Aster didn’t think Dem would be much of a talker after that performance, but as she cuddled into him, he seemed to open up to her emotionally as well as physically.

“I do care about you. You know that, right?”

“I know, and I care about you. This thing between us . . . it isn’t something I can ignore.” She’d tried, and look how well that had gone.

“Ignoring it doesn’t seem to be working out, does it?” He chuckled.

“Ending up in bed together doesn’t really seem like we are ignoring it, does it?”

They both lay there quietly for a while, the post-orgasm bliss fading. There was no awkwardness, though, nothing that made her feel like she had to fill the silence. Being with Dem was . . . peaceful. Which was ironic considering they were usually at each other’s throats.

The calm that came with the two of them being together was something she’d only ever experienced around him. Anyone else and she’d be running her mouth a mile a minute, trying to keep them engaged, keep them interested, but with Dem, it wasn’t just that she already knew he was interested, it was more that he knew her. They had spent a weekend together, and she’d been totally unguarded because she thought it was a one-time thing. Now, all her neurotic tendencies were taking a back seat, just letting her live.

“Would you like to hear about Isa?” he asked after a while. His voice was soft, as though he didn’t want to intrude on her thoughts.

“If you want to tell me?” She knew that Isa was his soulmate and that he’d locked her up because of the gods tormenting her, but other than that, it was all a blank slate. Aster didn’t feel threatened by the other woman. What she and Dem had was new and strange, and there was no way in hell it wasn’t going to be impacted by his past, so hearing about it could only help, right?

“She was beautiful. The first time I saw her, my heart stopped.” He paused and Aster waited, frozen, unsure what to do in this situation. When he asked, “Are you sure you want to hear this given what we just did? And that we’re still naked together?”

Angling her head to look up at him, she said, “Isa is part of you, and I want to get to know you, so that means I want to get to know about her too.”

He nodded. “I was out chasing down one of Dionysus’ cats, a panther, if I remember correctly, but it was hard. The thing had been moving about so fast that it had sapped my energy. I couldn’t teleport anymore, so I took a train to the furthest destination I could think of in the direction the cat could be heading, hoping to beat it there by some miracle. Isabeau was on the train. She got on a few stops after I did and sat down a few rows in front of me. I didn’t notice her at first, not until the ticket master came by, and then once I had seen her, I couldn’t see anything else.

“Brown ringlets surrounded her face. According to her, it was not a very popular style at the time, but she couldn’t get her hair to do anything else. Her eyes were a clear blue, and they always seemed to see through my bullshit. We started talking, and that was that. We never lost touch, spent all the time we could together. She was fascinating; her opinions were so different from those I had encountered in women before, very modern for the time. Isa probably would have loved what society has become over the last century. She loved reading, couldn’t get enough of Romeo and Juliet. We would go and see it performed whenever we could.

“At some point, Zeus noticed that I was spending time with her, and it all went downhill from there. He started speaking to her, whispering crazy thoughts in a way that only she could hear them. Most of the time, he wasn’t visible to her, but when he was, he’d take my form. Zeus twisted and bent her mind in so many directions that she couldn’t bring herself to believe anything . . .”

Aster could still hear Dem talking, but couldn’t make out the words as the world spun around them. She tried to get his attention, tried to move, to speak, but nothing worked. By the time everything stopped moving, she was nauseous again.

She was in a hospital, an old one. The white-tiled room she stood in held rows of bathtubs, most containing a woman who was submerged up to her neck and covered with a sheet. Along the far wall were a series of boxes, two of which contained women in a similar situation. The boxes closed around their bodies up to their necks. It looked like a horror movie flashback where they showed the building as it was before the murder spree or ghost or whatnot took up residence. A chill that had nothing to do with the sweltering temperature of the room ran over her skin, and she broke out in goosebumps.

“Come on, Isabeau, time’s up. I need you ta be a good girl for me now. No more tantrums.” The nurse had a slight accent that Aster couldn’t place. She sounded like she should be in an old-timey film, with the slight warble in her voice.

Turning, she found the woman who had been speaking. A white apron covered her black floor-length dress, and a white cap was pinned to her hair. The heat and humidity in the room from all those baths must have been overwhelming in an outfit like that. Tucking some hair that had come loose behind her ear, the nurse pulled the blanket off the bath, releasing a cloud of steam.

As she walked forward, Aster could see that Isabeau was restrained within the water; leather cuffs around her wrists and ankles prevented her from moving. Quickly, the nurse unlocked them and had Isa stand, before clothing her in a dress of some kind. Isabeau was being led from the room, and Aster was being dragged along with her, the memory not letting her go.

“There you are, princess, back in your tower.” The woman didn’t say anything offensive, and yet, the way she said princess seemed belittling and almost spiteful.

