20
APHRODITE
My sister shows up within thirty minutes of the attack, a mere five minutes after my husband finally leaves me alone. She bursts through the door of my office and looks wildly around before landing on me. “Oh thank fuck, you’re okay.”
I blink. “Are you okay?” Helen looks exhausted. There are faint circles beneath her eyes and her normally impeccable clothing looks like she slept in it. “What’s going on?”
“What’s going on is that this city has gone mad.” She drags a hand through her long hair and shuts the door. “We’ve had three assassination attempts in the last twelve hours, including yours.”
“Three?”
“Yeah, some fool tried to drop a shipping container on Poseidon.” She makes a face. “They’re no longer among the living.”
“Oh.” I don’t know if I want to ask whether or not Poseidon was the one to remove that threat.
Helen doesn’t give me a chance to figure it out. She crosses over and crouches down to look at my legs. “Do you need to go to a hospital?”
“No.” I barely resist the urge to brush my fingers against the bandage on my thigh, the memory of my husband’s gentle touch confusing and disorientating. He saved me. I still haven’t had time to process that. Truthfully, I can barely believe it happened, but even more shocking was the quiet moment afterward. The moment where I fell apart and he somehow managed to make me feel safe. I certainly don’t know what to think of that.
“Probably for the best.” Helen sits back on her heels. “I can’t guarantee the hospitals are safe right now. Nowhere is safe, really. This is so fucked.”
Her phone trills, its jaunty little tune totally at odds with the seriousness of the situation. I raise my brows as a deep voice says, “Hey, sexy,” against the music. “Charming.”
“Achilles has a funny sense of humor.” She fishes her phone out of her pocket and frowns. “It’s Perseus. Hold on.” A few button clicks and she answers with video. “Eris is okay.”
Our brother’s face fills the screen. Anyone who didn’t know him would think he looks much the same as ever, but I grew up with him. I recognize the stress deepening the faint lines bracketing his mouth and the fact that he’s starting to get the same dark circles beneath his eyes that Helen is.
He looks at me a long moment. “We’re locking down.”
“That’s a mistake.” Helen shakes her head sharply. “If we look like we’re running scared, the city is going to riot. MuseWatch is already practically salivating over each new attempt. We can’t afford to go into hiding.”
“I don’t give a fuck.” He looks at something off-camera and his expression shutters. “I’ll be with you in a moment, Hera.” A few seconds later, she must leave the room, because he relaxes a little. Hardly matrimonial bliss over there. “We can’t afford to lose another of the Thirteen, and none of the three attempts in the last twenty-four hours actually followed the clause’s parameters. If one of these attempts succeeds, we’re going to either have a violent civilian who doesn’t know a single thing about their new responsibility, or we’re going to have a vacancy that will take time to fill. Neither of those outcomes is acceptable.”
“Or we’re going to have another of Minos’s minions in the role.” Helen makes a face. “Though he’s been remarkably quiet since the wedding. I don’t think he’s behind any of these, and Apollo agrees with me.”
“I. Do. Not. Care.” Perseus bites out the words. “We are locking down.”
“No, Helen’s right.” I’m still feeling a bit shaky, but I’m not about to admit as much to my brother. “Perception matters as much as anything right now. We can’t hide.”
“Then give me an alternative,” he snaps.
“I need a couple hours, but I can send squads of my people to bolster the Thirteen’s security teams.” Helen holds up a hand when our brother starts to argue. “Achilles has spent the last three months organizing our people into a fighting force he’s confident in. I won’t pretend that I’d trust every single one of them with the temptation of close contact with us, but there are enough to form thirteen squads.”
For a moment, I think Perseus will shoot down the idea. Helen might have settled into her role as Ares, but it’s hard to dismiss the sibling roles that have ruled our lives. She’s older than me by a year, but from the time we were children, she’s been softer, taking more after our mother than our father.
Our mother wasn’t hard enough to survive in Olympus.
Gods willing, our sister will be.
I clear my throat. “Either we trust her or we don’t, Perseus.”
He curses, slow and steady. Trust our brother not to ever lose his cool, even when he’s showing a tiny sliver of emotion. “Fine. Do it.” He turns his attention on me. “Your husband is swaying public opinion in his favor, and the time he’s spending with Adonis is only adding fuel to that fire. They look like they’re commiserating over their broken hearts, and it’s garnering too much sympathy.”
“I’m aware,” I manage.
“This stunt today will only further the fiction he’s spinning of being a loving and protective husband. Are you sure he’s not involved in the shooting?”
I blink. It’s a testament to how rattled I still am that I hadn’t even considered this was all a ploy on Hephaestus’s part. He did show up at my office unexpectedly, but surely he’d be better suited to being a widower than saving my life with only one person as a witness. Sele isn’t the most discreet when it comes to gossip, and they won’t keep their cards close to their chest this time.
Still, there’s no way he could have known that.
Unless he’s several steps ahead of me…
Despite myself, I can’t help thinking back to how carefully he touched me. Gentle isn’t a word I’d associate with the man who came into his title through violence, but there’s no denying that he was gentle with me. Or that my comments about my father bothered him.
He’s not that good of an actor. If he was, he would have proven it before now. Right?
I shake my head sharply. “I can’t guarantee anything.”
