I drew back my palm to strike him, but he caught my wrist with ease and clapped a bangle around it. Then he captured my other hand and did the same as easily as the first. My flames vanished. Impossibly powerful dispelling shackles, they bound my magic.
I flung myself against the door of the car, trying to wrench it open and fall out into the street. The door did not give. With a cry of rage, I pounded on the glass, but it did not shatter. Artemis’s strength was truly gone from my veins. I kept struggling, fighting to escape him. I will not be taken like this. But as I told myself these things, the truth hit me hard. I had fallen. Artemis had abandoned me. I was in enemy hands.
“I planned for this, you see.” He watched me, a caged bird helplessly beating my wings against the bars.
“Stop struggling.” His voice grated on my ears as I focused my energy on breaking the rear window. His arms closed around me like a vise. Pulling me to him, subduing me with an ease that caused rage to roar through my heart and mind.
“Shhh, shhhhhh, don’t fight them. You couldn’t get them off if you tried.” He kept me stilled against him with one strong arm and ran his long fingers down the side of my neck, tracing the silver runes that had marked me as Artemis’s servant. “Your beautiful skin. How could she mar it like this? It was so perfect.” He spoke as if I were a work of art on a wall in Artemis’s chambers, now defaced. “And this,” he said with deep contempt while perusing the birthmark along my jugular, no doubt pulsing a bright red in my distress.
“Get off me.” But I was outmaneuvered and under his control … for the time being.
He squeezed me closer, his breath in my ear. “For now.” The stranger relaxed his grip. He set me beside him once again and regarded me with his strangely familiar gaze.
He was powerful, far stronger than any ordinary immortal. Strong enough to subdue a warrior of the gods. I was not going to escape with brute force. So I switched tactics—reconnaissance. Calming myself and slowing my heartbeat through sheer will, I began, “Who are you?”
“Don’t you know, Helen?” His eyes twinkled with some dark secret.
“Why are you calling me Helen?”
“Because that’s your name.”
“My name is Elena. You have the wrong person.”
He waved my comment away with a dismissive flick of his wrist. “She changed your name to suit her own vanity. You are Helen. And, I assure you, I would know you anywhere. You, your body, your scent, your”—he glanced down at the apex of my thighs—“everything.”
I took a deep, shuddering breath, if only to calm the bloodlust careening through my veins. I had been kidnapped and muzzled by an insane creature of unimaginable power. I didn’t have a strategy for this situation tucked away in my mind—because this turn of events should have been gods-damned impossible. But I wouldn’t give up my chosen tactic, not until I got all the information I could.
“Who is it you think changed my name?”
“That bitch Artemis. She thought it would be fun to wipe your memory and make you more of her disciple. As if that would change you, make you somehow unrecognizable. For an all-powerful goddess, she truly is a simpleton.” He shook his head.
My anger bubbled over at the slight. “When my mistress finds out what you’ve done, she will flay the skin from your bones, wait for it to grow back, and then do it again and again until you beg for death. If I’m lucky, she’ll allow me to be the one to do the flaying.”
He laughed, a rich sound that still managed to lack any true depth of feeling. “I sincerely doubt that.”
Irritation rankled under my skin. “How do you know me?”
“I already told you,” he said and sank back into the seat, confident I was no longer a danger or a flight risk. “I know everything there is to know about you.”
“Why didn’t my magic harm you?”
He smiled faintly, as if remembering something that amused him. “We made a deal, you and me, a long, long time ago.”
“A deal about my magic?” Goddess give me strength to withstand this delusional fool. I had no memory of him, just the faintest sizzle of recognition on a visceral level.
“Not exactly.” His gaze still raked over me, all of me, possessive.
I stiffened my back. “I demand to know why you think you know me.”
He leveled me with his dead stare, a hint of amusement in the curve of his lip. “Because I’m your husband.”
Chapter Three
Paris
I continued teleporting, skipping from one street corner to the next, keeping the car that held Helen captive in my sights. I could not let her go again, could not give her up as I had before when there was no other choice.