possible that once was all it would take to change Creon from a savior to an embarrassment.
Now that his target was being protected by his own family, he had few options but to wait and see if she was stupid enough to go out on her own. He was hoping that if she went anywhere it would be to the place she had once called home.
It wasn’t much of a chance, but it was all he had at this point. He couldn’t go back to the yacht and face his other cousins empty-handed. He had to come up with something else—a lead, an opportunity, something—before he involved any of the Hundred. No matter how this turned out, his father could never know about his failure outside the hotel. It was too humiliating to even think about.
Tantalus had finally entrusted Creon with the truth, and for the first time in over nineteen years, Creon had been allowed to hear his father’s actual voice. He hadn’t been allowed in the same room, or seen his father’s face, because that woman had deformed it so monstrously it would be death to look upon him, but for the first time in such a long time Creon had actually spoken to his father and learned about the burden he carried.
His father praised him for being so strong and faithful over the years. Then he told his son what had really happened in that rowboat, how his thoughts and his will had been so grievously twisted that he had had been led into a type of sin that had marked him forever—marked like Medusa. Tantalus admitted his wrongs, repented for them, and told his son that he had been trying to right them ever since. He had sworn to remove the feminine evil of the cestus from the world so that all men, Scions and normals alike, could finally control their lust. Then he had entrusted Creon with the same sacred mission.
And Creon had failed.
Creon felt his phone vibrate in his pocket for the fifth time. He had been ignoring it for a while and he didn’t even want to know who was trying to contact him, but this time he caved and pulled it out to look at the screen. It was his mother. He debated answering for a moment, then finally relented.
“Where are you?” Mildred asked in a low voice.
“Hunting,” Creon replied vaguely, sensing his mother was being watched, maybe even listened to. It had happened before.
“One of the traitors just called me,” she said in an urgent whisper. “She told me about your failure in front of the hotel, and she wants to change sides. She wants her men freed of the cestus. . . .”
Creon heard the crackling sound of his mother’s phone as it brushed up against fabric, as if it had been shoved into a pocket or under a sweater. A few seconds passed during which all Creon could hear was the rhythmic brushing of clothes against the mouthpiece as his mother walked somewhere else.
“Are you still there?” she finally asked when she got to relative safety.
“Yes. Mother, what’s going on?”
“Sssh. Just listen. The Hundred are starting to doubt you. I can’t let them know we’re in contact,” she whispered urgently. “Where are you? She wants to meet right now, to make a plan.”
Helen spent fifteen minutes on the phone with her dad, trying to get him to calm down. He had been just about ready to go down to the police station, and he demanded to know where she had been all night. She didn’t have an answer for him. Jerry was as angry as he had ever been with her. He demanded that she come home immediately. He even yelled at her, which he hadn’t done since she was a kid. Helen wasn’t used to disobeying her father, but she found herself telling him that she was safe and that she wasn’t coming home just yet. She hung up on him while he was still sputtering.
She knew she was being unfair to him, but she didn’t know what else to do. She hadn’t decided if she was going to tell her father about Daphne’s return and then tell him that she was leaving to live with her, or if it was kinder to just disappear. Daphne insisted that a clean break would be better for everyone, including Jerry, but Helen couldn’t quite bring herself to accept that. He might be physically safer, but emotionally he would be destroyed.