Red Mortal Read Online Free PDF

she’d not heard his brokenness in that one small word. Stay.
    “I shall even recite poetry, if it means I gain my way with things,” he offered playfully, then leaning forward, whispered in her ear, “ For in place of steel comes the beauty of the lyre .”
    “You’re quoting Alcman.”
    “A fine Spartan poet for my fine Greek lady.” He stroked her cheek with rough fingertips. “A lady that I am indeed determined to ravish . . . and not next week or next month, Daphne. Today the lyre calls us both.”
    Leonidas was fully experienced in matters of physical intimacy. He’d been married, perhaps even taken lovers throughout the centuries, although she’d never glimpsed any—and she’d never dared ask. He certainly knew a great deal about the act of lovemaking. She, on the other hand, had never been touched intimately . . . except by the man who held her now, and they’d certainly never made love.
    “You don’t like Alcman? Perhaps he’s not romantic enough for my Oracle. Not tempestuous or sensual . . .”
    “He was before your time,” she hedged.
    “Before my time? After? What matter? I am more than a mere brute, sweet Daphne. I’m an educated man. And obviously most wise, which is why I recognized your beauty the moment I first spied you when we made our bargain in Hades . . . and again when you appeared thousands of years later on my moors.”
    Daphne felt something unfamiliar tug at her heart, a long forgotten memory bubbling to the surface, unbidden. Leonidas, lost to her after that moment by the River Styx when he’d gazed upon her, smiling as if she were the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. And then he’d begun to appear confused, glancing around as if she’d vanished from his sight.
    Ares had grabbed hold of her arm, wrenching her away from the warriors. “They cannot see you,” he’d announced coldly. “Only Ajax. You may speak your words to him. None of the others will hear or see you, sister.”
    She closed her eyes against the recollection. “Oh, Leo, I kept hoping you’d be able to see me again, like Ajax. For so many years I kept coming to you, praying you’d know I was there,” she confessed, unable to conceal the pain that memory brought forth. “I couldn’t forget the way you’d looked in Hades. How I’d felt when you gazed into my eyes, that one moment. You . . . you were stunning.”
    “Even Styx couldn’t fully restore my body.” He pressed his face against the crown of her head. It was almost as if he were hiding his scarred face from her. “I’m sure I appeared a great monster that day in Hades. If I stunned you, it was with the horror of my ruined appearance.”
    After his death on the battlefield, Leonidas’s body had been mutilated by the Persians, tossed and paraded on the ends of spears and shields until it became unrecognizable. They hadn’t relented with their mocking, not until the king had been swept into the underworld by Ares. After the bargain was struck, each warrior bathed in Styx itself, but Leo’s own scars and wounds had been too much for even those supernatural waters to eradicate completely. His lower lip was permanently slashed through and disfigured; he had another scar that slanted across his forehead. That didn’t begin to cover the spiderweb of scars that covered his broad back and hands.
    Leo continued, “I am hardly a handsome man. I never was, not even in my youth and mortal life. And that was, uh . . . was before what was done to me.”
    She glanced over her shoulder at him, her eyes growing wide. “You awed me. I was enthralled by you from the very first, but Ares made me invisible before I could speak to you. Perhaps my brother saw something in the way I gazed upon you. Even then he was jealous of your effect on me.”
    “You need not fear your brother any longer,” Leo told her, reining Virtue to a stop from his easy walking gait. He murmured in Greek to the horse and then swung smoothly to the ground. Reaching for her,