Enraptured by Elisabeth Naughton Read Free Book Online Page B

control has fled and biology takes over. He clenched his jaw, thrust harder, deeper, jostled her against the wallboard. Too shocked to do anything but hold on, her muscles contracted, and as she felt him grow impossibly hard inside her, knew his release was consuming him. But hers was long gone.
    Tears she wasn’t about to shed burned her eyes. He drove deep one last time and groaned, then held still, pinning her to the wall with his body. She tried to steady her racing heart. Couldn’t. Tried to convince herself what she’d just experienced wasn’t real.
    But it was. Gods help her, it was. And a truth so horrendous she didn’t want to acknowledge it as real…became crystal clear.
    He wasn’t just a rogue hybrid causing trouble for Zeus. He was more. And their meeting had not happened by chance.
    He dropped his head against her shoulder, breathed deep. Braced one hand against the wall to steady them both. “My gods,” he mumbled against her, his hot breath tickling her oversensitive skin. “Who the hell are you?”
    She couldn’t tell him. Not now. Not ever. But the déjà vu feeling she’d felt before now made a sick sort of sense.
    She swallowed, braced her hands against his shoulders, and pushed with what little strength she had left. “You’re hurting me.”
    He immediately eased away, dropping her legs to the ground so she could stand. He wasn’t hurting her—at least not physically—but he didn’t need to know that. Hands shaking, she tugged her pants back on, reached for her shirt from the floor and shrugged it on, then found her boot, the whole time avoiding his eyes, trying not to notice the movements he made as he dressed, how similar they were to his .
    How could she have been so stupid? Why hadn’t she seen it from the very beginning? And why in Hades hadn’t Athena warned her?
    “Skyla—”
    She turned for the kitchen. “I need to go.”
    “Wait a minute.”
    “There’s food in the refrigerator if you’re hungry.”
    He grasped her arm just as she reached the door. “Hold on. We need to talk.”
    Panic pushed in. A panic she knew would sweep her under if she didn’t make tracks. So what if she looked like the weak female running from the scene after doing the deed? It wasn’t embarrassment over what they’d done driving her. It was a need for answers. And for an explanation that made no logical sense in a world she’d come to rely on.
    “Look,” she said quickly. “You don’t need to worry. I’m not fertile. Nothing will come of this.”
    “That’s not what I…” His hand tightened around her arm. “ Skata . What the hell just happened?”
    She turned her face toward his. For a split second searched his eyes for some confirmation that what she suspected couldn’t be true. But she didn’t see it. For the first time since they’d met, she saw eyes she’d looked into hundreds of times before, thousands of years ago.
    Cynurus. The man she’d loved with heart and mind and soul. The one she’d nearly sacrificed her order for. The one whose death still haunted her, even now, over two thousand years later.
    The man she was responsible for killing.
    Pain slashed sharp and deep. Dear gods, it really was him. Reincarnated into this…this monster.
    “Skyla—”
    “Forget you met me, daemon. Forget everything about this night. If you know what’s best for you, you’ll forget what it is you seek and you’ll leave this realm. And you’ll never return.”

Chapter 5
    The Fields of Asphodel were as depressing and desolate as Atalanta remembered. As she stood in the middle of the waving gray wheat and stared out at a dull gray sky, she remembered why it had been so easy to recruit souls from this forgotten land to build her army of daemons.
    Those that dwelt here existed between life and death. Frozen in time. Almost as if they’d never existed in the first place. Though some were truly evil and would ultimately find their way to Tartarus to begin punishment, others, the ones