Page 23 of Until the End of Ever (To the Cruel Gods #2)

KLEOS

W e ended up staying at Lucian’s parents’ for the night.

The guest bedroom where Cassiopea had shown me to was offered to me.

I was fairly certain it was as grand as my father’s master suite in our home.

The bed was so vast, one had to wonder just how many guests were supposed to fit in it.

A football team would have been perfectly snug, cuddling each other.

But if there were any signs of a former orgy, I missed them. The bedroom faintly smelled of lavender and some fresh spice I couldn’t quite pinpoint. Not a speck of dust had been permitted to exist anywhere in this house from what I’d seen of it.

I wondered if blue was Cassiopea or Kaelius’s favorite color, given how everything seemed to be white or the many varying shades of the sky and sea. Perhaps both of them favored it. Come to think of it, Lucian also often wore blue.

His core magic was bloodred, on the rare occasion I’d seen him make use of it, but minor spells, such as resizing or levitating objects, tended to leave a faint blue mist.

“I trust you’ll be comfortable. Are you two staying together, or should I open up another room?” Cassiopea asked oh so casually.

“Oh, we—” I stuttered, not wanting to get her to go through any extra work at, what, two in the morning? I couldn’t keep track, and still didn’t have my phone. The dinner party had started late, and lasted long enough for me to be a yawning mess. “We could share?”

We were only going to crash. And it wasn’t like we had never shared a bed, in any case.

Great. I was blushing like an idiot, thinking about Saturday night all over again.

“Mother, behave,” Lucian retorted, appearing right behind his mother, shaking his head.

He walked into the room, heading towards me with a smile.

“There are a dozen spare bedrooms in this place, all of them ready at any time. Don’t let Mother make you feel guilty. I warned you she wants grandchildren.”

Spectacular. Awesome. I’m thinking about sex harder . In front of Cassiopea, on top of it.

“And so what if I do?” the matriarch challenged. “Don’t forget, Luce, that if you’re not interested, I have another son who might see the wisdom in snatching up such a gem.”

“Mother, dear?” he purred, sounding ever so sweet. “Another word, and I’m getting on my knees in front of Thea on the morrow. Good luck getting any grandchildren from me then.”

Cassiopea’s eyes narrowed into slits. With a huff, she turned on her heels, stomping away.

I wouldn’t have thought someone like her stomped . She did so gracefully anyway.

“I’m not crashing yet,” Lucian told me, helping me out of the diamond constellation. It was so comfortable and light, moving like fabric rather than metal, that I’d honestly forgotten I was wearing it. “I’ll find a room nearby when I do.”

“When do you even sleep?” I asked, unable to stop another yawn.

I pressed the back of my hands to my lips.

“Before you barged into my life? Around six to ten, midday at a push. Now, earlier—as you insist on waking me up with your sorcery.”

“Baking,” I corrected with a grin.

“Same difference. Ask anyone tonight, little witch.”

It was the perfect time to head to the bathroom and prepare for the night, or possibly just crawl into bed.

“So, who’s Thea?”

None of your business, that’s who. But the words were out, and there was no swallowing them back up.

The room was mostly dark, the trees outside faded to a dull gray, and the light emanating out of the marble out of doors, faint, like a night light. There was no such illumination inside the bedroom itself, but Lucian and Cassiopea had left the door open.

In the darkness, I saw his eyes flash like a creature of the night. The idiot was smirking.

“My cousin Kore’s best friend. You might have met—she’s about your age, and has attended all the festivals in the Hall of Truce, like the rest of us.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think any unders ever bothered to introduce themselves to me.”

Still, I knew Kore Saltzin’s name. She’d stood out.

And she’d also been his dance partner for as long as I could remember. Of course I’d noticed her.

“Have you bothered to introduce yourself to any of us?” he countered.

Good point, well made. I winced. “I mean, we just stuck to our own side of the hall—all of us. That wasn’t an answer, by the way. Why did her mention make the great Cassiopea practically run away?”

“Curious little witch, aren’t you?”

He wasn’t answering, damn him.

I could have dropped it. Should have dropped it. I blamed the countless glasses of wine and the late hour of the night for what followed. “I spend most of my time here, with you. If there’s any dynamic I should be aware of, you should tell me. I don’t want to trample on another woman’s territory.”

“Trample, huh?” Lucian whispered, taking the tight red braids I’d just made.

I hadn’t noticed my hand moving.

“You’re not only curious. You’re jealous.”

What I was was angry. At myself, at him, and at the pit of heat that churned low in my belly whenever I looked at his smug, self-satisfied, unfairly gorgeous face.

“You don’t want to tell me? Fine,” I snapped, snatching my hair back and starting towards the bathroom.

Lucian grasped my wrist as I walked away, chuckling. “Easy, kitten. I want to tell you. I just don’t want you to misunderstand the situation.”

I turned back to him, glaring. “It’s none of my business, anyway.”

“Clearly, it seems to be. And you’re the one dating the likes of Castor Pendros-Valmont, so why you’re so concerned is anyone’s guess.”

I wanted to kick him. As he was too far, I just stomped my foot like a bratty seven-year-old. “Out with it. Or out of my room!”

“All right, all right.” Holding his hands up in surrender, Lucian commandeered the side of the bed, sitting, and then lying back on it.

With his huge frame filling it, it didn’t look all that humongous all of a sudden.

