A beat from
The God’s Keeper

The first thing I heard was laughter—low, dangerous, and old enough to make the hairs on my neck rise.

Lucas.

I froze in the hallway. The storm outside had finally passed, leaving the air thick and damp. Knox’s voice floated from the living room, dry as sandpaper.

“I’m serious, Lucas. You nearly leveled half a city.”

“It wasn’t half,” he said. “Three-eighths, maybe. And technically it was already burning when I got there.”

“Oh please,” she shot back. “You were the one who lit it.”

“That’s not how I remember it.”

“Of course not,” Knox said, rolling her eyes—I could hear it. “You were too busy trying to impress me with your godlike temper.”

“It wasn’t temper. It was passion.”

“Passion doesn’t usually involve arson, Lucas.”

There was a pause. Then the faint clink of glass.

He sighed. “You vanished. You were gone for an hour. I thought Eli took you. The whole city was—”

“Lucas,” she interrupted, calm but cutting, “I went to the bathroom.”

Silence.
Long enough that I peeked around the corner.

Knox was perched on the arm of the sofa, hair tied up, smirking. Lucas sat across from her, glaring into a glass of whiskey like it had personally betrayed him.

“I was washing my hands,” she continued. “Next thing I know, the world’s on fire.”

“I didn’t mean to burn it down,” he muttered. “The wind got involved.”

Knox laughed. “Oh, sure. Blame meteorology.”

And that’s when my mouth jumped into the conversation without informing my brain.

“So let me get this straight,” I said, stepping into the room. “He burned down Rome because you went to the bathroom?”

Both of them turned to look at me.
Knox blinked—guilty and amused.
Lucas frowned like I’d insulted his architectural résumé.

“I was worried,” he said defensively.

Knox snorted into her drink.

I shook my head. “You people seriously need couples therapy.”

Eli, from the doorway, not even looking up from his book:
“We tried that. The therapist ascended.”

And that was the moment I realized sarcasm might actually be humanity’s only defense mechanism against gods.