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Icarus

I don’t know how long I sleep for. Not long, judging from my headache and the drowsiness clinging to me, urging me back to blessed unconsciousness.

Unfortunately, the one-eyed man from earlier is currently standing over me, so close to the edge of the bed that I could reach out and touch him. He doesn’t look particularly happy with me. Shit.

Without meaning to, my gaze skates toward the door. Looking for Poseidon? But that doesn’t make any sense. He hates me just as much as the rest of the Olympians do. And why not? My father was instrumental in the events that brought down the barrier protecting Olympus from the rest of the world. Or at least that was always the plan. That, and destabilizing their power structure so that when Circe finally sailed up with her squadron of ships, the city was ripe for the plucking.

By all accounts, there’s no reason to keep me alive. I might have a wealth of knowledge about the key players in Circe’s inner circle, but it’s not like anyone in this city would believe me. The only person who gave me the benefit of the doubt sailed off with her monster of a boyfriend. The Minotaur will protect Ariadne. That, at least, I don’t have to worry about.

I don’t have to worry about…anything. Not even my unwelcome guest. I’m not going to survive this. My chance of obtaining freedom is gone forever, and maybe if I live long enough I’ll mourn that loss, but right now all I feel is relief. There’s no one left to disappoint.

None of that explains why this man is in my room, though.

I stretch out carefully and prop my arms behind my head. “Go ahead. Look your fill.”

He looks at me like I’m dog shit on the bottom of his shoe. “I don’t expect you to know this, but when your people killed Triton, there were others caught in the crossfire.”

My bravado threatens to buckle. I had nothing to do with any of that. Responsibility would require my father to trust me enough to tell me anything. It would require me to be something other than the son he never wanted. The son he claimed he never needed. Apparently, my failure as a son was so spectacular he had to foster two sons to fill the void created by my disastrous performance.

“Sorry?” I don’t quite manage to sound as irreverent as I’m aiming. The word crumples around the edges. “That wasn’t my op.”

“But it was your father’s. He bribed Triton to bring people into Olympus. And once he did, they murdered him and his guards. Including my sister.”

Growing up as Minos’s only biological son, I may not have had a front-row seat to all of the sins he committed, but I was privy to enough of them to develop a thick skin. It was the only way to survive. He wasn’t going to change his actions just because I find murder stomach-turning. If he knew how much I hated everything he did, he would have taken away the sliver of freedom that made my life worth living. I could say I didn’t have any other choice, but somehow I don’t think this stranger wants to hear it. “I’m sorry,” I say again, managing to make it sound more sincere this time.

“Maybe.” He lifts his hands, and I go cold at the sight of his leather gloves. “You will be sorry. I’ll make sure of that.”

I don’t stop to think. I burst into motion, rolling across the bed away from him. Some part of me already knows what I’ll find when my hand lands on the knob: it doesn’t turn beneath my grasp. Locked. Of course. This person, intent on revenge, wouldn’t leave anything up to chance. Of course he locked the door behind him when he came to murder me.

He grabs my arm before I have a chance to decide on a different course of action, spinning me around and slamming me back against the door. He pins me there with a hand across my throat. “What is Circe planning?”

I might laugh if I had the breath for it. So, not a murder. An interrogation. Of course. It was my mistake for thinking Poseidon’s honesty would prevent him from getting his hands dirty—or allowing his people to get their hands dirty. Naive of me.

“Answer the question.”

I let my head fall back to rest against the door. “The answer to that is above my pay grade. But even so…it doesn’t take a genius to look around and draw the obvious conclusions. Her squadron is in the bay, so she intends to take the city.”

He tightens his grip around my throat and slams me back against the door. “No shit. Give me the details.”

“I don’t have details.” If I did, I would’ve bargained for my freedom and my sister’s freedom long before now. Gods, that is what I should have been focusing on. If I’d managed to get those details, I could have saved us both.

It was only in the last couple of weeks, when our father turned on my sister, that I realized there was no coming back from this. There was no gaining his approval. We had disappointed him one time too many, and he’d rather see us dead than see us turn against him.

If I live long enough, eventually I’m going to have to deal with the truth that he turned a gun on me, with every intention to pull the trigger and end my life. That my sweet, precious sister killed him first. That she bloodied her hands to keep me among the living. That she will bear scars on her soul because of my failures.

Fortunately, I’m likely to die before I ever have to face that reckoning properly. Maybe it’ll even happen today.

The stranger glares. I think he might question me again, but instead he moves too fast for me to brace, punching me in the stomach. The breath rushes from my lungs, and every muscle in my body seizes up as I bend in half with an instinctive need to protect myself from the blow that already happened. One would think I’d have learned to take a punch by now. Apparently not.

He uses the opportunity of my agony to haul me back to the bed and throw me down on my back. I’m still trying to force air into my seizing lungs when he straddles me and shoves my hands over my head. A click of handcuffs registers before the feeling of cold metal against my wrists. The man sits back on his heels, his disgust written all over his face. “It’s pathetic that someone so weak helped orchestrate so much pain. So many deaths of people better than you.”

