Page 1 of Apollo

CHAPTER ONE

On the bingo card of imagining her own death, Irowen Steed had never reserved a square for this.

Granted, as one of the globe’s most successful headhunters, she’d allowed some room for creative license. Just not enough room for impaled on a pop starlet’s foyer chandelier.

Maybe she should have rewritten things. Especially from the second she’d answered the phone call from Nao Ito.

There was a popular saying on the global hunters’ chat group. Team Ito: where the home field is Hell. She’d quickly sensed enough of the sentiment beneath the sarcasm to ignore the yakuza boss’s first attempts to contact her.

But three and a half weeks ago, Genny had been late getting home. Later—by hours—than her sister’s usual version of late. And Wen’s intuition had started firing on very unpleasant cylinders . . .

Which had been horribly right.

So she’d picked up the call and been given no choice about joining a search in which she’d desired no part. The only other time that happened, she’d done the job well enough to make sure she was never extorted into a job ever again.

Ironically, she was pickier about her gigs than Natasha Korra, the mega pop star owner of the hillside mansion into which she’d snuck a few minutes ago. But Ito made sure his pet project was her wrenching exception. Locating Korra’s lover, the elusive rock star Reks Byrd, had become the most terrifying priority of her days.

And, quite clearly, the last dumb decision of her life.

A fact she was hopelessly doomed to fixate on, bringing a hundred more points of pain than the wounds that had half her body weight bleeding out across this Italian marble floor. She couldn’t exactly ignore the issue by looking away either. The most disgusting damage of it all came courtesy of the long gold arrow embedded in her sternum.

Or maybe it seemed that way because the arrow’s shaft was glowing.

“No,” she mumbled, close to vomiting the metallic sludge in her throat and mouth. Impossible. Two or three or eight internal organs must have been violated by the arrow or part of the palace-sized chandelier with which she’d just pulled a major D’Artagnan tribute, but nothing north of her shoulders had been hit. She was thinking too clearly and feeling too sharply for a brain bleed.

“W-W-Wait. Whoa.”

Maybe parts of her gray matter had truly fallen loose. It was the only explanation for what she saw now, rolling her head to one side despite the chandelier crystals crunching beneath her skull. But blinking harder didn’t help. Neither did an attempt to haul in a breath in the name of clearing the teary haze from her vision.

Oh, God. Everything hurt. Except when she dared to look up again, which filled her horizon with a view like this.

Idiot, idiot, idiot.

Especially because she should be glaring at the stunning male across the marble floor, not sopping down the air with her half-conscious mooning. Whoever he was, even with his waterfall of silver-blond hair, his diamond cutter of a jawline, and his glittering kohl-lined eyes, nothing changed his most important status.

He was her worst enemy come to life.

Gorgeous in all the most distracting ways. Cocky enough to know it. Obnoxious enough to act on it.

Exactly as he had a couple of hours ago, when she’d arrived at the DeLux Club to question Natasha Korra in a more civilized way—if that’s what she realistically labeled as civilized, with eight of her best field soldiers on her heels—only to be shut down by this golden-haired hunk and his own unexpected arrival on the scene. Ah, and there she went again with the creative lexicon. When a paranormally beautiful man used a funnel of fire as his calling card, was it an arrival or an offensive? And did it matter if he didn’t give half a shit about it?

Not even half.

No, the Greek-carving-given-life had been breathtakingly focused, to the point that she almost took notes on his style as soon as he’d snatched up Korra, her Hercules look-a-like date, and their whole speed dating event table with them. In their wake, Wen had nothing to show for her effort, and therefore nothing to hand over to Ito, but a dust-jammed firearm, eight unconscious men, and one very sentient stranger charging her way. A woman who was as blindingly blond and gorgeous as the disappearing statue boy.

A female he and his buddy had called Aphrodite.

Aphrodite.

Wen fought to shake her head, nearly welcoming the fresh glass in her hair. Hopefully it’d jar her mind from its Olympus-themed fever dream. Why did it even matter now? Whether this was Hollywood Hills or the middle of the Acropolis, she was going to bleed out on this marble floor: an elegant death row with her own etched angel to lead her to the next realm. What would Sister Margaretta say now? The sweet nun had always been thrilled about Wen’s fascination with angel stories, until discovering she used them as foundation tales for her fan fic page, Dirty Seraphs.

Damn it. She was in too much pain to be distracted by a single scene from those tales now. Not even as her personal angel of death fixed her again with those eyes, startling as the green glass with which the tips of his hair seemed adorned, in the middle of an expression that looked more like a confession.

But she knew better. He was sorry about something, but not for or to her. That glowing arrow was going to stay right where it was.

“Herc.”

The single syllable from his angular lips confirmed as much, though Wen was less puzzled by his rue than the word he’d used it for. Herc? As in, a nickname for Hercules? The guy standing next to him really looked the part too. But no way was that possible . . .