Chapter 635: Why (2)

Grey whistled under his breath. "Your dad sounds like a real piece of shit."

"He was, and he’d have been proud of it."

"I think I’d have liked him."

Amunet stared at him, then laughed so quietly that he felt it more than heard it, a small tremble rippling through the flat plane of her stomach where it pressed against his own. The sound caught him off guard, and he forgot to say anything clever, simply watching the way the laugh softened her whole face before it faded.

Then he noticed the light.

It was subtle, barely more than a faint shimmer in the air near the ceiling, but Grey’s Resonant Sense could feel what it was instantly, and the pain he had experienced at its hands several times before was even more searing. The Genesis System.

It seemed they were running out of time unless they escalated further.

Amunet noticed it at almost the same moment, her eyes flicking upward before snapping back to his with an expression that clearly made it his problem.

Grey hooked two fingers beneath the waistband of her panties.

"Don’t you fucking dare--," was all Amunet managed to get out.

The fabric tore with a soft, satisfying rip, and Grey tossed the ruined scraps somewhere over his shoulder without bothering to see where they landed. Amunet went rigid in his arms, her thighs clamping hard around his waist as cool air kissed skin that had been covered a second earlier, and her nails dug into the back of his neck so viciously that he was fairly sure she drew blood again.

"Those were new, you animal."

"Light’s gone, isn’t it?"

Amunet glanced upward, found the air settled once more, and her jaw clenched hard enough that Grey watched the muscle jump beneath her skin. She didn’t argue, though. Instead she pressed herself closer, her bare hips sinking against him until only his pants separated them, and the heat of her soaked straight through the fabric in a way that sent every coherent thought in his head scattering.

Grey exhaled slowly through his nose.

"Okay," he muttered. "That one’s on me."

"Then fucking talk, Grey."

He tried, and for several seconds he genuinely tried, but Amunet had started moving against him in slow, deliberate rolls of her hips, each one dragging her along the length of him and punching a sharp breath from his lungs.

Her breasts flattened against his chest while her back arched away from the wall, the long line of her spine curving in a graceful arch. Grey’s hands found her waist on their own, fingers spreading across the narrow dip of her lower back to pull her closer.

She looked like something carved rather than born, so perfect in so many ways Grey’s senses couldn’t find an imperfection even when they tried.

The muscle along her stomach shifted beneath smooth skin with every roll of her hips, her thighs lean and strong where they gripped him, and the flush creeping down from her throat had spread across her collarbones and over the tops of her breasts, painting her a deeper shade of bronze with every droplet of sweat that accumulated in the heat between them.

A loose strand of hair had caught against her damp lips, and Grey reached up without thinking and brushed it away with his thumb.

He wasn’t sure anymore whether she was selling the scene or losing herself in it. Judging by her uneven breathing, the tremble in her thighs each time she ground against him, and the way her eyelids had grown heavy, he suspected she didn’t know either.

Grey swallowed hard and forced out the question that had been sitting at the back of his mind the whole time.

"What about the Egyptian Gods? Are they real too?"

Amunet’s hips stilled.

She blinked at him, lips still parted, looking at him like he had suddenly started speaking backwards. Then something shifted behind her eyes, and Grey watched the haze drain out of her expression until only shock remained.

The Gods who had descended upon her world were the same ones Greece and Rome would come to worship. Prometheus, Kronos, the ones whose names her people had heard from traders and scholars and strange visitors carrying gifts beyond imagination, and she had always accepted that their presence explained how those civilizations climbed so high so quickly.

But her people had never worshipped them.

Egypt had its own Gods, older and stranger, and in all her life Amunet had never once seen one of them walk the earth. Yet Egypt had stood shoulder to shoulder with those other civilizations, rivaling and in many ways surpassing them, while its people prayed to Gods that had supposedly never answered.

If one civilization rose because its Gods were real, and another reached the same heights while its Gods were false, then where the hell had Egypt’s power come from?

Her heart began pounding so hard she could feel it in her throat.

"I don’t know," she whispered.

Her voice sounded thin and far away, even to her own ears, and her fingers had twisted so tightly into Grey’s shirt that the fabric bunched in her fists. Every certainty she had carried across three thousand years seemed to tilt beneath her, and she had no idea which way it was going to fall.

Grey didn’t push. He only watched her, the smirk gone from his face, his hands warm and still against her waist while he waited for whatever came next.

Amunet looked up at him.

Their eyes met, and for the first time since she had dragged him into this room, she forgot about the curtains, the flickering light, the Council, and even the fact that she was completely naked in his arms.

There was only the steady weight of his gaze and the words he had just spoken that felt like they had burst free from a dam. How did he always manage to see things so clearly? Was that what happened when you were so care free?

When could she be so free?

Grey’s breath brushed against her lips, sparking like electricity along her skin.

Neither of them decided it. They simply leaned in at the same time, slowly enough that either could have stopped, and neither did.

Amunet’s eyes fell shut as his mouth met hers, her arms sliding around his neck to drag him closer, while Grey pressed her back against the wall and kissed her back just the same.