Tomorrow Bathymaas would have to send her Ēperon out to battle. The Greek gods had been overstepping their bounds for weeks now, and their forces would have to be quelled. This was what her team had been trained for.
Yet …
Over and over, she tried to think of some reason to keep Aricles out of the fight.
Unfortunately, there wasn’t a logical one.
She shouldn’t care. She shouldn’t. It wasn’t her place to have feelings for anyone. But as she contemplated the thought of his being injured, she couldn’t breathe for the ferocious pain inside her. No wonder he’d told her he could do without love.
It was agony.
And it was something she couldn’t tell anyone that she felt.
Not even Aricles.
To do so would only cause him to be harmed. She was never to know emotion and yet he’d managed to make her feel when nothing and no one else ever had.
Her gaze went to Malphas who was formulating their battlefield strategy over a map table. He’d lost his love a long time ago. There was a permanent darkness in his eyes from it and she’d seen him break down into tears from time to time when he thought he was alone … all the times when he’d reach for the locket he wore that contained a bit of hair from his love.
She’d never understood that until now.
“Perhaps we should let the Greeks fight this out for themselves.”
Malphas looked up at her with a stern frown. “Who are you?”
“Bathymaas.”
He laughed. “There’s the goddess I know. The one a second ago … never met her before.”
Ah, now she understood why he’d asked that question.
Sighing, she closed the distance between them so that she could look over his plans. “Are you sure they’re ready?”
“I wouldn’t send them into battle if I wasn’t. They’ve learned to be a team and have bonded well. They no longer see themselves as humans, Apollites, and Atlanteans, but rather your Ēperon. You have their loyalty over their homelands.”
Still, she couldn’t bear the thought of someone striking Aricles. Of them bruising his flawless body.
But she had no choice. She had to send him out and appear to all that she couldn’t care less.
How she was going to do that, she had no idea.
Please, Ari … don’t get hurt.
And yet she had an awful sense of foreboding that said the fight would not go well for any of them.