the only thing out of her mouth I believed. I also knew it was true she took everything he did out on his victims because she couldn’t come at him directly, no matter how cruel I found that. Hephaestus’s weapon changed that. She could get revenge on her husband for being utter shit.
I just didn’t think she would stop there. She’d been queen a long time, but she was always second to Zeus. I had no doubt Athena, Ares, and Poseidon were plotting to get rid of Zeus if they could. I just thought Hera wanted them out of the way, so they didn’t challenge her either with that weapon in play.
I was pretty much fine with killing all three of them. Poseidon was mine, and Athena’s death belonged to Pavlina. And really, who didn’t want to kill Ares? I’d met Ares before. He spent a lot of time on Earth pretending to be the God of War. Mostly, he stirred shit up and got people fighting and would disappear when he got bored.
I loathed when he would visit with Poseidon, and I’d have to be in the same room. Ares was just unpleasant in addition to being dumb. He got off on watching people hurt each other. If he wasn’t placing bets with Poseidon over which villages to get to slaughter each other next, he was strutting around like a peacock and demanding everyone tell him he was pretty.
Aphrodite was shallow and vain, but I think that was just because she was gorgeous, even for an Olympian, and she grew up with everyone making her think that mattered. Ares was just as evil as Aphrodite when it came to shallowness, but he didn’t have her grace. Everyone just volunteered to tell Aphrodite she was beautiful like that was the only important thing in the world. Ares went around posturing and begging for compliments, and it was just sad. His ass wasn’t even that nice, and he constantly talked about it.
Now that I thought about it, I wouldn’t mind eating Ares either. A lot of the seaside villages Poseidon set me against to slaughter was because he had a bet with Ares, and he was losing. If they weren’t meddling with people’s lives like that, I wouldn’t have been forced to slaughter entire villages so Poseidon could win some dinars off Ares.
I was getting pissed just thinking about it, and I needed to be focusing on Hera. We were all trained assassins, but none of us moved to put a knife at her throat. It wouldn’t have killed her for good, but I didn’t even snap her neck with my tentacles so we could figure out what to do with her.
Why didn’t I snap her neck? Everyone had weapons at their ankles, but most of our blades were on that incredibly ugly side table of a fat baby drinking wine. That had to have been a gift from Dionysus. I didn’t have a problem with Dionysus, but he’d always been more about partying with mortals than cursing people. He created satyrs, but only because humans begged him to. They considered it a great honor to be turned into a satyr by him. I think that’s why none of us liked the satyrs in the Underworld. They cursed all the other monsters against their will, but the satyrs begged to be turned into one.
But enough about the fucking satyrs. Why didn’t I stop her? I was going to, then Hephaestus said it was his mother. Did I stop because I deferred to Hephaestus? He was technically in charge. This was his stomping ground.
That had to be it. I didn’t trust her, but I didn’t snap her neck because this was Hephaestus’s show. He didn’t kill her right off. And as much as I didn’t like it, if this was his show and he wanted to trust Hera, I’d have to bite my tongue and deal with it.
But I would totally kill her if it came down to it.
Chapter 17
River
F
ucking Hera. I got that she was Hephaestus’s mother and that he thought we should trust her. I believed everything she said to us, but there was still everything from my class working against her. It was hard for me to fall asleep at first, but now I was awake. We were all slowly waking up except Solron, who was still snoring on the sofa bed.
My father was already awake and was sharpening his knife. I bolted to a sitting position when I