Page 14 of A Spark in Time (A Knights Through Time Romance #21)

T he Nereid smelled like a speakeasy after a long night—if they were made of tar-soaked wood and powered by men who hadn’t bathed since the Trojan War.

Things I miss about Athens: regular baths, food that doesn’t move, and floors that stay still. Things I don’t miss: being dressed like a sacred doll and paraded around until someone decides to sacrifice me.

Bebe gripped the rail as the ship rolled, her torn dress flapping like a surrender flag.

The silver threads and beads caught the afternoon sun, throwing tiny rainbows across the deck where Kassander’s men pretended not to stare.

She probably looked like what she was—a flapper who’d been dragged through a hedge backward, then through a massacre, then onto a ship full of men who regarded soap as optional.

“You kidnapped me,” she said for the third time, because apparently once wasn’t enough to penetrate his thick Thessalian skull.

Kassander didn’t look up from where he sat sharpening his sword, the blade singing against the whetstone. “Esōsa se—I saved you.”

“You threw me over your shoulder like a sack of potatoes!”

“Rescued you with enthusiasm.”

“You killed thirteen men!”

“Rescued you thoroughly.”

She wanted to scream. Or push him overboard. Or possibly kiss him, which was an alarming thought she shoved down harder than bathtub gin at a temperance meeting.

Blood seeped through the leather on his forearm where a guard’s spear had caught him during their escape. He hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t even flinched, but she’d noticed the way he favored that arm when he thought no one was looking.

Men. They’ll bleed to death before admitting they need help.

“Your arm needs tending,” she said, trying for imperious and landing somewhere around concerned.

He glanced at the wound like it had personally offended him. “It’s nothing.”

“It’s bleeding.”

“Blood does that.”

“Are all Thessalians this stubborn, or are you special?”

That got him to look up, those storm-blue eyes crinkling at the corners.

“You’re concerned for my welfare? How touching. The pampered oracle cares whether her rescuer bleeds out.”

“I care whether you bleed on me,” she shot back. “This dress is already ruined.”

He laughed—quick and genuine—then winced as the movement pulled at his wound. Before he could protest, she was kneeling beside him, removing the leather, noting the way her hands shook as if they belonged to someone else.

The cut was deeper than she’d thought, ugly and jagged where the spearpoint had torn through leather and flesh. Blood welled fresh when she touched it, and his muscles tensed under her fingers.

“Mē kine?! Hold still.” she ordered, tearing a strip from her already-destroyed dress. The fabric came away easily, silk worth more than most Athenians saw in a year reduced to bandages.

“Expensive medicine,” he observed.

“Athens can afford it.”

She worked in silence, cleaning the wound, then with a deep breath, stitching it closed with a silk thread, aware of every breath he took, every shift of muscle under her hands.

His skin was a map of violence—scars crisscrossing like roads to nowhere good.

A puckered mark near his elbow that looked like an arrow wound.

Thin white lines across his forearm from what might have been a whip.

Or claws. With him, either seemed possible.

“You’ve been hurt before. Many times,” she said, not really a question.

“Occupational hazard.”

“Being an insufferable barbarian?”

“Being eleútheros—free.”

The word hung between them like sail rope, taut and loaded.

She tied off the bandage harder than necessary. He didn’t flinch.

“There. Try not to get stabbed for at least a day.”

“I’ll do my best to disappoint you.”

She stood, brushing her hands on her ruined dress, and became aware that half of his crew were watching them. Rough men with scarred faces and calloused hands, but they looked at her with something almost like respect. She’d tended their captain. That apparently meant something.

The ship creaked and groaned like an old woman’s joints, every timber complaint audible.

Tar clung to everything—the ropes, the deck, probably her hair by now.

Salt spray misted constantly, leaving her skin sticky and her throat parched.

The whole vessel reeked of sweat, fish, and something else—freedom, maybe.

Or just thirty unwashed men in close quarters.

Note to self: Freedom smells awful.

She made her way to the bow, needing space, needing air that didn’t taste like testosterone and questionable decisions. The sea stretched endless and blue, no land in sight. Just water and sky and the possibility of anything.

Or nothing.

After she washed the needle, she pulled a few more threads from the dress and stitched the rip closed so at least she’d look halfway decent.

