.
My gaze moved between the two of them. In that moment, Atlas looked less like a king and more like a desperate man on the very edge of losing the one person he could not live without. And I knew that having to beg help from a creature like Theron would only twist the knife deeper.
Especially now that Theron had glimpsed the cracks in my brother’s armor. He knew now that he could ask for very nearly anything he pleased. And be given it.
“Can you help her?” Atlas asked.
“Take me to her.”
A silence fell over the office, broken only by my brother.
“You may have something in that collection of yours that can help.”
Theron did not hesitate. “I can promise you nothing. Only that I will try.” His voice hardened. “Now I won’t ask again. Take me to her. Now.”
Atlas did not wait for another word. He turned on his heel and strode toward the door.
As for Aster and I, we exchanged an uneasy look. Because somehow, against every conceivable odd, we had successfully kidnapped the Gorgon King.
And somehow, more impossible still…
Atlas and Theron were about to work together.