My first full breath comes out in a rough laugh. It’s painful that everyone from my own father to this stranger have such an accurate read on me, but it’s nothing new. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

“Okay.” He reaches into his pocket and withdraws a switchblade. “I’m going to cut you, again and again, until you tell me exactly what I need to know. Poseidon might be pissed that you bled out all over his fresh sheets, but the information you give me will make it all worthwhile.”

“Torture.” I make a face. “I would think a big, strong man like you would know that torture doesn’t work. That’s practically Bad Guy 101. Except I suppose you think you’re the good guy? Color me not convinced.”

He presses the tip of the knife to the center of my chest, right at the bottom of my sternum. “Yeah, that’s the thing. Poseidon is the good guy. Not me. I figure if you blubber like a baby, at least something that comes out of your pathetic little mouth will be true. That’s enough for me.”

He might say he’s a bad guy, but it’s not the truth. He’s convinced himself he can make this work. He can make himself strip me apart piece by piece and come out okay on the other end. It’s sad. Somehow, I don’t think he will thank me for saying as much, though.

I take a ragged breath. “I’ll be honest. All it will take is you cutting me once, and I’ll tell you anything you want to know. I’m more a fan of giving pain than taking it. That doesn’t mean my information will be accurate. I don’t have what you’re looking for.”

“We’ll see.” There’s no further warning. He drags the knife down my stomach in a shallow slash. I thought that getting punched was agony. It’s nothing compared to this. It’s no mere scratch that he’s dealt me. It fucking hurts.

“I don’t know anything,” I gasp. I can’t breathe, not even to cry out. Somehow, a part of me didn’t really believe he’d do it.

“I think you do.” He drags the knife in a parallel line to the first. Another searing stroke that has me clamping my jaw shut to contain a scream. “What is Circe planning?”

“Death and destruction to all Olympians, probably. Definitely the Thirteen. She doesn’t seem to like them much.” I hardly sound like myself. Surely that’s not my voice, so rough and thready?

He cuts me a third time.

This time I can’t stop myself from crying out. “I told you what you wanted to know! I answered you. You’re supposed to stop hurting me.”

He grins, but not like anything is funny. His eyes look almost sad. “When did I ever say that I would stop hurting you if you answered me?” He cuts me again before I can find an answer.

And so it goes. My world narrows to each cut, to each new pain that blossoms in the wake of the last. I answer his questions…I think. But I don’t know what I say. There’s no space for intention when all I can experience is agony. At one point, I start screaming and I can’t make myself stop.

That’s when the door slams open and he appears.

Poseidon, looking like an avenging angel, but maybe that’s the haze of pain talking. His fury is written all over his roughly handsome face. It only becomes more pronounced as he takes in the scene: his man straddling me, the mattress soaked with my blood. I half expect him to step back and close the door and let the torture continue.

Instead, he crosses the space in two large steps and hauls my torturer off me, picking him up by the back of his shirt and flinging him away. “What the fuck are you doing?”

The man hits the wall, but manages to keep his feet. “Getting answers.”

“Absolutely not.” Poseidon roars the words. “This is not what we do. This is not who we are, Polyphemus. This cannot be who we are.”

The man—Polyphemus—stammers, his face gone waxy. “Poseidon, I—”

“ Get out .”

In the back of my mind, I expect my tormentor to keep arguing. To bluster. Maybe to get a little stabby with Poseidon himself. Grief makes people do strange things, and Triton was only killed a couple weeks ago. Not nearly long enough for this man to process the death of his sister.

But he doesn’t. He wilts as if Poseidon has ripped out his spine with his words. The knife drops to the floor and his voice turns almost pleading. “I thought this was what you needed. I thought you just didn’t want to command me to do it. I didn’t know—”

“You know nothing!” Poseidon is still roaring, the walls practically shaking with his fury. “If I want you to do something, I will give you an explicit order. You’ve worked for me long enough to know that. Now get out of my sight.”

My torturer flees. Everything hurts—every breath, every minute movement of my muscles. I stare at my unexpected savior, watching the fury sweep out of him, draining away as quickly as it arrived. I swallow painfully. “I think I’m going to pass out now.”

Poseidon gingerly places his knee on the mattress next to my hip. “I’m sorry.”

I must be suffering from blood loss, because there’s no way that one of the Thirteen just apologized to me. Impossible. Absurd. “I’m your enemy.”

“You are.” He produces a key from somewhere and unlocks the cuffs binding my wrists to the top of the bed. “This is going to hurt. I truly am sorry.” I don’t have a chance to ask him what he means when he wedges his arms under my body and lifts me, cradling me to his chest. I don’t think I’ve been held like this since I was a child, and maybe not even then. But there’s no space to enjoy the strange moment of care. My entire body screams in protest. Maybe I scream in protest. I can’t be sure.

Poseidon shifts off the mattress…and everything goes black.