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Avery was standing there with his hands braced on the door frame, his face flushed like he’d swam all theway here from the coast.

That panic, the sheer, unadulterated force of it, was all I needed to see.

“Wait!” he yelled, stopping me in my tracks. “You can’t just rush in there.”

“What?” I snapped. Who the hell was this kid tellingmewhat to do?

To his credit, all he did was raise his hands carefully. But he didn’t back down. “He has herandLady Pluto. He’s armed and so are the people with him. You have to play this the right way.”

The logic in that statement was the only thing stopping me from leaving. “Andhowdo you know all of this?”

Avery looked at Antonio and snarled, to which Antonio blinked in confusion. He would have no idea why Avery was that pissed at him, not after his memory was wiped. “Piper overheard you saying something about wanting to kill Apollo and told him. Sebastian came to grab someone off Reyna’s brother’s security team like ten minutes ago.”

Oh, fuck no. “He went after her.” It wasn’t a question. It was a statement that confirmed the feeling I’d had that something was about to go wrong wasn’t entirely off base.

“He’s probably waiting for you,” Lukas said, the words a harsh bite.

“Then I’ll give him what he wants,” I said, rolling my neck when a renewed wave of tension rolled through my body. “This ends now.”

With a quick command to Lukas to go get Dominic, I stepped through a portal into my office.

And the first thing I saw was the tip of an arrow pressing into Reyna’s throat.

Chapter 33

Reyna

Olympus—and I do mean theentiremountain—shook with a clap of thunder when Adrian appeared in his office.

“Ah, there you are,” Sebastian said, his voice confident despite the fact that Adrian looked seconds away from killing him.

Adrian’s eyes connected with mine first, then dropped to the arrow at my throat.

“I’m okay,” I said, the words pushing through the gravel in my throat. I tried to hide my fear, steadying my gaze. Whether I was successful or not, I couldn’t tell. Adrian’s fury was too thick.

His eyes looked over to Rose, who was tied down to his office chair in the corner of the room. Sebastian had used the threat of killing me to force her into letting his men tie her up, her hands bound behind her back in the same way mine were when Sebastian kidnapped me.

Adrian’s eyes returned to mine and the windows rattled with sharp slaps of rain—a deadly storm alreadydescending on Olympus.

Lightning started crackling around his hands, shooting out towards Sebastian then pulling back. With an arrow pressed under my jaw, there was no way he could hit Sebastian without him first pulling the trigger on his crossbow.

“I would advise against plotting my death,” Sebastian warned calmly. Like he was speaking to a friend instead of staring down the god he was trying to overthrow.

“Give meonegood reason why.” I tensed under the full weight of the authority in Adrian’s voice. He never turned that threatening, powerful voice towards me and seeing it in action made me tense even more than the arrow pressed to my skin had.

“Because I’ve planned for this. For over three decades, I have planned for this,” Sebastian said, sick humor trickling into his voice. “I don’t have any heirs.”

Oh,shit. His recklessness was astonishing.

“For the sake of clarity,” Sebastian continued, his voice carrying over Rose’s growl of anger and the rumble of thunder outside. “That means if you kill me, this world will be devoid of its only source of art, music, healing, sunlight—need I continue the list?”

It helped Sebastian’s case that his life source fueled so much of what people loved. A world without art and music and the hope of healing from a sickness was not one most would opt to live in.

And the entire room knew it.

The sparks around Adrian’s hands dimmed ever so slightly. “What. Do. You. Want?”

Sebastian chuckled lightly, pressing one finger over his smile in thought. “You know what I want.”