Deliverance [malexmale]

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

"Why are you so devoted to Atlan?"

I'd finally managed to corner Dianna the next day, after another meeting with Atlan in which he politely forced me to eat until my stomach felt like it was bursting. Apparently a single plate of food and two cups of wine was not nearly enough food for a person like me, according to Atlan, and he thought I was lying again, so he sat there and watched me eat a second plate before he let me loose until our first training appointment later.

So far, Atlan appeared to know that I was playing his game. He knew and he was going to try harder to convince me to join him, and he was going to start off by pretending to care and acting like Clymene by forcing me to eat when I didn't want to and train when I really did not feel like getting my ass kicked. If Atlan thought acting like my mother was going to encourage my loyalties to switch, he was really going about this the wrong way.

In the meantime, I needed to find out more about Atlan and how he planned to play this game. And what better way to do that than to pin down his loyal servant?

His only servant, from the looks of things. I had yet to see another living creature in the palace during my stay, and Dianna seemed hopelessly devoted to Atlan. Why, I wanted to know.

So after I fled the dining hall, I managed to guess my way down a hallway of doors until I found myself in the lavish industrial style kitchen that would make Hannibal positively giddy. Dianna was scraping leftovers off into a clay pot, probably to throw out or feed to the animals outside, humming a strange tune.

"Hm," Dianna looked up at my question, then wrinkled her nose, "I had hoped your food coma would've knocked you out along the way." I glared at her impatiently and she rolled her eyes. She certainly didn't act like a servant, but when I brought it up to Atlan, he'd laughed and passed it off as "woman playfulness". Was that even a thing?

"Answer me first," Dianna said, turning away to wash the plate off in the sink, making me frown and approach her to hear her over the rushing water, "What makes you so devoted to your hybrid?" For some reason when she asked, my mind went to Arikos, then I quickly steered my thoughts toward Hannibal, her words making me frown.

"Blind stupidity," I answered. Dianna tsked and shook her head, shaking her hands off over the sink before shutting it off and turning to face me with an arched brow, her arms folding over her chest. If that position didn't call me a smart ass, I wasn't sure what did.

"You trust him, no?" She asked.

"I did up until a short time ago," I muttered, leaning back on the steel counters behind me. Dianna's eyes flickered with something I couldn't identify, something that made her avert her eyes and bite her bottom lip before she swallowed and looked at me.

"May I speak freely?" She asked. I frowned.

"Don't you always?"

"No, not always. A woman knows when to shut up. It's men who have the problem."

"Well, then my apologies on behalf of the penis-bearing population," I replied drolly, making her lips twitch in an attempt at a smile, but it faded when I said, "Continue." She inclined her head. She glanced toward the door, rubbing at her arm before she looked back at me, a darkness seeping into her bright green eyes.

"When I was brought back into this world from the Source," she began, her voice shaking for a moment before she cleared her throat and continued, "I was not returned to my home on the island of Atlantis. I was not given my family back. I was deposited like nothing in the middle of the ocean." She stopped, gritting her teeth tightly and I felt a wave of sympathy for her when I realized how traumatizing that had to be. She'd drowned in the ocean like the rest of them, surely. To have to relive that horrible nightmare again was definitely not a very good welcome basket. And judging from the fact that her family hadn't been returned, she either couldn't find them in the vastness of the universe or they had died before the island sank.