Her words resonated through him, their true intent slicing his confusion. What was she doing here? Last week she’d been their neighbor, an old woman who gave too much advice and stole people’s clothing off the line, yet she was Soul Divine, and keeping company with a god and his trusted adviser.
As he grasped for understanding, all he could think of were times he and Elias had caught her spying from her upstairs balcony, or coming over for meals without an invitation, or prodding his arms with her spindly fingers and asking where his energeia was.
She’d been around the Metaxas as long as he could remember.
Not around the Metaxas. Around him.
He jerked his hand free from Seneca’s grasp. “Get away from me.”
Petros jabbed one finger toward Madoc.
“You’ll treat your mother with respect,” he warned.
Madoc laughed coldly. “My mother?” Seneca had to be at least thirty years older than Petros. How did they know each other? Madoc tried to imagine their meeting during a routine tax collection, and the thought of their courtship was less than comforting.
But the anger pulsing off his father was lightened by something softer that Madoc couldn’t immediately recognize.
Love.
Petros was in love with Seneca.
For a brief moment, he wished Elias could hear this. Another time, they would have laughed about it for days.
“My mother is dead,” Madoc said, but before the words were out of his mouth, anger tore through him. When he’d been a child, he’d wanted a mother—someone to protect him from Petros. Where was she when Petros had beaten him? When he’d thrown Madoc to the streets?
No, this wasn’t his mother. Ilena was his mother.
Even if she’d never forgive him for Cassia, he wouldn’t let another fill her place.
“You were too young to know the truth,” Petros said. “And undeserving anyway. Had you shown earlier signs of energeia, I might have been more inclined to share, but you appeared to be pigstock. I knew she’d never come back to me if you were worthless.”
Hatred scoured Madoc’s insides. Petros had taken Cassia. He was responsible for her death. And now he admitted to withholding news of Madoc’s mother just because he’d assumed Madoc was Undivine?
But when Seneca patted Petros’s shoulder, Madoc saw how eager to please his father had become. It was as if all the beatings, all the times he had torn Madoc down for showing no sign of energeia, had been done by a different man.
“My Petros is so impatient.” Seneca’s proud gaze turned cold and unfamiliar. “And yet look at what Madoc has become. A marvel. A living tribute, carved in my likeness.”
Madoc froze.
“He’s the offspring of a goddess, not a god himself,” Geoxus reminded her. “You bred him by mating with one of my Deimans. That makes him mine to use.”
The god’s words stabbed into Madoc’s brain.
Offspring of a goddess.
Bred him.
Mine to use.
Madoc would have laughed if the situation had not been so dire. “So now I’m the son of a goddess? Is there anything else I should know?”
“Madoc,” Ash hissed, and when he glanced her way, he watched her lips form a single word. “Anathrasa.”
Seneca cackled, and cold shivered down Madoc’s limbs. She looked like the old woman he’d known all his life, but there was something different about her now. It was as if her top layer had been shed like the skin of a snake, revealing the slick and poisonous soul beneath.
“I told you,” Petros said quietly to Seneca. “You are not forgotten, Goddess.”
Madoc raked his fingers over his skull. “Anathrasa is dead. The other gods killed her hundreds of years ago.”
“There are many ways to die.” Seneca’s hard gaze flicked to Geoxus. “And there are many ways to live. When stripped of most of one’s powers, one has to become resourceful.”
“Come now,” Geoxus told her, annoyance dragging at his tone. “Pity looks poor, even on you. I give you tithes. I feed you for your services.”
Beside him, Ash flinched. “He feeds you?”
“Gladiators, dear.” Seneca’s lips tilted in a wicked smile. “They are quite sustaining. Stronger than your average Divine. Stavos was particularly hearty.”
She took it from me.
Ash fell back with a wince. Her fear slashed against Madoc, hot and uncontained.
“I saw a record that said some of Geoxus’s top gladiators had been ‘tithed’ before their deaths,” Ash said. Her gaze flicked to Petros. “And I heard him talking about how he’d had to cover up Stavos’s escape. It was all because of you.” She pointed to Seneca, new horror dropping