“I’m so sorry.” He sounded agonized. Helpless in the face of her despair.

“Your public persona.” Fretfully, she rubbed her forehead. “You said you’ve wanted to drop it for years, but you haven’t. For the same reason, I assume. Because it’s too hard, and you could lose everything, and you’re scared. Too scared to pick your next role, because you’d have to decide which version of you would show up on set.”

The statement didn’t require an answer, and he didn’t give her one.

Instead, after a deep breath, he squared his shoulders. “Can you forgive me?”

The question was gruff, his eyes glassy as he met hers.

She opened her mouth, then pinched it shut. Once. Twice.

When she continued staring at the ceiling, silent, he spoke again. “You don’t owe it to me. I know that. My love doesn’t buy me absolution, and I didn’t say it to sway you. I said it because you should know. No matter what happens between us now, you should know that you’re loved. Even if you don’t forgive me.”

Her cheeks were already tight with salt, and she was crying again. Still.

He loved her. She believed that. And in some ways—in many ways—he really was such a good man. So good, she’d almost believed they could make it work, against all odds.

But she knew the answer to his question, because she knew herself.

She didn’t want to say it, but she would. She had to.

“No,” she finally said. “I can’t forgive you.”

He made a raw, wounded sound, and that only made the tears come faster.

Rolling her head to the side, she finally looked at him again. He was a blur through her flooded eyes, his expression indistinct, and maybe that was for the best.

She knuckled away the wetness from her chin. “I want to go home.”

His love for her didn’t buy him forgiveness, and hers didn’t mean she’d offer it. Which meant this would be their last time alone together. Ever.

When he reached for her hand, though, she didn’t pull away.

Her fingers were trembling and cold, and so were his. He pressed a tender kiss into her palm, then carefully placed her hand back into her lap.

He clicked his seat belt and put the car in drive. “When we get back to Berkeley, I’ll pack my things.”

Her breath hitched again, hard.

But she didn’t argue.

Gods of the Gates: A Howl from Below (Book 2)

E. Wade

“Build a pyre,” Dido told her sister, Anna, as the wind snapped the sails of Aeneas’s fleet and speeded him away and away and away. “Upon it, place all the possessions of our life together. Our bridal bed. The clothing he once wore. All the weapons he abandoned.”

As he abandoned me.

Once, she too was a weapon. A sword, shiny and sharp and lethal. The Berber king Iarbas had found her so, when she’d arrived in North Africa and begged from him a small plot of land, a place of refuge before she resumed her travels.

“Only such land as can be encompassed by an ox hide,” she’d pled sweetly.

His agreement had come after the amused, tolerant laughter of his men. His wise advisers.

Silly woman. Silly request.

First, she honed her blade until a fingertip’s pressure could quarter a man where he stood. Then she took that smelly hide and cut it into such fine, thin strips that she could encircle a substantial fertile hill.

There she’d settled, she and her subjects, before expanding her rule outward and outward again.

A ruler. A queen. Respected and beloved by her people, by Aeneas.

Amidst her fevered passion, her people had grown restless. So had he.

When the pyre was built, she climbed atop and lifted the sword he’d once presented to her while kneeling, the blade laid flat on both his palms. The flat no longer interested her. Only the point.

Her lips, mouthing final words no one would hear, stilled at the sight of him.

Another demigod, equally a trickster. Cupid.

His wings folding gracefully behind him, he glided to a halt atop her mountain of grief. Watched her, sorrow in his expression.

“Have you come to increase my devotion?” Her laugh was the screech of metal, cold and terrible. “It has already driven me to destruction. What more do you intend?”

“No, betrayed queen.” His voice was low, resonant with determination. “I come to free you.”

She tried to laugh again, but it emerged as a helpless sob instead. “I was poised to free myself.”

“Not like this,” he told her. “Not like this.”

The arrow he loosed into her breast then wasn’t sharp or hot. It was blunt and cold. Lead.

And for the first time since she’d caught sight of Aeneas aboard his ship, brown curls caressed by the breeze as he neared her shores, she was once more a blade. So much of one, she had no need of the sword still pointed toward her heart. Not anymore.

The thought of Aeneas brought only disgust, not lust. Not frenzied longing.

Cupid inclined his golden head. “Thus, we are both freed. You from a doomed love. I from the selfish dictates of my treacherous mother.”

With a flick of his wings, he gathered her up and deposited her at the base of the pyre.

