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Delphi gives me a serious look. “You don’t want to know.”
Then she goes back to playing a song that sounds like…a familiar place. Like waking up in bed next to somebody you love. It sounds like wedding bells and a moonstone rings and chasing each other through the forest, trying your best not to laugh and laughing anyway, even if it’s a dead giveaway.
While Apollo sleeps, I do plenty of my own crying. I wish none of those things had ever happened to him. I cry about it as quietly as I can, because I don’t want to wake him, but I’m not leaving his side again for a long time. Maybe not ever. I don’t know what the deal is with our bond—curse—whatever it is, but I’m not taking any chances. Can you blame me?
Yeah. I didn’t think so.
I know that dealing with all of this and the attendant fallout is going to take a long time. I know that when he wakes up, he won’t be over it, and I don’t expect him to be.
But I hope that he doesn’t feel like he has to carry it around like a shameful secret.
There’s nothing about him that’s shameful. Everything about him is bright as the sun, and it always has been.
He wakes up on the third day when Delphi’s in the middle of a melody that sounds like water burbling in a stream somewhere sunny and safe. A forest coming to life in the spring.
Apollo’s eyelids flicker, and then he opens his eyes and looks at me. My heart pounds.
I’m never going to get used to him.
“Dead or alive?” he asks, his voice rough with sleep.
“Alive,” I answer.
He smiles. “Engaged or not engaged?”
“Engaged.” I hold up my ring and let him catch my hand out of the air. He brings it to his chest.
“Germany?” he asks. “Or home?”
“Definitely Germany,” I tell him. “And we’re probably going to be here for a while. You’re officially on vacation. Everybody’s still here, too, so you might’ve been signed up for a family reunion. Uncle Hades already rented a castle.”
“No.” Apollo looks skeptical. “If he did anything, he bought it.”
“Yeah. You’re right. He did.”
Apollo laughs, and my whole heart sings with the sound. “We’re sharing a room. I don’t care what anyone thinks.”
“How about we share a whole life?” I lean down and kiss his temple. “We could do a marriage on each other, if that sounds good to you.”
“It sounds perfect.” Apollo leans up and kisses me, and I fall gracelessly on top of him. He catches my weight without so much as a grunt. He really is getting better.
“Love birds!” Delphi does a loud, triumphant strum on her guitar. “What a gorgeous happy ending.”
22
APOLLO
“I am not embarrassed about this,” I say into the pillow. Sun slants through the window of the castle we’re staying in. A castle that is, apparently, owned by Uncle Hades. I’ve never known anyone who could buy a castle that fast.
“Good,” Artemis answers from her spot between my legs. She sits behind me on the mattress, her fingers stroking gently at the base of my spine. “You shouldn’t be. You’re, like, incredibly hot.”
“I feel like I should be,” I admit, because I guess that’s what I’m supposed to do now. Admit things. About how I feel. Stop hiding from everyone. Although I don’t think everyone in my family wants to know about this. Just Artemis.
“You have nothing to be embarrassed about.” Artemis’s fingers move lower, over my crease, and she does a bit of tentative tracing that gets less tentative with every second. “I already told Uncle Hades that we were fucking, anyway.”
“What?” I keep my voice relaxed, and my body relaxed, because anything else is counterproductive in this situation. What Artemis is doing with her fingers is amazing. I want her to keep doing it.
The truth is, there were a lot of things that happened during those favors that I didn’t like because I was a child and what was happening was completely fucked up. It was a crime. And none of it was fun, even if it wasn’t painful in the moment.
