Page 39 of Fuse

Never have I truly been tempted to apply the label to him—and wonder, in every clamoring, chaotic corner of my being, if it might really be true. That all the ancient mythmakers and storytellers might have been on to something the modern world has dismissed as a cute story. An adventurous tale for fireside fantasies.

But no.

Zeus is real. And I’m engaged to him.

If he survives long enough to marry me.

At this moment, I’m not sure he remembers who I am. Who he is.

Though I’ve been summoned here by the call of his soul, I barely recognize the force of the fury he’s spewing from his mind and heart—which spins around him like a gyroscopic firestorm, his bare-torsoed body serving as the hub for hundreds of electric lassos that snap and spark and hiss, lighting up the twilight as if it’s high noon again. If sunlight were actually blue. And if everyone actually walked around in vortexes of their own anguish all the time.

Maybe that’s why the gods chose to stay on Olympus.

Because speaking as the mortal in this equation, I don’t know how much longer I can watch him do this. His face, contorted with self-loathing. His body, flinching from the searing self-floggings. But that’s not even the worst of it.

What the hell is he doing to his hands?

What he continues to do, over and over again, driving them at full intensity into the canyon wall—a rock face that was probably striated with amber, brown, and bronze as little as an hour ago. Now, the stone drips with metallic red and brilliant blue, the same pigments covering Reece’s knuckles, wrists, and forearms. He barely stops to stretch out his fists, but when he does, he glares at them like winter tree limbs weighted beneath a ruthless storm.

Only…the storm is him, and ruthlessness is just the start of his self-inflicted bloodletting.

As swiftly as he stops, he’s back at boxing with the cliff. He snarls from the pain and slips in the dark-red puddle around his feet, letting the falling rocks cut into his naked back but refusing to let up by one degree. Denying himself even a shred of mercy. As if I need to have that thesis confirmed, he joins a savage grunt to every blow, adding a visceral version of his pain to the surreal glow on the air.

And the girl who just moaned about getting off the porch and taking action?

She does nothing but stare.

Damn it!

The last time I felt this helpless, Reece had just fried nearly every electron in his blood to rescue me from Faline and was crouched inside a New York apartment shower stall that had turned into a plasma storm. But this canyon isn’t a shower stall, and he’s doing a lot more than crouching and shivering. Yet, like then, he’s aware that I’m here. And that his every pound impacts me too. Though it’s not my blood pooling on the ground, it may as well be.

And that despite how he may be ordering himself to ignore me, his soul has called mine here for a reason.

A certainty that couldn’t be better timed. Because as his next punch reverberates hard and deep into the rock, I fortify my resolve to stay.

Even as his blows cause a twelve-foot-high chunk of cliff to shear off.

I fall to my knees and shield my head as pebbles and dirt pelt around me. A stunned gasp gets me two lungs full of the same grit, and I cough in a fight to survive the blast.

And in that crazy dust fog, I recognize another significant change.

In New York, Kane had been there with one last atta-girl before I’d dared to step into the storm.

But one look up at Reece’s profile, every virulent angle defined by grit and dust and stubble, and I now know the truth behind what my gut’s only suspected to this point.

There won’t be any more encouragements from Kane again.

We’ve really lost him.

The whole world has.

The reality gouges me as deeply as the next punch Reece takes to the cliff. Then the next. The next. The next. More sickening fist cracks. More of his primal growls, escalating into brutal, mournful barks. I force myself to watch despite the stinging tears and wet soot clouding my eyes and new spike every one of his blows hurls into my stomach. But I don’t know how much more I can take. This is more than grief. A further cry than just avoiding his tears.

“Shit.” I gain my feet like rockets have fired beneath me—and if dread can also be rocket fuel, maybe they have. “Reece!” But my voice is the opposite, scratchy and shaky. A girl can’t be blamed after jog-hiking the distance of a few football fields and then finding her fiancé picking a fight with the side of a cliff while wrapped in a scary-as-hell electric vortex.

“Reece!” I edge as close as I can to the outskirts of the sizzling wheels of light, fighting fear as their velocity blows my hair back and yanks on the fine hairs of my arms. “Please!” I yell out. “Baby, it’s me. You know it is. If you can hear me”—holy crap, please hear me—“you’ve got to stop!”

The gyroscope falters.