“If I speak against him so openly, there will be no healing the breach.”
Athena let him go and stepped back. “I cannot help you decide how far you are willing to go to protect her, Thor. I can only say that if Odin has lost your loyalty, the fault is most assuredly his own. And if he acts unwisely now, unreasonably, he does not deserve your support.”
He watched her open her arms, thick with feathers, and shake them into wings. With another breath, she was all owl, and lifted herself up into the trees, and then the sky, leaving him behind.
“She would make you a very fine wife, Thor,” Ra said at his shoulder. “If I were free to choose…” The Egyptian god sighed the rest away and smiled dryly. “I fear I am too old to give her what she deserves, now, but she would make a better match for you than Eve, if you could turn your heart.”
“My father is not wrong about me, Ra. Once my heart is set, it does not change so easily.”
But for a moment, that moment, he almost wished it could.
Chapter Thirty-four: Present
Eve slipped away to the library, hoping she might escape both the DeLeons and the Watsons for a time. It was a struggle to find a comfortable position anymore, but she leaned back in an armchair with her feet up, hands resting on her stomach, and felt some of the knots in her back unkink. When she concentrated, she could feel the baby inside her, contented and calm. The unique mind and presence within her own body had always fascinated her, utterly trusting, so totally innocent, untouched by the world but still part of it.
“Am I intruding?” Adam asked.
She looked up, surprised to find him in the doorway. He had seemed to be avoiding her since his arrival, though she wasn’t sure if that had been his own idea, or Garrit’s. “Only if you’re intending to fuss over me. I’ve had quite enough of that for one day.”
“No.” His lips curved, then thinned in what she thought might have been a repressed smile. “I wouldn’t dream of insulting you that way.”
“It isn’t an insult.”
“Isn’t it?” He came into the room, perching on the edge of the ottoman beside her feet.
“I appreciate their concern,” she answered, trying to keep the note of challenge from her voice. She didn’t have the energy to fight with him, and she was just uncomfortable enough that she wasn’t interested in defending her family, either. “But Garrit fusses over me enough without his parents and his aunt doing it too.”
He tore his gaze from her stomach to stare at the book in his hands. Ryam’s journal, by the dates on the spine. “They’ve made an art of hating me, haven’t they?”
“You shouldn’t have taken it.”
“I thought it might answer some of my questions.” He met her eyes and smiled, offering it to her. “He loved you a great deal to go to all this trouble. To set his family the task of caring for you in perpetuity.”
She frowned slightly as she took the book, following his thoughts. He was thinking about what Juliette had told him. The things he had forced her to tell. “You don’t know who they are, do you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I understand your question.”
“This is Reu’s family, Adam. My House of Lions.”
The warmth drained from his face almost at once, and he stood up, turning away to the window.
“They don’t hate you.”
He laughed, but it was an awful sound. Bitter and angry. “Even you hate me.”
She sighed, watching him lean against the frame of the window, his head bent. The last few days had been easy. He had behaved himself perfectly. Garrit hadn’t even had cause to gripe. Not that it meant he relaxed at all. But she felt at least they had come to some kind of truce. Rene had been as reasonable as she had hoped, and Juliette as calming. The change in Adam had been fundamental, though she couldn’t quite identify it. He had been no more and no less than kind. His arrogance and the hurtful sarcasm of his last visit all but gone. If she was honest with herself, she found it more disconcerting when he was nice, and she saw glimpses of Paris.
“I don’t hate you, Adam.” She wouldn’t lie to him. It was fear, more than anything. Anxiety for what his presence could result in. Maybe she shouldn’t worry. Maybe she didn’t have to. Maybe she was safe. But that was no reason to tempt fate.
He turned to look at her. “But you don’t trust me.”
“No.” She hadn’t trusted Paris, either, and that Adam hadn’t threatened her at all. But she wanted to trust him now. That was the most frightening part.
He smirked. “I’m not sure I would trust me either. Though I think your husband distrusts me enough for both of you.”
“They have a long memory, this family—Oof.” The baby kicked and she stroked her stomach, trying to soothe it.
He sat down again on the ottoman, reaching for her, and then stopped suddenly, his hand suspended over her stomach.
“May I?”
She raised an eyebrow at his tone, so strangely reverent. “If you like.”
He pressed his hand to her stomach and she tried to ignore the heat of his touch, the way it seeped into her body. The baby kicked again, and his eyes lit. He smiled, and it was the most artless expression she had seen on his face since he had arrived before her wedding. Full of an innocent joy. Like the day in the Garden when he had offered her strawberries for the first time. Her heart started to race and she scowled. The baby, feeling her stress, began moving more forcefully and she winced.
He pulled his hand back at once, almost guiltily. “I’m sorry.”
She shook her head. “No, it’s fine. It isn’t you.” She closed her eyes to soothe the mind within her. So undefined but so sensitive. The baby calmed and she looked up at Adam. “See? All better.”
He smiled, but it was forced, as though he were distracted.
He shook his head and stood up, walking to the door. He stopped before he opened it, but he didn’t look at her.
And then he left, the door swinging shut behind him.
She stared after him for a long moment, at the place where he had been, puzzling over the exchange. If they were twins, shouldn’t she have some idea of his thought process? If they were so similar, how were they so different? Adam was the most confounding man she had ever known.
She picked up the journal and let it fall open in her hands. The sketch of Adam in its plastic sleeve stared back at her.
Maybe she was being unfair. It seemed more and more lately that the title of most confounding really belonged to Ryam. At least Adam she could question. Ryam was still baffling her centuries after the fact.
She wasn’t sure what was worse: not knowing the answers, or knowing Garrit seemed to have them but was forbidden to tell her.
They served lamb for dinner, and Eve did her best to ignore the associations. Juliette must have made the menu, she thought, and Garrit must have decided she didn’t need to be bothered by it. As if choosing a main course was going to send her into early labor.
She hadn’t eaten lamb since Troy. Eve stared at her plate and pressed the memories back into the darkness where she had kept them locked away. Before she had married Menelaus, when she had still believed she might escape her fate and the horrors of war with Troy which would follow, she had fled to Athens, throwing herself upon the mercy of Theseus, its king. She hadn’t thought, even for a moment, that she would fall in love—but Theseus! Her throat closed, tears pressing behind her eyes. Theseus had sacrificed a lamb to the gods every day