“Hmmm.” Perseus steeples his hands before his mouth. “Ares, get the squads in place by this afternoon. No one moves until that happens. Tomorrow, we need to meet and discuss what steps to take moving forward.”
I press my hands to my thighs as if that’s enough to ignore the way they’re still shaking, just a little. “Who’s we? I assume you don’t mean the whole of the Thirteen.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. We can’t effectively face this outside threat until we’re unified.” He makes a face and sits back. “An impossible feat with our current Hephaestus, but there’s a target on his back, same as the rest of us.”
Helen sighs. “We’re not going to get anything done. It’d be better if you curated the group. Us. Hera. Demeter. Apollo. Athena. I suppose Hades can come as well.”
I don’t entirely disagree with her, but eight out of Thirteen is not great. “Not Poseidon? Or Hermes and Dionysus?” Artemis and my husband can barely be in the same room with each other, but surely she can see the benefit of unification?
“Poseidon has decided that he’s not concerned with mundane subjects like Olympus’s survival. He isn’t taking my calls.” He looks at her directly. “Dionysus was at that party, and I didn’t send him there, so we can’t guarantee that he’s on our side. He’s too close to Hermes to trust. No, it needs to be all of us or none of us. Better to keep shit out in the open than have meetings behind closed doors—and encourage the ones we don’t trust to do the same.”
“Even Hermes is invited? You still suspect she might be a traitor.”
“At this point, it’s less suspecting and more that I know she is. She was in contact with Minos before he came here. She’s intentionally being difficult and not sharing what she knows about his benefactor and the greater threat to the city. That makes her an enemy.”
Helen shakes her head sharply. “Forget whoever is paying Minos’s way. We can’t deal with Hermes as an enemy.”
“She’s one woman.”
I exchange a look with my sister. Perseus isn’t foolish or impulsive, but that statement is both. I’m not entirely sure what Hermes’s game is, but the fact remains that she’s not actively trying to cut down the rest of the Thirteen, so we need to prioritize dealing with the assassination clause first. “Fine. The whole Thirteen will meet. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
“Stay safe, both of you.” He ends the call.
Helen sighs. “I like how he commands it as if that’s enough to make it true.”
“It’s how he deals with an out-of-control situation.” I shrug, feigning a lightheartedness I don’t feel. “We’ll figure it out.”
“Will we?” She stretches her arms over her head and something in her spine pops. “Sorry, I’m being morose. It feels like they’re one step ahead of us no matter what we do. Minos and his people might not be actively pulling the strings on these attacks, but they’re responsible for the events that got us to this place all the same.”
She’s right, but I don’t like the way her shoulders sag in something akin to defeat. “That’s not entirely true. They never wagered on you as Ares.” I give a faint smile. “We’d be a whole lot worse off if they had control of the military and more of the Thirteen.” I’d bet good money that the original plan was to have their new Ares—either my now-husband or the Minotaur—provide security for Minos’s little house party. With that in play, they would have taken two or even three more titles.
As bad as things are now, they could be so much worse.
“Yeah, I guess that’s true, isn’t it?” She holds out a hand. “I’m glad you’re okay, Eris. You scared the shit out of me. Let’s get you home and—”
“No.”
“What?”
“No, I’m not going home.” I rise without taking her hand. I love my sister, and I mean it when I say she’s a great Ares, but sometimes she still lets her emotions get the better of her. Right now, she’s like our brother and only thinking of keeping me safe, rather than of the implications of running home like I’m scared. “I’ll finish out the day here and then go home.”
To dinner with my husband.
I don’t know how to feel about that, so I put it out of my head. “I have appointments today that can’t be moved. There are three arrangements on the cusp of engagement, and we can’t afford to let them lapse. If we lose support of the legacy families right now…”
She curses. “I hate it, but you’re right. Fine. But you will keep my squad on you at all times.”
“Not in my home.”
Helen props her hands on her hips and glares at me. “So if an assassin bursts through the window—”
“I’m on the fortieth floor. If they’re coming through the window, they’re probably better than your team and it’s a moot point. This isn’t going away anytime soon. We have to find a way forward that doesn’t strip the Thirteen of all agency or they won’t agree to the extra security.” Not that she and my brother could strip the Thirteen of their agency, even if they wanted to.
It takes another fifteen minutes of arguing before my sister leaves, trailing dire promises of what she’ll do if I get hurt because of my hardheadedness. I check in with Sele, who’s already ordered a cleanup crew for the lobby, and then walk slowly back to my office and lock the door.
“Fuck,” I whisper. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
The shakes return with interest. I take a step toward the chairs, but my legs give out and I sink to the floor. “This is ridiculous.” My voice sounds halfway normal even though my bones are currently trying to detach themselves and rattle right out of the room. “I am Eris Kasios and I do not panic over…over…” A pathetic little sob erupts from my lips. “Godsdamn it.”
I pull my legs to my chest and drop my forehead to my knees. It doesn’t help the shakes, but at least I feel the tiniest bit in control like this. I can’t afford to lose it. There’s too much hanging in the balance, and even if my part in the fight might not be vital enough to sink Olympus as a whole… I don’t actually know that for certain. I can’t take it for granted.
I have to stay ten steps ahead of my husband and his family.
I have to.
I will…when I regain the strength to stand…in just a few minutes.