I’ve never been a reckless woman. I’ve bent over backward to ensure that I could anticipate any outcome, could be several steps ahead of any opponents. As a daughter of Demeter, carelessness has consequences and so I’ve avoided it.
Until now.
Spending the day in bed with Eros is a mistake. I know it’s a mistake, but every time I consider getting up and facing the rest of the world, he kisses me or touches me or, gods, just looks at me. And then we’re off again, working each other into a frenzy of lust and need. If it were just that, maybe I could convince myself that I haven’t veered off the path to the point of no return, haven’t driven this plan right off a cliff. Except we spend several hours catnapping, curled around each other as if we’re newlyweds in truth, rather than pretending to be simply to serve a purpose.
By the time I can no longer ignore the growling sounds my stomach makes, it’s early evening. I shove him back and practically throw myself off the bed. “I need to eat. I need to shower.”
“I’ll join you.”
“No!” I scramble back a step, panic rising because of how badly I actually do want him to join me. I need distance, and I need it now. “Give me a few, okay?”
Eros watches me closely, and it’s painful to witness his walls come back up. I hadn’t even realized they’d inched down at some point during the day. Before I can change my mind, he’s back to the coldly calculating man I’ve known him to be up to this point. “Take your time. I’ll put together something to eat.”
“Okay.” I barely wait for him to pull on a pair of pants and leave the room before I grab my phone and rush into the bathroom. It seems silly to lock the door, but I’ll take anything to make me feel more centered right now. I turn on the water and stare at myself in the mirror.
I look like a mess.
There’s whisker burn on my neck and chest and, really, my entire body. Red marks from Eros’s fingers pressing into my hips and thighs will likely turn into bruises later. The sensory memory threatens to overwhelm me, and I shiver. This is exactly why I shouldn’t have slept with him. Instead of thinking about our next move and about how to counter whatever lies Aphrodite decides to spin, I’m thinking about how good it felt when he slid his hand between my legs and…
Gods.
I grip my phone tightly, but who am I supposed to call? Callisto? She’s going to rip me a new one the first opportunity she gets. Persephone? She’s already made her thoughts on this marriage clear; she’s not going to have sympathy that I’m suddenly having second thoughts about the whole thing. Not to mention if she found out what the other option was…
No, I can’t call her. I can’t call anyone.
I take a deep breath and set the phone on the counter. This isn’t the first time Olympus life has overwhelmed me. I already have the tools I need to steady the ground beneath my feet. I hope.
Despite my promise to be quick—not to mention the relatively late hour—I take a decently long shower and then put myself together, piece by piece. Hair dried and straightened. Subtle but flawless makeup. I duck into the spare bedroom and pull on a pair of leggings, knit socks, and my favorite oversize sweater. Relaxed, but photo ready. It’s enough. It has to be.
I make myself take the time to stage a photograph in the fading sunlight filtering through Eros’s giant windows. It’s not up to my usual standards, and it takes me ten pictures to nail the soft and happy smile that I’m aiming for, but it’ll do until I can get some more content created in the morning. I type out a happy, sappy caption as I head down the hallway.
I find Eros in the kitchen, sipping from a glass of wine and staring out the window. He glances over when I walk into the room, but his blank expression doesn’t change. “Tomorrow, we’re going out. The longer we stay closeted in the penthouse, the more opportunity we give my mother to create a narrative we don’t want.”
Relief and something akin to disappointment course through me. This is familiar territory; manipulating the paparazzi is what I’m good at. If we focus on that, I don’t have to think about the fact that I really, really want to close the distance between us and kiss Eros for all I’m worth.
I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. I can drive myself up the wall trying to anticipate what angle his mother will take, but at the end of the day, our best defense is to stick with our original plan. “Do you want the giddy newlywed experience or the poised and perfect one?”
“How are they different?”
“Giddy means that we visit the outdoor gardens in the university district and cuddle close while we walk the paths, followed by going to one of the smaller bars to get a little tipsy and pretend like we’re the only ones in the room. Poised and perfect is dinner at the Dryad.”
His brows rise. “Even I have a hard time getting into the Dryad on a moment’s notice.”
“I’m surprised you can get in at all. Pan hates Aphrodite, and I’m sure that extends to you as well.”
