Page 92 of This Shattered Star

And there would be no true rest until their head rolled at my feet.

“If I manage to win—if I manage to break my curse with the magic contained in the Temple of Borealis, I want to find who did it.”

“I’m certain that you will.”

Kodhan held my gaze with unflinching conviction. That, and another emotion that had me looking away before the hundreds of butterflies sitting in my stomach decided to take flight. I focused on anything but his eyes—his nose, his cheekbones. His lips.

His throat worked on a swallow as both arms dropped down from behind his head, his left coming to rest at his side while his right fell directly above my head. “There are stories whispered amongst very few about a goddess and her two lovers. Of the havoc wrought from their triangle of betrayal and heartbreak.”

My upper lip curled instantly. “I am the last person who wants to hear about the gods. What of the Sunstar? Why ask about that at all?”

“Give me a minute,” he scolded, and I flicked his arm in response. His growing smile smoothed out the usual hardness coating his features. He seemed content. Relaxed. It suited him. I didn’t think it was possible, but it made him even more attractive. Like he wasn’t already otherworldly beautiful. “The goddess and her first lover were together for millennia. They were happy, despite being described as opposites. Where she was light and harmony, he was violence and discord. A god of chaos.”

A soft tug nagged at my scalp, as if strands of my hair had caught on something. Tilting my head up further, I noticed a lock of my hair was spun around Kodhan’s finger. He toyed with it absentmindedly, twisting and untwisting the strand while he spoke.

“It is said that her second lover won her heart with time. Their love began slowly—barely a trickle at first, spread over a thousand years. They’d known each other long before that. But he showed her that there was more—more to love than what the god of chaos ever provided her.”

“Her second lover, what god was he?” I couldn’t help wanting to know. “He must have been special, at least to some degree, to disrupt a relationship that lasted for so long. Not to mention who he was going against.”

“None of the stories say.”

The words were clipped. And surely I had to be imagining the underlying tone of evasiveness. This was a story, and nothing more. What details could possibly warrant being crossed out?

“The goddess saw her second lover in secret, their meetings innocent until suddenly they were not. Talk about their growing relations spread, fiction oftentimes overtaking facts. Her firstlover heard the whispers—” He stopped abruptly, his sentence ending in a low grunt. “Eloise.”

“Yes?”

Another tug on my hair. Sharper this time.

“I won’t be able to continue the story if you keep going like that.” He ground out the warning through gritted teeth, eyes dipping to his stomach.

I followed his train of sight. My fingers flexed mid-movement where they’d been drawing non-existent shapes, poised atop the exposed skin below his navel. Any lower and they’d have disappeared underneath his pants.

I started to pull away. “Sorry. It’s a bad habit of mine when I’m concentrated. I hadn’t realized—”

He entwined his fingers with mine and brought our joined hands to rest on his chest. “There is nothing to apologize for.” His other hand sunk into my scalp, abandoning the one strand. “If things were up to me, little viper, we would not be spending this time talking.”

The thought of watching him come undone beneath my hand was enticing.

Combined with treacherous flashes of how his lips felt against mine, the throbbing between my legs became an incessant ache. I shifted, trying to offset the feeling, but since the bed was so small, all it did was grind my body against his.

Kodhan groaned. His heart thundered against my fingertips. “If these trials don’t kill me first, you might be the death of me.”

No.I refused to think of the possibility that the last trial could kill him. Killme.The veryrealpossibility.

He squeezed my fingers, noting the way my face fell. Then took a slow, greedy gulp of air. Fighting a war of control. “When the god of chaos heard the whispers,” he said, hoarsely, “blood rained down on anyone the goddess cared about. Anyone who knew about the affair but didn’t tell him. He knew their deathswould torture her because she would live with the blame of their suffering forever. He forged a new title for himself. The God Killer.”

I shuddered. Gods were supposed to be immortal. If he’d managed to kill them… only the stars could help anyone who got in his way. And even then, little could interfere with power that mighty.

“Did he kill her second lover?”

“He tried. Some say he succeeded. Others say the second god was so brutally damaged that if one listens closely on a clear night while standing at the highest peak of any mountain, his cries of pain can still be heard on distant winds.”

This story wasn’t pleasant at all. “What does any of this have to do with the Sunstar?”

“Patience,” he tutted. He slid his hand out from my hair, instead opting to trace the length of my shoulder. “Unable to bear any more death, the goddess rallied all her power and cursed him. Trapped him in a mortal realm thinking that imprisoning him somewhere far away would be a sufficient method to prevent him from causing any more trouble. Which was generous on her part. Every other god wanted him dead.”

“Rightfully so.”