The room was small, barely containing the metal-framed bed. When Isa sat on it and began softly singing to herself while playing with her hair, Aster knew instinctively that this was how she spent most of her time.

“Isa.” Dem’s voice came from beside her.

Turning to look, Aster saw him standing there, but something was off.

“Were you a good girl for the nurses? Did you have a good bath?”

She nodded and backed up into a corner, pulling the white shift gown down over her knees.

“Do you want to play?”

She violently shook her head, banging it on the bedframe more than once.

“What the hell?” Dem’s voice came from the other side of her now, and she was confused. “Zeus?”

As soon as the name was out of his mouth, the other man disappeared.

“Isabeau, are you well?” Dem asked, kneeling in front of the bed.

“Demetrius?” The brunette’s wild eyes found his.

“I’m here.” His voice was knotted with emotion.

Her hand reached up and clutched at some of her hair. “There were two of you, but you vanished, but you’re here. Two of you. Two of you.” She repeated the phrase over and over again, each time a little quieter, before she pulled on the handful of hair.

The clump that came out made Aster wince in pain.

“Isa love, have I been here frequently of late?”

“You know where you’ve been. Bad man. Bad, bad man.”

“I will protect you. I promise.” Dem was clearly in pain seeing her like this, but there was an undercurrent of anger in his voice as well.

“Protect me from yourself? He wants to protect me, but he hurts me. How could he protect me?”

“It doesn’t matter how, just know that I will.” He reached out to touch her knee, distress etched in every crease on his face, but she flinched away, shrieking her head off as though he’d poured boiling water over her skin. She pulled on more hair. This clump came away easily, as though she’d pulled it out multiple times.

“No touching, I get it. I’m sorry, love.”

The door opened, and a nurse came in, seemingly oblivious to Dem’s presence. Aster guessed by the way that he was moving that he was physically there, but invisible somehow.

“What are we screaming about now, princess?”

“Touchy, touchy. No touchy.”

The nurse gathered up the clumps of hair from the bed and walked out, returning no more than a minute later with a straight jacket, or at least the ancestor of the straight jackets that were used in her time. Wrapping Isa up was like trying to dress a baby, but eventually the nurse won through patience and skill versus wild flailing.

“There you are, princess. Be a good girl now.” Satisfied that Isa was secure, the nurse left her alone again, with the exception of Dem, who apparently made himself visible to her once more.

“I love you, Isa. I always will.”

“I love you, Dem.” She paused after she spoke, as though assessing the words for their accuracy, before adding, “I hate you, Dem.”

His body visibly reacted, hunching in on itself as though he’d been punched.

“You won’t see me again, my love. If you do, scream that beautiful little head of yours off. I hope somehow you will be able to forgive me for everything.”

Aster’s heart clenched. The woman in front of her was so different from the woman Dem had described. She’d never thought the mind could so fully protect itself, but it was obvious that Isa’s mind was trying to do exactly that. There were questions that couldn’t be answered logically, actions that had been taken, decisions made, and at some point, her brain had decided enough was enough.

Aster slowly felt herself waking up from the memory as though it was a dream. She wished it was. When she opened her eyes, she found Dem propped up beside her in bed as he read. She wanted to crawl into his lap and heal this wound that had festered on his soul for all those years. He had to let her, though, which she wasn’t sure he would do yet.

“Welcome back.”

“Thanks.”

“Do I want to know where you were?”

“Probably not, but I should tell you, anyway.” She sighed, knowing that keeping this a secret would doom their fragile bond from the start. “I was in one of your memories. You found Zeus tormenting Isa in what I think was a mental hospital, although to be honest, it looked more like a series of different torture devices.”

“I see.” He was frowning at his book as though he was trying to burn its pages with his eyes. “So, now you know a fraction of what Isa went through just because she chose to be with me. Do you understand why I tried to avoid this?”

“I understood before I saw that. I just don’t agree with your choices. Would she really have wanted you to shut yourself away from the world? To never love again?” Aster ducked her head, trying to make eye contact with him, but he stubbornly looked at his book. The questions she’d posed to him had to be ones he’d thought of before. “Can I ask you something?”

He nodded, eyes guarded as he looked at her.

“Why did the nurse call her princess all the time? Was she royalty?”

He snorted. “About as far from royalty as she could get. The nurses didn’t like that Isa got special attention just because I paid them an exorbitant amount of money for her to have a private room and avoid most of their so-called treatments.”

She thought for a moment about what it must have been like for both Dem and Isa to go through that.

“You know I didn’t choose to see that memory, right?”

He nodded, but she didn’t feel like he truly accepted that she had no control over what she saw. Then again, maybe she was just projecting her own fears onto him. Either way, it didn’t matter. Once she talked to Phobetor, she would be able to figure all of it out. At least, that was what she was hoping would happen.