“No! I wasn’t! I won’t!” The man shook his head, raising his hands in surrender. “I just want the crystal. That’s it. Then it’s over.”

“Can you give him the crystal?” Piers asked.

She shook her head, her blue eyes wide again.

“Then he has to die.” The ruffian-for-hire had threatened her. Her family. What if she had a large family like he did? He would do anything to protect them.

Pink gaped at him. She did that a lot. “I don’t know what circus decided to spit you out, or what wardrobe from Narnia, but life has value here. And murder has consequences. You can’t just kill people,” she insisted.

“Fine.” Annoyed, Piers flipped his sword around and brought the hilt down on the man’s temple. Thug Two slumped to the side, unconscious near the refuse pile along with the rest of the garbage. With any luck, he’d have forgotten this coveted crystal when he woke up as well as the blonde woman. He might also have forgotten his own name, but Piers didn’t consider that his problem.

CHAPTER 2

Sophie’s life had gone from normal, if a little boring, to utterly insane. How could a handful of days make such a difference? She kept wondering if she’d blinked and woken up in an alternate reality—one where she had to flee her house in the middle of the night when she heard people breaking into it, where hopping from hotel room to hotel room in the city under false names didn’t throw off the people chasing her, where she ran for her life—repeatedly, where incredibly hot—if really strange—men jumped in to help her for no apparent reason, where Greek gods were real, where…

She started breathing so fast her vision turned spotty.

Where she was about to have a breakdown.

“Breathe. Slowly.” The man put his hand between her shoulder blades. He didn’t press, or rub, or do anything, really, but the heat from his hand gave her something to concentrate on other than the ice-cold panic beating through her system.

Or maybe that was the freezing-cold crystal in her pocket. The Shard of Olympus. The darn thing wasn’t a rock. It was an icicle. And it never melted.

Sophie drew her shoulders back and took a deep breath. She shook herself out a little. The man let his hand fall away from her, and oddly, she missed it. But her pulse was getting back to normal, and they had to get the hell out of here. Novalight’s lackey could wake up any second. Or more could come. He seemed to have an endless supply of minions.

“We need to go.” She glanced from side to side at the miraculously still people-free alley, at a loss for what to do next after days of exhausting herself and her resources. She was a French teacher, not a millionaire expert at subterfuge.