are careful to color inside the lines. They don’t drink too much, they don’t do drugs, they don’t date or sleep with anyone they shouldn’t. The most scandalous thing any of them have done in the last two months is when Callisto, the oldest, attacked a guy who grabbed her youngest sister’s ass in a bar. It was a gorgeous takedown. One second he was leering at Eurydice, and the next she’d punched him in the throat, knocking him on his ass, and said something in his ear that made him turn a sickly shade of green.
If I have my choice, I wouldn’t cross Callisto. I’m better than she is, but she’s got a rage that makes her unpredictable. Being unpredictable makes her dangerous.
“Eros.” Mother snaps her fingers in front of my face. “Stop daydreaming and do this task for me.”
I sigh. “Which daughter?”
“The daughter no one but her mother will miss.” She smiles slowly, her blue eyes going icy. “Psyche.”
Years of training keep my response to a minimum. I should have known Psyche would be her choice. Callisto is a wild card and as likely to harm Demeter’s reputation as help it. Persephone is untouchable as Hades’s dark queen of the lower city. That leaves Psyche and Eurydice. Eurydice is sweet and as close to innocent as someone can be in Olympus, even with her recent heartbreak. Beyond that, she flits back and forth across the River Styx and spends too much time in Hades’s domain to risk messing with.
Psyche?
She’s something else entirely. She plays the game and plays it well, all without seeming to. She’s got this unassuming thing going on, but I’ve been watching her long enough to notice that she never makes a move by accident. I can’t prove it, of course, but I think she’s got just as savvy a brain in her head as her mother does. “The daughter no one will miss?” I raise my brows. “Or an excuse to punish the Dimitriou daughter who gets more press than you do?”
She sneers. “She’s a fat girl with little style and no substance. The only reason MuseWatch and the other sites follow her around is because she’s a novelty. She’s not even close to my league.”
I don’t argue with her because there’s no point, but the truth is that Psyche is gorgeous and has a style that sets trends in a way Aphrodite can only dream of. Which is exactly the problem. My mother’s decided to take down two birds with one stone.
“The reason is irrelevant.” She props her hands on her hips. “I want this taken care of, Eros. You have to do this for me.”
Something in my chest twinges, but I ignore it. If I believed in souls, I would have sacrificed mine long ago. There is a price for power in Olympus, and with a mother in the Thirteen, I never had a chance at innocence. I don’t mourn the loss, not when I enjoy the benefits so immensely. If it means that sometimes I’m required to do these little tasks for my mother? It’s a small enough price to pay. “I’ll see it done.”
“Before the end of the month.”
That doesn’t give me much time at all. I stomp down on the flicker of resentment and nod. “I’ll see it done.”
“Good.” She twirls away, her skirt once again flaring dramatically around her feet, and strides out of the room.
That’s my mother, all right. Here for the proclamations of revenge and heavy with the demands, but when it comes time to actually do the work, she’s suddenly got somewhere to be.
It’s just as well. I’m good at what I do because I know when to be flashy and when to fly below the radar. Aphrodite wouldn’t know how to be subtle if her life depended on it. I wait a full thirty seconds before I push to my feet and walk to my front door. If she changes her mind and comes back to spout off some more bullshit, she’ll be pissed to find my door locked, but I don’t like being interrupted once I get to planning.
And, frankly, it’s good for my mother to be foiled from time to time.
I head down to the ground floor and flip the lock there and then lock the actual door to my apartment for good measure. Then I head through the rooms to the safe room. Oh, it’s not technically a safe room even if I like to refer to it as such. I