The Darkest Lie. Gena Showalter

I hate you, man, but please keep talking.” I love you, but shut the hell up! Seriously.

      Strider growled his renewed frustration as they pounded down the steps that led into the dungeon, stained-glass windows giving way to crumbling, bloodstained walls. The air became musty, tainted with sweat, urine and blood. None of it was Scarlet’s, thank the gods. His guilt couldn’t have handled that. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on whom you asked—she wasn’t the only being locked away. They had several Hunters awaiting payback, aka interrogation, aka torture.

      “What if she was lying to you?” his friend asked. The man didn’t know when to quit, and yeah, Gideon knew Strider couldn’t quit. Which was why he didn’t simply punch his friend in the face and beat feet. “What if she’s not really your wife?”

      Gideon snorted. “Forgot to tell you. Sifting through truth and lies is difficult for me.” Except with her, but he wasn’t going to issue that reminder just then.

      “Yeah, but you also told me you don’t know with her.”

      One of them had a perfect memory. Excellent. “There’s no way she can be my wife.” The chances were slim, but yeah, they were there. “I don’t have to do this.”

      When Scarlet had first invaded his dreams and demanded he visit her in this dungeon, he’d been helpless to do otherwise, filled with a need to see her, some part of him recognizing her on a level he still didn’t understand. When she’d alleged they’d kissed, had sex, even wed each other, that same part of him had hummed in agreement.

      Even though he didn’t fucking remember her.

      Why couldn’t he remember her? he wondered for the thousandth time.

      He’d been playing with several theories. The first: the gods had erased his memory. But that raised the question of why. Why would they not want him to recall his own wife? Why had they not erased Scarlet’s memory, as well?

      The second theory: he’d suppressed the memory himself. But again, why would he have done so? How would he have done so? There were a million other things he’d actually like to forget.

      The third: his demon had somehow erased the memory when they were paired. But if that were true, why did he recall his life in the heavens, when he’d been a servant to Zeus, tasked with guarding the former god king at every moment of every day?

      He and Strider stopped at the first cell, where Scarlet had resided the past few weeks. She was asleep on her cot, as he’d known she would be. And as he’d done each time he’d seen her, he sucked in a breath. Lovely. But…

      Mine? Did he want her to be?

      No, of course not. That would complicate the hell out of everything. Not that he’d let it matter. He couldn’t. His friends came first. That’s the way things were, and the way they would always be.

      At least she was clean; he’d made sure she had enough water to drink and to bathe. And she was well fed; he’d made sure food was delivered three times a night. He would do the same when he ultimately returned her. That would have to be enough.

      Don’t hurry, Lies cried, practically jumping from one corner of his skull to the other. Don’t hurry!

      Cram it, buddy. I’ll handle this. But he couldn’t force himself to move just yet. He’d been waiting for this moment forever, it seemed, and wanted to bask in it.

      Bask? He really was becoming a woman.

      Look away before you get an erection, he told himself. All right, now that was more manly. He purposefully shifted his gaze. The walls around her were composed of thick, impenetrable stone. Therefore, she could never see the Hunters imprisoned beside her. Actually, Gideon didn’t care about that. He didn’t want the Hunters seeing her.

      Yeah. He wanted mine. At least for now.

      Speaking of the Hunters, they spotted the warriors through their own bars and shrank into the shadows, their murmurs tapering to quiet. They might have stopped breathing as well, so afraid were they of being singled out. Good. He liked that his enemy feared him.

      They had every reason to do so.

      These men had imprisoned and raped innocent, immortal women in hopes of creating half-breed children they could raise to hate and fight Gideon and his friends. Children who would’ve been able to help the Hunters find Pandora’s box before the Lords could, all in hopes of using the artifact to separate each demon from its host. An act the warriors wouldn’t survive, as man was now bound irrevocably to beast.

       That, too, was part of their punishment for opening that stupid box.

      Gideon withdrew the key to Scarlet’s cell, his new fingers stiff and shaky from disuse, and reached out.

      “Wait.” Strider placed a hard hand on his shoulder, trying to hold him in place. Gideon could have shaken free, but he allowed his friend the illusion of winning this small battle of wills. “You can talk to her here. Get your answers here.”

      But they had an audience, which meant she couldn’t relax. And if she couldn’t relax, she wouldn’t allow him to touch her. Degenerate that he was, he wanted to touch her. Besides, how else was he going to seduce information from her? By telling her how ugly she was? By telling her what he didn’t want to do to her?

      “Don’t ease off, man. Like I haven’t told you countless times, I have no plans to bring her back when I find out what I don’t want to know. Okay?”

      “If you can bring her back. We discussed that little problem already, too. Remember?”

      Kinda hard to forget. Unfortunately. “I won’t be careful. You don’t have my word. But I don’t need to do this. It’s not important to me.”

      That hard hand never left him. “Now isn’t the time to leave us. We have three artifacts, and Galen’s pissed as hell. He’s gonna want revenge for the one we took from him.”

      Galen was leader of the Hunters, as well as a demon-possessed warrior. Only, he looked angelic and was paired with the demon of Hope, so all of his human followers thought he was, indeed, an angel. Because of him, they blamed each of the Lords for the world’s evil. Because of him, they expected a future free of that evil, and fought to the death to achieve it.

      Aeron’s new woman, Olivia, who actually was an honest-to-her-God angel, had stolen that third artifact from the bastard. The Cloak of Invisibility. As there were four artifacts needed to lead the way to Pandora’s box—the All-Seeing Eye (check), the Cage of Compulsion (check), the Cloak of Invisibility (as stated, check) and the Paring Rod (check coming soon)—Galen was desperate to win back the Cloak, as well as confiscate all the others.

      Which meant their war was really heating up.

      Didn’t matter, though. Nothing was going to deter Gideon from his present course of action. Mainly because part of him felt like his very life depended on this.

      “Gid. Dude.”

      He flicked his friend a narrowed glance, lips pulling back in a snarl. “You’re begging to be kissed.” Beaten to hell.

      A moment passed in heavy silence.

      “Fine,” Strider finally muttered, raising his arms, palms out. “Take her.”

      Jeez. “Wasn’t planning on it, but many thanks for the approval.” But why wasn’t Strider collapsed on the ground, out for the count? He’d just lost a challenge, hadn’t he?

      “When will you return?”

      Gideon shrugged. “I wasn’t thinking…a week?” Surely seven days was plenty of time to soften Scarlet toward him and get her to open up about their past. Right now, she seemed to hate his guts. He didn’t know why, but he would. It was a vow. But still. She clearly preferred dangerous men. Why else would she have supposedly married him? So he fit the bill.