Thanatos shoved the fingers of his left hand through his thick hair, clawed the black strands back and fought with himself, wrestling with the thoughts that twisted and tangled, trying to unravel them and find the beginning of one that would make her believe she was wrong about her family.
“They never abandoned you, Calindria,” he husked, miles away in his thoughts, chasing those ribbons to their endpoints, seeking the right one. He needed to buy himself time to find the way to convince her, so he let his mouth do as it pleased. “Your family are the ones who sent me to find you. I have been searching for you for four years.”
Her brow puckered. “And how long have I been missing?”
He did her the courtesy of looking into her eyes so she would see he was speaking the truth, because he knew this wasn’t going to be easy for her to hear. “Five hundred and seventy years.”
She reached out and gripped a stalagmite as she breathed, “Gods… six centuries.”
Her eyes searched his.
“I’ve been a captive for six centuries?” The shimmer of light in her blue eyes didn’t last. Her face slowly darkened again, her gaze narrowing on him as he sensed anger rising within her, couldn’t mistake it for anything else at this distance. The realm muddied his senses, but not when he was as close to her as he was now. Rage lit her eyes. “They let me rot in a cell for six hundred years?”
“No.” Thanatos held his hands up between them when she looked ready to lash out at him, unleashing her anger on him. “They did not know where you were.”
“A convenient excuse,” she barked and spun on her heel, giving him her back. “Perhaps they thought I would forget what they did if they left me to rot for so long.”
She cast a withering look over her shoulder at him.
“Perhaps they are the liars and you a fool for believing them. They sent you on an errand when they surely would have come themselves if they truly wanted to see me, to set me free.” She stormed away from him and he let her go, waited for the distance to grow between them and his mood to level out before following her.
Because he was not a fool.
Pursuing her too closely right now would only stoke her anger and he needed to calm her down, needed to convince her that he wasn’t lying to her.
“What makes you believe your brother is dead?” He kept pace with her, curious about the answer to that question.
“I saw it.” She didn’t look at him, just kept marching forwards, rounding a bend in the tunnel.
He lost sight of her, tracked her with his senses until he had navigated the bend himself, easing his wings between two spires of rock. She stood at a fork in the path, her head switching back and forth between the two tunnels. One sloped downwards, the other up. Which would she choose?
“Tell me what you saw and I will tell you what I know of your brother, and what he saw.” That earned him another glare.
“You will tell me lies.” She looked back at the tunnels and muttered under her breath. “This entire realm is one of lies. This god of death is no doubt one of them.”
“I am no illusion.” The urge to reach out and take hold of her arm was strong, but he denied it. While touching her might go some way towards making her believe he was as solid and real as she was, it would also frighten her.
She cast another black look at him and then picked the left tunnel. Down it was. He thought perhaps she had chosen it because it was the smaller of the two and she either hoped to lose him or was punishing him for being a liar.
He added determined to her growing list of new attributes as her voice echoed along the tunnel.
“I am not interested in being reunited with my family. They abandoned me and I despise them. I want only their heads.”
That would not do. He frowned at her back as he ducked, dodged and eased his way along the cramped tunnel behind her, sensing how deeply her anger ran, and how dark her belief that her family had abandoned her and her brother was dead had made her.
How was he meant to make her believe those were the lies and that he spoke the truth?
Her family were moving all the realms to bring her back to them.
His thoughts spiralled down a dark path, an unwanted memory surfacing, unleashing another irritating wave of guilt. This time, it wasn’t anything to do with Calindria that made him feel that wretched emotion—it was something he had done.
The very same thing she was doing.
He had closed himself off just as she had, brought up walls to keep others out, thinking he was protecting himself from further hurt by shutting out his family—his twin brother.
But gods, he regretted drifting apart from Hypnos now. Regretted how his actions had altered their relationship. Damn near killed it. Hypnos had always been the one he was closest to and had always been the one guaranteed to have his back. His twin had been there for him in the bad times as well as the good.
And Thanatos had destroyed that.
He looked at Calindria, focused on the darkness he could feel in her, and where it had come from. She hadn’t had someone like Hypnos in her life, hadn’t had her own twin in her life, for a long time now, and it was clear it had taken its toll on her. When he had seen her as a child, she had been filled with light, and now there was only shadows and darkness.
Only anger.
Rage.
Bitterness.
He thought about how he had been long ago too, how his teasing back then had been from the heart and not just for show, a tool he used to keep people at a distance, disarming them and stopping them from seeing the real him. He thought about how, despite how serious he had always been about his duty, he had always been able to kick back around Hypnos and lower his guard. Hypnos had never judged him like the others. His twin had never seen him as the cold, ruthless bastard who hated everyone, who carried out his duty without a shred of mercy or feeling.
Instead, Hypnos had seen the toll it had taken on him, had buoyed him up whenever he had been low, and had always had time for him.
It struck him that he and Calindria were more alike than he ever could have thought possible. They were both twins, both shared a bond with the other half of them and had been close to them, and now they had both drifted apart from their sibling—him because he had chosen to, and her because she’d had no choice.
“Calistos is alive,” he said, needing more than ever to convince her of that, because if one of them could end up being reunited with the other half of their soul, he wanted it to be her. He didn’t know her story, didn’t know the trials she had been through in her captivity, but he knew deep in his heart that she deserved the light of having her twin back in her life more than he did.
“You said that before.” She ducked around another low hanging spike of rock that resembled a row of fangs and made it look as if she was walking into the mouth of a dragon.
“I mean it, Calindria. I do not know how to convince you of it.” He sighed and trudged after her, starting to feel he was fighting a losing battle and only getting her away from this realm of lies, as she called it, and getting her to her family would convince her that he was telling the truth. “Calistos is alive. Your family never abandoned you.”
She scoffed, but said nothing.
Thanatos knew why.
Because they were the same in another regard too.
He too found it easier to hold on to hate, to continue treading the dark path he had made for himself, than admit he was wrong and turn back.