Hercules reaches across Meg’s sleeping body and takes my hand. “I’m sorry.”
“You weren’t even alive at the time. You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“Fuck, Hades, I can still offer emotional support even if I wasn’t directly responsible for what happened to your family.” He strokes his thumb over my knuckles. “What were their names?”
“Amber. Jonah.” Saying them aloud feels like summoning their ghosts to this room. I was a different man in my early twenties. They wouldn’t recognize me now. Some moments, I barely recognize myself.
Hercules squeezes my hand. “You should have told her.”
No point arguing. He’s right. “I know.” I’ve never lied to Meg—not really—but withholding this information is almost the same thing.
Hercules keeps stroking my hand, little movements that curl through me even as they provide the comfort I don’t deserve. He finally says, “What you said before, your plan to defile me and send evidence to my father… It won’t work. He won’t care.” He doesn’t tense up as he says the next words. “For it to be true justice, you’d have to kill me.”
My chest locks up and I stare at him, shocked to my very core. “What?”
“That’s what this is about, right? A son for a son?” He’s watching me so closely, and for the first time since we met, I have no idea what my face is showing. “He already wrote me off, Hades. You could be fucking me seven ways to Sunday, and it will barely make him blink. That’s not how my father works.”
Surely he didn’t just suggest I murder him? I won’t lie and say the thought never crossed my mind in my initial plans, but I discarded it upon meeting him for a thousand different reasons. Meg and the future of our relationship, such as it is. Even Hercules himself. “I’m not killing you, little Hercules.”
“Why not?”
What is his aim with this conversation? I twist my hand and take his wrist, tightening my grip until his fingers splay out and he bites his bottom lip. There are so many things I could say, so many reasons I could give that would detour us away from this conversation. In the end, this strange addiction to honesty wins out. “Because you’re mine.”
He’s mine.
Yes, that’s my truth.
Hercules is mine the same way Meg is mine. Except it’s not the same. She and I push and pull and move through an intricate dance of power in every single one of our waking moments. With Hercules, it’s effortless. He slid perfectly into a slot in our lives that I hadn’t even realized was lacking until his presence brought it to my attention. I acquired him as a gift to Meg, yes, but I never realized that I would feel this way about him, too.
“He knows I’m here.”
He doesn’t form it as a question, but I answer him nonetheless. “He knows you’re here.”
Hercules nods. “Maybe that’s enough.”
It’s not. Zeus will be ripping his hair out at the thought of his son within my grasp. Not because he cares about Hercules. If he did, he wouldn’t have let the man leave the city and struggle the way he has these last few months. No, Zeus is a schoolyard bully. Hercules is a possession, a toy, and even if he’s long since discarded it, he can’t stand the thought of someone else picking it up and finding value in it. It will aggravate him to no end to know Hercules is in my household. Eventually, I will push him hard enough that he’ll be forced to come here, to my territory, and retaliate.
That’s when I’ll truly gain my revenge.
I release Hercules’s wrist and reach up to stroke a single finger along his jaw, tracing the hard line there. Lifetime bargain or not, I can’t guarantee he’ll stay, short of locking him in. I know how that story ends. I don’t know how this one does, though. “You’ll be tempted to break your word at some point.”
He makes the conversational leap with me without hesitation. “I’ve never broken my word before. I won’t start now.”
Promises aren’t worth the air it takes to voice them. I’ve learned that lesson time and time again. “I suppose we’ll see, won’t we?” I lean over Meg and kiss him.
Chapter 22
Meg
I wake up pressed between two bodies I know intimately. Hercules has a big hand bracketing my hip, but from the way they’re moving, they’re making out over my head. Both their hips shift as if seeking each other, except I’m in the middle, keeping them from closing that last bit of distance.
I’m in the way.
If I had any self-respect at this point, I’d bolt out of the bed and retreat back to my bedroom to brood in peace. I came here last night to escape the demons nipping at my heels, and yet here they are, thrusting their hard cocks against me. If I leave, will they even pause? Or will they get right to fucking without the slightest bit of hesitation? I don’t know. I don’t even know what I want. I’m not fool enough to think their relationship only exists when I’m in the room. It’s not true for me and each of them, why should it be true for them together? Expecting that—wanting that—is ugly and horrible and selfish of me.