Once she was done, she checked the hem. The rings, necklaces and small gems she’d pried from the bracelets were safe, stitched into the hem.

For later. She touched the hidden bulk at her waist where Helen’s Tear pressed against her skin through its fabric wrapping.

The weight of it had become familiar over the weeks, a constant reminder of how she’d gotten here.

Of how she couldn’t go back home. To her own time.

Her eyes found him. Kassander as he moved among the men, speaking to them, clapping several on the shoulders.

I tried everything.

She had too. In those first desperate days and weeks in Athens, she’d prayed to every god she could name—Zeus, Hera, Athena, even Hecate in case dark magic was required.

She’d made offerings at dawn and dusk, burned incense until her room reeked like a funeral parlor.

During a thunderstorm two weeks ago, she’d even cut her arm and pressed the blood to the diamond, trying to recreate that night in the conservatory.

Nothing. Not even a tingle.

The ring was magic—she knew that bone-deep. It had brought her here, ripped her through time like tissue paper. But it wasn’t taking her back. Maybe it couldn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t. Or maybe it had its own agenda that had nothing to do with what she wanted.

Twenty-four hundred years from everyone I know. From coffee and jazz and the vote for women. From my home.

She thought of her parents. Did they think she’d run away?

Eloped with some unsuitable boy? Or had Alistair told them the truth—that she’d vanished in a flash of light, leaving nothing but broken glass and questions?

Would they search for her? Mourn her? Move on and pretend she’d never existed, the way rich families did with embarrassing relatives?

The jewels Lysias had given her pressed heavy against her ankles as she shifted.

Gold and silver, enough to buy passage anywhere.

She’d been planning her escape for a week before the council’s decision—not back to her time, but forward in this one.

To Egypt maybe, or Rome. Somewhere she could disappear, reinvent herself, see the rest of the world she’d always dreamed about.

“Brooding doesn’t suit you.”

She didn’t turn. Kassander moved like a cat—all that muscle shouldn’t be so quiet.

“I’m not brooding. I’m thinking.” She ran a hand through her hair, noting it was almost to her shoulders now.

“About?” He leaned against the rail beside her, close enough that she could feel his heat, smell the leather and blade oil and something uniquely him.

“Home.”

“Athens?”

She laughed, bitter as black coffee. “Athens was never home. Just another pretty cage.”

“And before Athens?”

Before Athens was 1926. Before Athens was champagne and cigarettes and the promise of a future I didn’t want.

The words hung in her throat like champagne bubbles, effervescent and dangerous. She’d kept the secret for months, but suddenly—with the sea stretching endlessly before her, and him standing close enough to catch her if she fell—the truth felt lighter than lies.

“New York,” she said quietly. “A place that doesn’t yet exist. Won’t exist for...” She did the math again, still staggered by it. “Twenty-four hundred years.”

He didn’t laugh. Didn’t step away. Just waited, patient as stone.

“I lived in a mansion on the Gold Coast. My father made his fortune in railroads, my mother in marrying well.”

The words tumbled out like water through a broken dam. “They wanted me to marry a man named Alistair—fourth of his name, if you can believe that. He had the personality of week-old fish and the charm of a tax collector, but he had the right bloodline and a trust fund the size of a small country.”

Kassander’s mouth quirked. “Sounds delightful.”

“Oh, he was the cat’s pajamas, all right. If cats wore too much pomade and bored you to tears talking about their polo ponies.”

She found herself smiling despite everything. “The night he proposed—with this very ring, actually—I panicked. Ran to our conservatory during a thunderstorm, tripped and cut my hand, and...” She gestured vaguely at the ancient world around them. “Here I am.”

“You ran from one cage into another.”

“That’s what I thought. In Athens, anyway.

” She turned to face him finally, studying his profile in the light.

“Then, just when I thought my life was over, the Silver Siren a sacrifice, you crashed through those doors like some avenging angel and proved that cages can have exits if someone’s brave enough to kick them down. ”

“Or stupid enough.”

“Why?” The question she’d been carrying since that blood-soaked council chamber slipped out. “Why did you come back for me? You could have taken your money and left Athens. Instead, you started a war.”

He was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn’t answer. Then he said. “Because you looked at me like I was a man, not a weapon. You didn’t want anything from me.”

“You are a man.”