Eros’s slow smile affects me even more than it did the first few times I saw it. Now I know he looks exactly the same when he’s planning out what delicious things he wants to do to my body. I fight back a shiver. He sees it—of course he does—and his smile widens. “Pan and I have an understanding.”
That draws a surprised laugh from me. “Don’t tell me you’ve seduced him, too.”
“Psyche.” Gods, every time he says my name, it’s like an invitation to do something I’m sure to regret. “I’m hurt by your insistence that I’m moving through Olympus, leaving a trail of lovers behind me.”
“Am I wrong?”
He chuckles and ducks his head a little. It’s horrifyingly charming. “Depends on who you ask.”
This is bad. I need to be focusing on the plan rather than how attractive Eros is when he’s being self-effacing. “And if I ask Pan?”
“He’d argue that he seduced me.”
Of course he would. Pan is even more notorious than Eros is for spreading his charms far and wide. I shake my head, amused despite myself. “Back to my original question; giddy or poised?”
“Giddy.” He drops the smile, but something about it lingers in his eyes. “This is a love affair, and if we look too practiced, people will doubt that it’s real and give my mother the opportunity to capitalize on their doubt. The fact that neither of us does the giddy, foolish thing normally will only help sell this story.”
“I agree.”
He crosses his arms over his chest. “Then why even give me an option? Why not simply lay out the plan?”
I can’t quite hold his gaze. “You’re in this, too. It’s important that we’re on the same page.”
“Sure.” He shrugs. “But we’ve already established that this is your domain more than it’s mine.”
“Still.”
Eros drops his arms and moves toward me. It’s everything I can do to plant my feet and not scramble away from him. Or at least that’s what I tell myself as I watch him approach. I’m certainly not holding my breath, waiting to see what he’ll do next. He leans down until our faces are even. “Silly me. I thought it might be because you’re doubting your instincts, but you’re not that ridiculous.”
My skin heats in a way that has nothing to do with desire. “Excuse me?”
“You’re doubting yourself. Stop it.”
I straighten my spine and glare at him. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m not doubting myself.”
“Liar.” He says it almost fondly. Eros turns away before I can form a response. “Food’s ready.”
I watch him pull a delicious-smelling casserole out of the oven, not sure if I want to let this go or not. “You don’t know me.”
“You keep saying that.” He spoons plentiful portions onto two plates and passes me one. “I think we’ve established that I know enough.”
I follow him around the corner to a small formal dining room. It’s just as minimalist as the rest of the house—giant windows, a square steel and marble table, and a wall bare of anything but a large mirror with a geometric black and white frame. He sets his plate down and walks out of the room, reappearing a few moments later with his wineglass and a second one that he places in front of me. It feels very, very strange to sit in this room across from Eros. As if we’re eating in a museum or something. “Are you sure you actually live here?”
He spares me a glance. “Not everyone leaves a trail of clutter behind them as evidence of their occupancy.”
I tense, but there’s no judgment in the sentence, just a simple statement. “I’m not a messy person.”
“I said clutter, not mess. They’re different.” He stares at his plate. “Beyond that, I live here alone. There is no family to imprint their presence in every room the way it is at your mother’s place.”
“You keep bringing that up. Why?” I brace myself to defend my family. We might not always get along, but I’ll be damned before I let anyone disparage us. Even Eros. Especially Eros.
But he surprises me. “It feels like a home. It’s…novel.”
“Novel,” I repeat. “How can it be novel? You’re only, what, twenty-eight?”
“You say that like you don’t know.”
I blush a little, because of course I know how old he is. We might not have known each other before now, but I have at least basic knowledge of everyone who is close to the various members of the Thirteen. “You haven’t been living alone so long that you’ve forgotten your childhood home.”
He fiddles with his fork. “You know who my mother is. Do you really think my childhood home was even remotely as warm as yours?”
“Well, it can’t be that warm if it’s designed like this place.”
“What’s wrong with this place?”
I flick my fingers at the mirror behind me. “What’s with all the mirrors? I can theoretically understand it in the foyer as an art thing, and even in the bedroom as a kinky thing, but they’re everywhere.”
“Ah.” He stares at his plate for a long moment. “I mostly let my interior decorator do their thing. It was easier, and it’s not like I have strong opinions about it.”
