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Despite the ease, I couldn’t shake the little trickle of worry that my intuition was holding onto. Thatominous feeling that the other shoe was about to drop.

The proverbial shoe crashed to the ground two minutes later when Rose’s smile dropped into a hard line the second the door behind me slammed open. Rose went deathly still, her limbs moving like they were pushing through thick liquid as she leaned to set her teacup on the table then straightened, folding her hands in her lap. “For the love of Jupiter,” she cursed, looking over my shoulder. “For someone with so much potential, you are one dumb son of a bitch.”

My head whipped around right as a lyrical, smooth laugh sounded from the door. “You knew my mother, Rose. Bitch is too kind a word.”

My breath was caught in my throat, seized by fear. Because I was staring down the barrel of a crossbow. Held steady by Sebastian Apollo, god of so much light and artistry and power, and yet craving more. His multicolored gaze narrowed and his head cocked towards me. “Hello, Reyna.”

At that moment, five of his minions, three men and two women, slithered into the room behind him. I gasped as I realized that they were dragging three of Adrian’s unconscious guards into the room by their feet. Including Emre.

Fuck.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” I asked, seething already.

Sebastian smiled cruelly, and yet impossibly tinged with something charming. “I was prepared to be nice to you, seeing as you both have made this quite easy on me.”

“How’s that?” I snapped. Fucking hell, this guy was arrogant.

“I was going to have to do this twice,” Sebastian said, stepping fully into the room without wavering even an inch on the crossbow that was pointed right at my throat. “Now I don’t.”

“You are—”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Sebastian said, cutting me off as his gaze snapped to Rose. “I wouldn’t do that.”

I turned to look at her, then noticed mounds of shadows building on the floor. Her power working to come protect us.

“Yeah, why’s that?” Rose asked carefully, the shadows pausing in their growth. She didn’t even look like she was using her power, she was so still.

Sebastian smiled again, like this entire thing amused him. He turned to me, pausing to run his hand through his midnight black hair. “Well, Reyna already knows the consequences. Don’t you?” I froze then, growing infinitely more furious at the mention of the threat he’d lorded over me since the beginning of this. His eyebrows creased, a false show of confusion while he pretended to search his memory for something. “I imagine your father is at work.” I let the growl building in my throat go. There was no use hiding my anger. And then Sebastian just had to go and make it ten times worse. “Hey, it’s a Wednesday. Doesn’t your mother join him for lunch?”

My entire body locked up.

Sebastian’s lips pulled into a grin, trapping a breath of laughter behind them. “Thought so.”

“And what, pray tell,” Rose said. When I turned to look at her, she was inspecting her manicure calmly. “Is stopping me from killing you right now?”

Sebastian tsked, coming to lean against the arm ofthe couch opposite us, jerking his chin to his little henchmen to guard the door and keep an eye on us. “Don’t steal my thunder, Rose. That’s not very nice. We’re getting to that.”

Rose scoffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “Dick.”

“Murderer,” Sebastian shot back. Rose did a good job hiding her reaction, but I could tell that word was still a soft spot for her. “If you do anything but cooperate, I’ll kill Reyna. And if I kill her, Adrian is certainly going to try to kill you. And if he’s successful, Dominic is either going to try to return the favor or spend the rest of his miserable life hating him. And he’s not very good at hiding his feelings in that regard, which really just works splendidly in my favor.”

It was a very vivid picture he was painting. Classic, for the god of art.

“Oh, Sebastian,” Rose said, smiling sweetly. “None of that is necessary. I’m the one who’s going to kill you.”

Sebastian cocked his head and folded one hand under his elbow, the one bracing the crossbow, which was, again, pointed directly at the center of my throat. Though, for some reason, fear for my own life was much farther down my list of priorities than I would have imagined. “You had the element of surprise with your brother. You don’t have that with me.”

I clamped down on any reaction before it could expose the one thing possibly saving us. Unless I was misunderstanding Sebastian’s words, it seemed that he didn’t understand the full extent of Rose’s skills.

One of the nights Adrian and I had holed up together, he’d shared her history with me. He wasn’t betraying her confidence by any means. He told me she was openabout it. And it was pivotal to why he blamed himself so much for believing she was capable of fratricide for so many years.

Before releasing a statement that her father was the one responsible for her brother’s death, which had smoothed over a lot of the resentment, but not all of the fear people carried, Rose had never told any of the gods what had actually happened.

But the common belief was that she caught her brother by surprise.

Few knew the full extent of her father’s torture. And the level of cold, brutal skill it formed.

Including Sebastian, it seemed.