you didn’t count the two times I’d seen Jamaal executed. Seven permanent deaths witnessed over the course of two months.
But today’s was the worst of all. I’d seen Anderson be ruthless before. I knew he had it in him. He was the son of a Fury, for God’s sake. But Emma was his wife. Okay, ex-wife, though they hadn’t exactly filed for divorce in a court of law. The principle was the same. He had stood there and watched her die when he could have saved her.
I kept having to dab at my eyes as we made the silent walk from Cyrus’s house to the garage where we had parked. Anderson was stone-faced, staring straight ahead as he walked. When we reached the car, Anderson pulled the keys out of his jacket pocket and handed them to Blake.
“I’m not fit to drive,” he said. His voice was gravelly, and for the first time I noticed the rim of red around his eyes.
It made me feel a little better to know that Anderson was hurting after what he’d done. I don’t know if I could have borne it if he’d been as indifferent as he’d pretended to be while we were at Cyrus’s. Maybe he’d just been trying to hide his true emotions in front of the enemy.
“It had to be done, boss,” Blake said as he took the keys.
A glint of anger flashed in Anderson’s eyes. He’d called for Emma’s death himself, had stood idly by while Mark killed her, but apparently he didn’t like the implication that she’d needed to die. “You never did like her, did you?”
“There are a lot of people I don’t like, and only a couple of them I’d like to see die. Emma wasn’t one of them. But she wasn’t right in the head, and she was getting worse over time instead of better. I just wanted you to know I thought you did the right thing.”
Blake gave me a look that held both warning and reproach, probably worried I was going to argue, but what would be the point? I’d made my position clear already. Anderson was obviously suffering—as he had been almost from the moment we’d pulled Emma from the pond and he’d seen what she’d become. I wasn’t going to give him an “atta boy” like Blake had, but I wasn’t going to kick him while he was down, either.
Anderson nodded a thank-you at Blake, then climbed into the back of the car. The ride home was even longer and more miserable than the ride out had been.
TWENTY-ONE
I felt far from social when we returned to the mansion, so I made a beeline for my suite and locked the door behind me. A long, scalding-hot shower failed to erase my memories, and my mind was stuck on a continuous loop, replaying Emma’s death over and over again.
Was there something I could have said or done to save her? Some way to convince Anderson or Cyrus that it wasn’t fair to hold an insane woman responsible for her actions?
In some traditions, when you save a person’s life, you then become responsible for that person. It was a cruel, capricious universe that made my rescue the first step on Emma’s path to destruction. In a fair world, Emma would have come out of that pond sane and healthy. Maybe her marriage to Anderson would have dissolved anyway—from what I’d heard, their marriage had already been on shaky footing when Emma was kidnapped—but she would not have fixated on me, nor would she have run off to join the Olympians to spite Anderson.
It burned me somewhere deep inside that I had rescued Emma only to have her die while Anderson looked on.
Because I wasn’t feeling wretched enough already, my mind insisted on dangling my conversation with Maggie in front of me, the conversation during which Maggie had suggested that Emma’s jealousy wasn’t entirely misplaced. No matter how I looked at it, I still saw no sign that Anderson was interested in me that way, but then maybe I didn’t know where to look. Maybe I just didn’t know Anderson well enough yet to pick up the cues. And maybe if I had picked them up, I’d have been able to find some way to discourage him, and then—
My thoughts were spiraling out of control, and I knew it. Logic told me in no uncertain terms that Emma’s death was not my fault. I’d done everything I could to prevent it, and I had absolutely