This interior decorator is someone hired by Aphrodite. I’d bet a significant amount of money on it. I hesitate, trying to parse my way through this without sounding like a complete asshole. “Eros, this is your home. You’re allowed to put your stamp on it.”
“Am I?” His mouth twists. “I suppose that depends on who you ask.”
I open my mouth to keep arguing, but my brain catches up to my tongue before I can make a complete fool of myself. It’s more than obvious who he’s talking about. Still… “I know Aphrodite isn’t a very good mother, but…”
He gives me a smile devoid of his normal charm. “There’s no ‘but’ in that sentence, Psyche. I’m glad that you grew up in a place that feels like a home and that Demeter preserved that feeling even if things changed after you moved here. It’s just not my experience.” He goes back to eating as if the subject’s closed.
I suppose it is.
I made fun of this penthouse the first night here. I continued to poke at his design choices, assuming that, at least in this, he is as clichéd as he pretends to be. The playboy millionaire with more money than taste, who mistakes minimalism for the peak of style. The more soulless, the better.
Except every time he talks about my mother’s home, there’s a thread of something in his tone that’s almost like…longing.
I look around the dining room again, my mind whirling. “Would you be opposed to my making some changes?” I hold up a hand when he lifts his brows. “Nothing too intense. Just a few things to put a little bit of my stamp on the space, too.” I honestly don’t mind the sheer number of mirrors, but they need something to soften them.
The smile Eros gives me has my heart fluttering in my chest. “I’d like that.”
“Good,” I say softly. It’s a small thing, but it feels very large. Too large for me to look at closely. Instead, I focus on my meal.
I eat slowly. The food is good, but it’s the silence that comforts me. It’s not strained. I have the strange feeling that Eros would be perfectly content occupying the same room for hours without talking if he had nothing to say. He might pretend to be the pretty playboy, but he doesn’t run his mouth for the sole purpose of hearing himself talk.
I’ve always liked silence. I think it comes from living with three sisters and a mother who are all talkers. They talk when they’re happy, sad, angry, or even bored. No one in my family would be content to eat a meal without filling the room with some kind of running commentary. There’s a comfort in that, but when my stress level reaches a certain point, it becomes just one more thing that weighs on me. I like that Eros doesn’t have the same urge. It makes this space feel almost safe.
A feeling I most certainly cannot afford.
I take a hasty sip of wine. Since Eros was in a sharing mood earlier, there’s something I desperately want to know. Now seems as good a time as any to ask. “I’d like to ask you a question.”
“I’ll consider answering.”
That’s fair. I swallow hard. “Why do you do it? All the stuff your mom demands? This isn’t the first time she’s called for someone’s head.”
“Heart.”
I blink. “What?”
“She didn’t call for your head. She called for your heart.” He takes another bite of food without looking at me.
Somehow, I know he’s not speaking figuratively. The thought almost makes me laugh, but I manage to keep the hysterical sound inside. “Your mother is such a bitch.”
“Glass houses, Psyche.”
I start to argue, but the truth is that Demeter is just as scheming and ambitious as Aphrodite is. I have no doubts that Aphrodite would leave half of Olympus to starve if given the right motivation, and my mother is responsible for several individuals disappearing mysteriously. There might be no bodies and no murder investigations, but I’m certain she’s behind them. Demeter just takes more care to ensure her sins can’t be as easily traced back to her than Aphrodite does. I lift my wineglass. “Fair enough. But that’s not an answer.”
He shrugs. “It started out easily enough. She wanted me to ruin the last Apollo. I think I was seventeen at the time.”
Shock nearly has me dropping my glass. “That was you?”
“Yeah.” He says it without any boastfulness or pride. Just a statement of fact. “I didn’t set it up, exactly, but I went to school with Daphne.” His eyes go dark. “She was in a bad situation, and she knew no one would believe her word against Apollo unless there was proof.”
I wasn’t in Olympus then, but I know the story well enough. The old Apollo pissed off Aphrodite for some reason, and the next thing anyone knew, pictures of him and an underage girl—Daphne—were released anonymously to all the gossip sites. With this new knowledge, I can see how carefully those photos were chosen. Just explicit enough that no one could argue what was going on, but Daphne was wearing lingerie. “Did those photos exist before that point?” Or did two teenagers conspire to stage them?
