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“Just now. I came right to you.” She looses a hideous little giggle when Zeus lets out a pleased grunt, squeezing her thigh. “The Middle East is burning with wars. The devastation will spread, slowly but surely to the West who can’t leave well enough alone.”

“You are a brilliant little war strategist, my love,” Zeus praises.

“That is why you don’t need him.”

“You may be able to start the wars, but Aresiswar. He is the bloodlust that stains the earth. He is the weapon to end it all. The weapon we must use if we wish to begin again, to show ourselves in all the power of ancient times, to command the worship weare due,” Zeus says loud enough for all the table to hear. “He will submit.”

Athena harrumphs, and Zeus’ hand slides higher. So high…

I can’t watch any more. It’s the worst kind of wrong.

Everything here in Olympus is wrong.

And the wrongness is leaching into the societies of man. The sins of the Gods overwhelming the minds of humanity.

Mom always preached about the evil of the world showing itself for all that it was. That the wrong would become right and right would become wrong. That in the end it would all be revealed.

I think we’re close to that revelation now. Close to understanding that that which cloaks itself in light is truly the darkest of dark. And sometimes within the dark, in the silence of the shadows, is where the good hides. Where good bides its time and builds its strength for a revelation that will win the final war.

In the arena below, Ares falls from his hands to his elbows. My heart falls with him into the deepest pit of my belly.

“If you wish to break him, you must show him that there is something worth breathing for.” Hera’s smooth voice is filled with shards of ice.

Her cold eyes cut to me, and Zeus makes a noise in the back of his throat.

“Run!”Hydra’s voice is loud in my mind. So loud, I hardly hear the snap of gun metal silver wings that burst from Athena’s back as she stands.

I don’t take more than two steps before Athena snatches me into the air with hands that bite into my flesh like the taloned claws of a bird of prey. Below, I see Leuce fighting the guards that have descended on her. She slices the throat of one with a steak knife before burying the blade into the chest of another. And then another is on her.

My eyes snap up to Hydra when she roars a roar of rage and fear. Around the perch she’s made her own each night while we dine is an orb of crackling electricity.

“Don’t fight it!” I scream to her, begging her not to die to save me. “Please.”

Hydra stops her frantic movements, and through the crackling glow of electrified lightning, I see the flash of her eyes. My soul aches and fear burns like acid inside my veins as Leuce is beaten and restrained. Vicious words spill from her lips, the threats deadly even as Zeus orders for her to be taken away.

Taken away to where? What is happening?

Athena cackles diabolically as she flies us high into the angry sky over the bloody arena. Her taloned fingers bite into my flesh as she growls low in my ear, “Scream.”

I shake my head, but I’m too afraid to speak. If she drops me from this height…

My gaze falls on the human man who is looking up at me from where he’s plastered himself against the wall of the amphitheatre. His face is an open book of dread as he watches me from far below, held by the diabolical creature that is Athena.

“Scream!” she yells over the wind that now whips at us.

“Why?”

“Because when he hears his little pet scream, he won’t be able to fight the bloodlust.”

“What bloodlust?”

“The bloodlust that will end it all.”

I shake my head, refusing even if it means—God, Hades, I love you.

I send the prayer into the ether of time and space, believing with all of me that it will find him. That he will hear it. That he will hear my love and the apology in it.

Tears of grief and fear prick my eyes, and Athena laughs over my shoulder. And then she lets me go.