“I must return to Psyche.” His hand reached to steady her, but she needed no assistance. “You know what you must do.”

She did. She did.

She would don the mantle of her reign once more, guarding her people from threats without and underneath. Human transgressors, and those who’d crawl from the depths of Tartarus through the gate that gaped within her city walls.

As Cupid become a gilded smudge on the horizon, Dido took a torch and set fire to her life with Aeneas.

26

MARCUS’S HOUSE KEY STILL WORKED. EVEN THOUGH IT felt like it shouldn’t.

Somehow, over the past months, April’s small in-law apartment had become his home instead. A place that was theirs, not just hers. A place he wouldn’t have to leave, not ever.

He’d let himself wallow in that fiction, until he almost forgot it was fiction.

When his front door opened, the frigid air-conditioning within hit him like a slap, and he shivered. Inside, the chill tightened his lungs, but he hadn’t taken a deep breath in almost twenty-four hours anyway.

April had shunted him aside—rightfully; of course rightfully—nearly a day ago, and he was still short of air. Still claustrophobic in a trap of his own making.

Nevertheless, he forced himself to walk inside and shut the door behind him. Lock it. Set the alarm, because his home was filled with valuables, even if he currently felt worthless.

His keys and wallet went on the console by the door, in a hammered bronze bowl. His shoes belonged in the entryway closet. His broken heart . . . well, he couldn’t organize that away.

He shoved his shaking hands in his pockets and contemplated the airy expanse of the first floor, all open floor plan and high ceilings and sunlit windows and impeccable furnishings. White walls and metallic accents and minimalist, low-slung furniture.

He’d never really felt at home anywhere before meeting April. Not even here.

His throat ached. He headed to the kitchen for a glassful of chilled sparkling water from the dispenser in the refrigerator door, his footsteps faintly echoing in the spartan space.

The cheap water bottle he’d bought at a gas station had warmed during the trip from Berkeley to Los Angeles, and he’d left it in the car. He didn’t need any unnecessary reminders of today, however inconsequential.

Every time he let his mind wander, April was crying again.

In another age, he’d have knelt before her then. Prostrated himself. Anything, anything that would serve to appease at least a small corner of his endless, ever-unfurling self-loathing.

He’d wept too, of course—but not until he’d left her home, because damned if he’d cry in front of her. Not like that. It would be inadvertent manipulation, because she cared about him. He knew it, even if he also knew he didn’t deserve it.

If she ever forgave him, if she ever took him back—and she’d do neither—he didn’t want her to do so out of pity. Never seeing her again would hurt less.

Probably. Maybe.

He sipped his water, the carbonation an irritant to his already-raw throat.

Beneath his palm, the polished concrete countertop was smooth and cold. Laying his phone on top of it, he idly scrolled through recent messages on his cell.

Texts from Alex about the optimal thickness of hot-water crusts for savory pies, as well as complaints about Lauren’s dampening disregard for both British baking shows and pegging. An obscenity-laden screed from Carah via DM, something to do with the upcoming awards season. An email from his father, which Marcus deleted without reading. A half dozen more emails from his agent, which he kept but didn’t open. A missed phone call from Summer.

The cast chat had been active the last few hours too. Active and on edge, probably because of the upcoming convention.

Carah: SURPRISE, SURPRISE, MOTHERFUCKERS

Carah: Ron and R.J. officially backed out of Con of the Gates, citing a too-heavy workload

Carah: Too-heavy workload, my sweet ass

Alex: I’m assuming they mean the workload for their Star Fighters project, since they were nowhere to be found on OUR set this last season

Alex: Except in front of the cameras, naturally, for special features and interviews highlighting their genius and dedication

Maria: Well, they certainly weren’t working on our scripts

Ian: They were around plenty, whiners

Peter: More tuna hallucinations, poor Ian

Peter: It’s a shame everyone will miss Ron and R.J.’s session, The Art and Science of Failing Upwards As Cishet White Guys

Ian: Fuck you, Peter

Ian: You’re a has-been

Ian: and since you’ve never been on a successful show before, you have no idea how things work, especially off on your stupid little island

Alex: Is Tuna Rage a thing? Like ‘Roid Rage, only smellier and less articulate?

Maria: “Fuck you, Peter”?

Maria: Oh, Ian, I’m so sorry

Maria: I’m afraid Peter requires a certain level of