The CEO's Disgraced Husband Is the Sea God's Commander

4

He moved to the next statue. A towering woman with six arms, each hand gripping a different element. Fire roared silently in one palm. Water spiraled in another. Lightning crackled between her third and fourth fingers. The remaining two hands held pure darkness and blinding light, both somehow existing side by side without canceling each other out.

FREYA. GODDESS OF FATE AND RUIN. WEAVER OF DESTINY ACROSS NINE HUNDRED REALMS.

The next one. A colossus gripping a trident taller than a cathedral, with eyes carved from deep blue crystal that seemed to track Dante's movements as he walked.

NEPTUNE. LORD OF THE ABYSSAL DEPTHS. COMMANDER OF THE ETERNAL TIDES.

Dante's mouth hung open. He turned in a slow, stunned circle, reading inscription after inscription. Gods of thunder. Gods of death. Gods of plague and harvest and shadow and dawn. Deities from Greek mythology, Norse mythology, Roman mythology, and civilizations that had never been recorded by any human tongue. An entire pantheon of cosmic beings from every corner of the universe, all standing together in this impossible sanctuary hidden beneath the ocean.

"This is not a temple." Dante's voice was barely audible. "This is a vault. A vault of gods."

Then the hum started.

It began deep in the floor, a vibration so low he felt it in his bones before his ears even registered the sound. The golden veins in the obsidian ground pulsed faster, brighter, all of them flowing in the same direction like rivers rushing toward a single destination.

Toward one statue.

Mars.

The God of War's carved eyes ignited. Two points of burning crimson light flared to life in the stone face, so vivid and so alive that Dante stumbled backward instinctively. The entire sixty foot statue began to tremble. Hairline cracks spidered across the surface of the stone, and through each crack, molten golden light bled outward like lava pushing through the skin of a volcano.

An invisible force wrapped itself around Dante's chest. It did not push. It pulled. Gently at first, then with an authority so absolute that resisting it never even crossed his mind. His feet moved on their own. Step by step, closer and closer, until he stood directly beneath the towering figure of Mars.

The crimson eyes looked down at him.

And Dante felt something he had never experienced before. Something beyond words. He felt seen. Not observed. Not watched. Seen, in the deepest and most terrifying sense of the word. As if something infinitely older and infinitely more powerful than anything in the mortal world was looking directly into the center of what he was, past his skin, past his bones, past his thoughts, all the way down to the raw, unfinished core of his soul.

And it was deciding whether he was worthy.

One second passed. Two. Three.

The crimson eyes blazed brighter.

The statue exploded.

Not into rubble. Into glory. A supernova of golden particles erupted outward from the stone and hung suspended in the air for one breathtaking second. Millions of glowing fragments, each one smaller than a grain of sand, each one burning with its own miniature sun, forming the exact shape of the God of War one final time. The golden silhouette raised its sword arm toward the stars in a gesture of absolute victory.

Then the shape collapsed inward. Every single particle surged straight into Dante's chest like a golden tidal wave crashing through a paper wall.

The impact lifted him off his feet.

His spine arched backward. His arms flew outward. His mouth opened in a scream that made no sound because the transformation was already ripping through every fiber of his being. Golden light poured out of his eyes, his fingertips, the pores of his skin. His muscles shredded apart at the molecular level and rebuilt themselves harder, denser, woven through with divine energy that was not human anymore.

Knowledge flooded his brain in a single unbroken wave. Ten thousand years of combat mastery. Every blade technique perfected across a thousand celestial wars. Every hand to hand style that had ever existed in any realm. The exact angle needed to dislocate a shoulder, shatter a kneecap, collapse a windpipe, and break through armor made of materials that did not exist on earth. The knowledge did not arrive gradually. It arrived all at once, like an entire library being downloaded into his skull in the span of a single heartbeat.

When it stopped, Dante was on his hands and knees. His entire body hummed with a faint golden glow that faded slowly into his skin. Sweat dripped from his jaw onto the obsidian floor, and where each drop landed, the golden veins pulsed brighter for an instant.

He stared at his own hands. They looked the same. But they were not the same. He could feel it in every tendon, every joint, every strand of muscle fiber. These were not the hands of the man who had boarded a yacht this morning with a ring box in his pocket. These were the hands of something else entirely.

"What did you do to me?" He whispered the question to the empty pedestal where the God of War used to stand.

The sanctuary did not answer.

But where the statue had shattered, a small object lay on the warm obsidian floor. A ring, plain and golden, glowing with soft inner light. Dante reached for it. The moment his fingers closed around the metal, understanding flooded into him without a single word spoken. This ring was the key. With it, he could step into this realm and leave it whenever he willed. This sanctuary, this vault of sleeping gods, now belonged to him.

He slid it onto his finger. It fit perfectly, as if it had been forged for his hand before he was born.

Dante rose to his feet. He turned toward the other statues, his curiosity burning despite the exhaustion still shaking through his legs. He pressed his palm flat against the base of the nearest figure, the six armed Freya.

Nothing. Cold stone. Completely dead.

He tried Neptune. Then the God of Thunder. Then a faceless deity holding a scale made of starlight. Every single one remained dark and dormant, as if they were waiting for a different moment or a different version of him.

Only Mars had answered. For now, that was enough.

Dante closed his eyes, twisted the ring once, and thought of the shore.

The sanctuary dissolved around him like smoke caught in a sudden wind.

He opened his eyes to rain and rock and the sound of waves crashing against the coastline. He stood on solid ground, soaked to the bone but breathing steady. The gash on his temple had already stopped bleeding. His heartbeat was calm and powerful, the heartbeat of something far more than a man.

The abandoned orange lifeboat sat tipped on its side near the water's edge. Empty. No rescue crew. No sirens. No flashing lights. Just wet sand and howling wind and the absolute silence of a woman who had never called.

"She really left me to die." Dante let out a cold, self mocking laugh. He stared at the empty beach for a long moment. "I was drowning in freezing water, and she never even made a single phone call."

He adjusted his soaked jacket. Having absolutely nothing on him, he turned around and started walking back toward the city on foot.

Inside the bright emergency room, Luca lay perfectly still on a white hospital bed. Ginevra paced back and forth across the floor, biting her fingernails.

The senior doctor walked in holding a medical chart.

"He is completely fine. His vitals are perfectly normal. He was merely spooked by the storm. The full body checkup shows absolutely no physical damage."

"Thank God." Ginevra breathed a massive sigh of relief. "Thank you so much, doctor."

She sat on the edge of Luca's bed, stroking his hair affectionately.

Then her eyes widened. Her beautiful face turned completely pale. She grabbed her phone, staring at the blank screen in horror.

"Dante." Her voice trembled. "I forgot to call the maritime rescue team."

She fumbled with the phone, hands shaking as she dialed the maritime rescue line. Her voice cracked with panic as she rattled off their location, the time the storm hit, every detail she could remember.

Behind her, something flickered across Luca's face. A sharp, satisfied gleam, there and gone in an instant, replaced immediately by trembling remorse the moment Ginevra turned back toward him.

"It is all my fault, Ginevra." His voice wavered, thick with manufactured guilt. "Because of me, Dante was left alone in that storm for three whole hours. If something happened to him out there, I will never forgive myself for the rest of my life."

"Do not say that." Ginevra smoothed his hair back from his forehead, her touch impossibly gentle. "None of this is your fault, Luca. None of it. You could not have known any of this would happen."

Luca let his head fall against her shoulder, hiding the smile that curled at the corner of his mouth.