“But you’re going to listen, and then, you’re going to ask whatever question comes to mind, rather than run it over in your big, beautiful brain until you come up with a theory such as surely he must be dating Kore .”

“A fair assumption,” I argued.

“All the same. I’d rather no assumptions were made on this matter.”

Slowly, I nodded in agreement.

“My grandfather was single for a literal two thousand years. Then he found someone who could touch him, and he proposed on that basis. Rejected by her family for powers beyond her control from a young age, and from her ancestral linage for not being a full-blooded, flesh-hungry monster, my grandmother wanted nothing more than a family—and to settle in a place she could call home. From what my mother told me of it, they were a happy match.”

I wondered what all that had to do with whoever that Thea was, but it was too fascinating to not listen, so I just leaned back against the wardrobe.

“You never met her?”

Lucian shook his head. “She was murdered in the vale seven years before I was born. You know the date. Everyone in the city does. You call it the Great Massacre.”

My eyes widened. “What?”

Everyone knew about the Great Massacre, the night when Cassius Regis lost his mind and murdered hundreds of people.

His wife, Lucian’s grandmother—Cassiopea’s mother—was killed too?

“I’m sure up on the surface, the history isn’t taught that way.

But when, at the start of the Age of Blood, we opened the doors to millions of paranormal creatures fleeing humans from all over the world, we weren’t prepared for it.

In the vale, we’ve always been self-sufficient.

The earth provides what we need. We’ve hunted and farmed what we required.

But the requirements went from a quarter million people to millions overnight. We had to switch gears.”

As he paused, I eagerly asked, “Switch gears how?”

“We’d never revealed our existence to the world before.

What would have been the point? But we needed more food, and we had resources to trade for it.

Gold, yes, but also skills. The Age of Blood, after paranormal creatures revealed their existence to humans, was a mess in a lot of different ways.

Humans rejected sups, yes—and they certainly did their best to hunt those weak enough to defend themselves.

But there was also the flip side. Powerful creatures taking advantage, enslaving, murdering for sport.

That’s why the protector level of the Guard was founded in the first place.

We were guns for hire. And our price in exchange for it was food, and resources to extend our own range. ”

I was wide awake. All of that was news to me. I wanted a notebook. I wanted history books to cross-reference each point. And I’d be damned if I stopped him from saying more.

“My mother was the one who prayed to Pan, singing to him in the temple of Dionysus. And he came to help. But even with the god of nature on our side, it took a good decade for the fields around the vale to produce enough to feed the expanding city. Particularly since, with so many likeminded creatures suddenly in the same place, when they used to live in different countries, thousands of miles away, there were many children, fast. So seven years after the doors were opened? Everything was rationed.”

We were back to the time of the massacre. I leaned in, no longer even caring about an unknown girl’s name.

“It must have been a struggle for valers to see the splendor of our house, the gold and silver and diamonds we wore, while going hungry at night. My grandmother used to volunteer at the old Healing House, next to the Hall of Truce. It’s ashes today.

She just walked a few feet, from the house to the Hall, to return home.

And she was dragged off the streets and murdered.

” His eyes flashed in the darkness again. “Cassius responded in kind.”

I sucked in a breath.

From the moment I’d met the even-tempered, sensible, fun, and well, kind man who’d raised Lucian, I’d struggled to reconcile him with the monster of legends. But this made sense. I would have gladly bathed in blood too, if someone had killed a person I cared about.

“It’s ridiculous that this isn’t taught in school.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is. A filtered version, in any case.

Night Academy does teach it in grade five, I think—to twelve-year-olds.

” Lucian straightened up. “I was sixteen when I asked Cassius about the massacre. He was honest from the get-go. He did not intend to stop at the seven hundred odd who died. He would have taken the life of every man and woman of age in the vale, leaving only the children, to be raised by the rest of us—and watched in case they revealed themselves to be problematic. He wanted his family protected, and the new bloods were a threat.”

I had to be honest. “I…don’t blame him?”

“Nor do I. Which brings us back to Thea.”

I had no clue how it could bring us back to anything. “How?”

Lucian shrugged. “Cassius may not have loved Mira, my grandmother. Their union was an arrangement on both sides. But he cared a great deal for her. And he wished to protect his daughter, his family. That was what made him ruthless. Monstrous. And such instincts are too dangerous in a being of his power. I do not blame Cassius, and I can also see that in the same situation, I’d be the exact same monster. The difference? No one would stop me.”

A shiver danced around my skin at the confession. It was deeply disturbing. Wicked, even. Evil . But each word was like a flick directly to my clit.

There was something seriously wrong with me.

“Thea Briar pursued me since she was just out of her teens. I am uninterested,” he stated baldly. “So, two years ago, I told her I’d wed her when she’s thirty if we’re both still unattached and that was still her wish.”

I stared in silence, my brain taking in the new information.

He was…engaged? I’d fucked an engaged guy?

“This is when you’ll keep your part of the deal and ask what you want to.”

I remained resolutely silent. Mostly because if I didn’t, I would scream at him.

I am uninterested. I told her I’d wed her.

Those two sentences didn’t make sense side by side. One of them had to be a lie. As the second was a fact, it stood to reason that the first was dishonest.

“Kleos. Use your mouth, not your brain.”

He wanted me to speak? Fine. “Get out.”