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Her words are a whisper. “There are so many souls trapped in the realm.”

“What happens to them when they die?” I already sense I know her answer, but I fear it all the same. Need to hear it even as I wish I didn’t have to.

“Ares saves the young women, the children. He gives them a home where they can hopefully heal.”

My head whips to her. “Zeus takes children?”

Her hands tremble so violently, she twists them in the sheets to still them. “Yes.”

“How young?”

“The youngest I’ve seen was six. A boy.”

The fucking bastard always did prefer the young boys be the ones sacrificed on his altars, when Gods demanded the blood of the innocent, a practice from the Titans before. A practice I’d thought long since abandoned.

I can’t swallow the curse that splits from between my lips. I ask roughly, “And the men?”

“He makes them fight again and again. Every night as gladiators in the arena,” she says brokenly. “It’s terrible, Hades. So terrible. They die and die again until?—”

She cuts off, but I don’t need her to finish.

They die again and again until they no longer die and become the gladiator Zeus craves.

I need to speak with Hermes. I need to know everything he knows of Olympus, though I’m not certain how much he knows. When I’d banished him from the Underworld for the part he played in Persephone’s murder, he’d made a place for himself in the living realm, avoiding Olympus for the most part.

But the evidence is lining up, and it’s undeniable.

Quietly, I tell her, “He’s building an army of souls.”

Her head snaps up, her wide eyes leak fear as they search mine. “But I thought that was why Demeter wanted the Underworld.”

“It is.”

“So, what do they want to take over then?”

“Everything.”

Heavy silence falls between us. A suffocating silence that sucks life from the very air we breathe.

I don’t miss the way her hands cradle her belly, where the lives our love created grow inside her. I think she’s worrying for them, for our daughters, until she says softly, “I think one of them belongs in Olympus.”

Every part of my body stiffens. “Explain.”

“One of them feels,” she pauses, continues, “a pull to Ares.”

My mind flashes back to the Moirai’s cave, and the vision of my daughters’ souls bound to the souls of Gods. One of those souls had been Poseidon’s. The other had been Ares’.

I hesitate to ask, “And?”

“Ares is good, Hades.”

“He’s always been better than the rest,” I admit.

“History paints him as a war hungry monster.”

“Ares is the God of War,” I say, but tell her even as I remind myself, “He is also the God of Courage.”

Her hand caresses her belly. My eyes follow the movement until, softly, she whispers, “I think he’s meant to save Olympus, with one of our girls at his side. As his Queen.”