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But it was me, smiling down at Reyna like she was the brightest part of my life. Her looking up at me in adoration—an expression I certainly did not deserve. Our hands intertwined, my fingers gripping hers, her hands covered in a pair of gloves I would be thinking about for a very,verylong time.

King of the gods steps out with Princess of Rome - Fated match one source says.

The entire paper was covered in picture after picture, story after story, of our debut as a couple. Most of it was just fodder for gossip—withsourcesclaiming that we’d secretly been together for years or that they knew the intimate details of our relationship.

And that article, the one dissecting all my faults and the problems that stemmed from my birth, was nestled in the back third in between obituaries and advertisements. You would have to go searching for it, it was that hidden.

The journalist who wrote it was a mystery, having come out of seemingly nowhere with a change of specialty from covering medical stories and scientific research to attacking the gods.

That was a shift I would be following up with. There was motivation there apart from commenting on my reputation.

The sound of voices outside my office door caught my attention. Normally I would rise, buttoning my suit jacket and painting the picture of perfect ease to greet whoever was walking through that door.

But today—the storms outside were too dark, too restless, electricity curling around my hands with painful force. There was no suit jacket to button, the only thing I was able to drag on was a plain, black long sleeve shirt.

Emre pushed open the door a second later, nodding at me once before revealing Reyna behind him.

“Hi,” she said, smiling brightly at me right as a ray of sun broke through the clouds and cast a warm, soft glow on her tanned skin. “How’d you sleep?”

Emre snorted and I shot him a look that threatened bodily harm if he made Reyna feel embarrassed. With a dramatic bow and pointed look at the sunlight creeping through the windows, he left us alone.

“How do you think I slept?” I asked, coming around to the front of my desk and leaning against it.

“I’m guessing not well,” Reyna said, walking up to me. I positioned my legs wide right as she approached. It wasn’t until it was too late, until she was standing in the space between my thighs and entirely too close that I realized how natural that had been. How instinctual. “You sent Emre to come get me.”

I was either a hopeful bastard or I heard a real thread of disappointment in her voice. Last night, standing in her living room in the dark, I’d been too busy trying to keep my hands to myself to really dissect her tone or her words, but I was pretty sure she’d been close to askingmeto retrieve her myself.

“I’m sorry.” The words came out scraping, sounding foreign on my tongue. I couldn’t remember the last time I'd said that. In earnest, anyway. “I was trying to prepare for today.”

A half truth. I was trying to regain some control soI didn’t accidentally electrocute the entire Council after one snide comment.

Reyna scanned my face with wide, brown eyes. Like she could see right through me. The little streaks of sun made them look like spun caramel, lighting with flecks of gold. I clasped my hands together to weather her attention. After a moment, she asked quietly, “Did you see the paper?”

I reached behind me, grabbing the paper off my desk and holding it in front of us. She looked down, her fingers ghosting over the page, right over the line of my shoulder. “At least they chose a good photo.”

I let out a huff of laughter through my nose. “Do you think they even had a bad one?”

“I’m sure there’s a bad photo of you circulating somewhere,” Reyna said, a small grin pulling at the corners of her lips.

I forced my eyes away from her mouth. “I wasn’t talking about me.”

Reyna’s breath hitched, but she cleared it by saying, “It’s that right there. You did an excellent job of convincing them.”

She didn’t need to know that there wasn’t a coherent thought where ourrelationshipwas concerned in my mind at all. That it had been instinct and truth. “Yeah, well, the article is buried in the back. It buys us some time.”

Reyna nodded, her eyes flashing with concern. It looked like she was debating saying something.

“What is it?” I prompted.

“Please, don't say—, " She cut herself off with a quick shake of her head. Then she swallowed, her voice coming out smoother, lower, the next time she spoke. “Did you stay up all night thinking about it?”

Her concern—and forme—made me want to light something on fire. As if in answer, a small flash of lightning brightened the gray sky behind me.

“Save that concern for someone who will write about it,” I said, if not to give me some time to prepare for it. To build up armor strong enough where it didn’t feel like my chest was splitting open from the weight of it.

Reyna's answering smile was small and my instinct was to read it as disappointment. Fucking Fates, I felt like an asshole. But the only way I knew how to protect her was to keep her away from me.

She looked down my body, her eyes flitting to the collar of my shirt, down where it tightened over my arms, to where it ended at my wrists. “Did you run out of suits?”