Complete Nothing (True Love #2)
Kieran Scott
PROLOGUE
After a time, I could feel nothing save the weight of his feet on my back, one heel pressing sharply between two lower ribs, and the other into the muscle of my shoulder. When he’d first told me to kneel before his throne and proceeded to thrust out his legs to use me as a footstool, I had thought it would be the humiliation that would kill me. But after half an hour, any pride had long since flown through the palace windows. Then it was only the cold, hard marble pressing into my palms and my bare kneecaps. The quivering of my muscles. The pain darting through my joints. I was forced to forget my pride as my brain focused merely on survival, on not collapsing, on refusing to beg for mercy.
It had been five hours, and my resolve was quickly crumbling.
“Orion!” the mighty King Zeus crowed, adjusting his feet, making sure to grind the hard soles of his sandals into my bones. “I know not how you do as a man, but you make for sturdy furniture.”
The guards and lower gods assembled laughed, and Zeus gulped his thirtieth goblet of wine. Another rivulet of sweat snaked its way across my forehead and down my nose until the drop slipped to the tip and clung there, trembling inches above the pool of perspiration I’d been staring at these last few hours.
When it fell, so would I. There was no more surviving this.
And then, a commotion. Guards shouting. A woman’s voice. A slam, a screech, an explosion. The mighty Zeus rose to his feet, and I collapsed in a heap on my side. My arms and legs curled in on themselves, jerking and seizing of their own accord. Several vile guards laughed over my plight, but I didn’t care. I was free. For the moment, I was free.
“What’s the meaning of this?” Zeus demanded of his nearest protector.
Before the guard could answer, a voice rang out through the lofty chamber, echoing against its vaulted ceiling and surrounding us, as clear as day.
“If Orion is alive, I demand to see him! I demand an explanation!”
“Artemis,” I groaned. And in my weakened state I prayed that she would come save me. Even though she had once killed me. Even though she was the reason I’d spent the last two thousand years hanging among the stars, watching life on Earth go on as if I’d never existed. I prayed to her, the goddess protector of women, of all things. I begged.
“Artemis, please. Rescue me.”
Zeus glared down at my coiled form, alarmed. There was a cacophonous crash as Artemis attempted to break through the wall of armored sentries. Then Zeus flicked his wrist, and I experienced a sensation like nothing I’d ever felt before. It was as if a tremendous cricket bat had hit me square in the face, chest, and knees. I flew backward, through the open doorway at the back of the throne room and that of my cell. I slammed against the back wall of the tiny chamber I’d spent the last week or month or ten years inside—I had no way of knowing—and hit the floor so hard I was sure no bone in my body had been left intact. I rolled onto my back and moaned.
“Eros,” I whispered, my voice a mere croak. “Where are you, my love? Where are you?”
I imagined her hovering above me, the sun in the sky casting a beatific halo around the long black mane of her hair as I lay back in the soft grass outside our humble cabin. The smile on her lips brought peace to my heart, and as she gently wiped my brow with her fingertips, the relief was total. If only she were here. If only we had never been found, if only we had devised a way to escape together so that she’d never had to make that hideous bargain with the king. If only, if only, if only . . .
Tears stung my eyes, and I bit down on my bottom lip. I hated the broken, shivering slab of flesh that I’d become, begging goddesses to help me, praying, sometimes, for death. I had thought that I was stronger than this. That I could survive anything. But Zeus was an expert in torture. He had seen, quite literally, everything, and he was very fond of reminding me of this fact. Every creative means of delivering pain and psychological damage that had ever been devised by god or Gorgon or human—he had witnessed everything—and for however long I’d been his prisoner, he’d been perfecting every last technique on me.
“Is it true? Does Orion live?”
I lifted my head. Artemis had somehow made it into the throne room. When I turned my head, I was able to see the smallest sliver of the bright-white chamber, past the golden bars of my cell, across the stone-walled room outside it, and through an open archway. I opened my mouth to scream her name.
Nothing came out. And suddenly I was choking. My throat collapsed in on itself as if an invisible rope was being twisted tighter and tighter and tighter around my neck. Then, just as suddenly, the rope was released, and I was left sputtering and choking and gasping on the floor.
“If you are keeping him here, King, I demand to see him,” Artemis was saying when my coughing subsided and I was able to hear again.
“On what grounds do you make these demands of your king?” Zeus asked, amused.
“He belongs to me!” Artemis cried. “He was my love! I have spent these last two millennia attempting to return him to life, to return him to my side—”
“And you have failed,” Zeus pointed out. “So perhaps, my dear Artemis, he does not belong to you, in the end.”
“Where is he?” Artemis growled.
I saw a flash, and a mighty clatter rang through the palace. The guard at my door fell sideways across the threshold, his eyes rolling back in his head, and my heart began to pound in earnest. Artemis had felled Zeus’s guards. I was both terrified and infused with pure, hot hope. This offense would not sit lightly with Zeus, but it also meant I had a chance. I somehow pushed myself to my knees.