move away one second before she tells me to. “It seems like I’ve brought you nothing but problems since I got to the lower city.”
“Come here.” I press a kiss to her temple. “Never apologize for bursting into my life, little siren. I don’t regret a moment of my time with you. I don’t want you to regret it, either.”
“Okay,” she whispers. She clings to me in silence as we listen to Eurydice begin to sob in the bathroom, loud enough to be heard over the shower. Finally, Persephone sighs. “I can’t leave her tonight.”
“I know.” I don’t want to let her go, to walk out of this room. Given enough time and distance, she might reconsider how she feels about what happened tonight. I clear my throat. “Thank you for calling my name. I…I don’t know if I would have stopped.” I tense, waiting for the inevitable rejection that confession will bring.
She nods slowly. “That’s why I did it.” She starts to say something else, but the shower shuts off. We both look at the bathroom. Eurydice needs her more than I do tonight.
I give her one last squeeze and force myself to release her. “You’ll be safe here. No matter what else has changed, that hasn’t.”
“Hades…” Her bottom lip wobbles a little before she seems to make an effort to firm it. “He’s going to use this to force me back and bring you to your knees.”
I can’t lie to her, even if a comforting lie might sound nice right now. “He’s going to try.” I turn toward the door. “I won’t let him take you, Persephone. Even if I have to kill him myself.”
She flinches. “I know.” The words aren’t happy ones. If anything, they sound sad. Almost like she’s saying goodbye.
It’s harder than I anticipate to leave her. I can’t shake the feeling that she won’t be there when I get back. But no matter what else is true, Zeus won’t risk throwing away his advantage by striking tonight. He needs the rest of the Thirteen behind him when he comes for me, and that will take time.
I hope.
I find Charon standing outside my study. He’s glaring at the door, but I know him well enough to know he’s still pissed about how things went down tonight. He gives himself a shake when he sees me. “Andreas is waiting.”
“Let’s not keep him waiting any longer, then.”
The old man is already shaking his head as we enter the room and I shut the door. “I knew it would come to this. He’ll crush you just like he crushed your father.” His words slur slightly, and the tumbler of amber liquid in his hand is the obvious culprit.
I give Charon a look, but he shrugs. There’s nothing to say. Even at his advanced age, Andreas does whatever he wants to. I need my people focused, but I have to deal with this first. I owe it to him, after all. I owe him fucking everything.
“I’m not my father.” There was a time when that truth felt like an itch I could never quite scratch. Andreas loved my father, was loyal right down to his bones. The picture he paints of the man is larger than life, a strange sort of expectation that weighed heavily on me as I was growing up. How could I compare with that?
That’s the trick, though. I don’t have to compete with the specter of the man who fathered me. He’s gone. He’s been gone for over thirty years at this point. I’m my own person, and it’s long past time for Andreas to acknowledge that.
I sink into the chair across from him. “I’m not my father,” I repeat slowly. “He trusted the rules and laws and it got him killed. He never saw Zeus coming.” A single truth that I’ll never reconcile. If he was as good as Andreas says, why didn’t he see the snake that Zeus is? Why didn’t he protect us?
I shove the thoughts away. No doubt they’ll be back to plague me in the lonely nights ahead, but right now, they detract from my focus. I can’t afford to miss a step. “I’ve spent my entire life studying Zeus. You think I won’t be able to anticipate him?”
“What can you do?” Andreas sounds like a ghost of himself, his once-booming voice faint and cracking. “What can you do against the king of the gods?”
I push slowly to my feet. “He’s not the only king in Olympus.” I jerk my