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look at me. “She got them off Apollo’s phone once we decided on a course of action. It wasn’t ideal, but it got him away from her and it made my mother happy to see Apollo punished.”
Olympus has few lines, especially for the Thirteen, but Daphne is Artemis’s cousin, and that prompted a firestorm the likes of which Olympus had never seen. She demanded his head, and when the old Zeus wasn’t willing to go that far, Artemis stirred up Athena, Hephaestus, Poseidon, and, no surprise, Aphrodite. Against those five, even Zeus had to do something. He didn’t kill Apollo, but he came together with the rest of the Thirteen and stripped Apollo of his title.
Two weeks later, his body was found in the River Styx. Common opinion is that Artemis is responsible, but any proof washed away in the water and his killer was never found. Not that anyone looked too hard for answers.
I stare at Eros. “You’re the one who came up with the idea to release those photos?” At seventeen?
Another of those shrugs that means everything and nothing. “Like I said, it was the only way.”
The only way to serve Aphrodite’s punishment.
The only way to help Daphne escape her situation.
“But…”
He sighs. “But what?”
“How did you go from helping people like Daphne to killing them?”
“The same way you boil a frog.” I blink, and he clarifies. “A little bit at a time. The first person I killed was a man threatening my mother.” He stares at his fork like it holds all the mysteries of the universe. “In hindsight, he really was a threat. I think he was a past lover, but he ended up stalking her and it was escalating to the point where she was legitimately afraid. She and Ares don’t get along, so he wouldn’t provide security. So I stepped in.”
I don’t point out that Aphrodite is more than capable of hiring her own security. Eros is smart. He knows that. “How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
My heart aches for him, both now and the boy he used to be. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He shrugs, but it’s too stiff to be convincing. “By the time I realized the people threatening my mother weren’t actually threats, my soul was stained too much to go back. The only path was forward.” I don’t know what my face is doing, but he shakes his head. “Don’t pity me, Psyche. I haven’t lost a single bit of sleep over the things I’ve done, to innocent people or not. I am as much a monster as she is.”
I know that. Truly, I do. But I can’t help hating her even more for grooming her son to be her personal fixer. He says it started at seventeen, but I know better. To get him to the point where he was willing to step in on her behalf, she would have started much younger. “You are her child. It’s still wrong to use you like this.”
“This is Olympus. There’s more wrong than there’s right. It’s the way things are.”
I understand he’s correct, but it doesn’t stop the surge of resentment. Neither of us chose our roles. He’s done unforgivable things at his mother’s request. He might have been a child when she started, but he’s no longer one. He could have stopped any time.
He stopped for me.
I stomp down on that thought before it can take me off the rails. It’s too tempting, too seductive. Eros already admitted that he had his own reasons for giving me the option of a marriage instead of death. Yes, he desires me, but that’s not enough to go against his mother. It can’t be.
Best not to think about it too hard.
I push my food around on my plate. He keeps working so hard to set us apart, to remind me that he’s a terrible human being and I’m… I’m not even sure. Good? The thought is laughable. I’ve made hard choices since arriving at Olympus, and I’ve done things that were petty and selfish and downright mean.
More… I don’t want Eros to feel like he stands apart. I haven’t killed anyone, but that doesn’t mean I’m some angel. “You might not number me among the monsters, but I’m not entirely blameless.”
He smiles like he’s indulging me. “Oh yeah?”
I rush forward before I can change my mind. “Remember when that story was published on MuseWatch with the audio of Ares ranting about all of Zeus’s children being failures?”
The surprise on Eros’s face makes the confession more than worth it. He sits back in his chair and grins, admiration lighting his blue eyes. “That was you? I’d wondered. I thought it might be Helen—it has her sort of flare—but she claimed up and down and sideways that she had nothing to do with it. That audio was singlehandedly responsible for driving a wedge through the Zeus-Ares alliance that they never quite recovered from.”
I know. I wish I could say that was one of my goals when I put my plan together, but the truth is much less ambitious. “He wouldn’t leave Eurydice alone. He’d chase her around Zeus’s parties and corner her every chance he got. No one would step in, not even my mother. All she could talk about was how useful an alliance with Ares would be for our family.” The words taste foul on my tongue. I love my mother, but she can be unforgivably single-minded at times. “A marriage with Ares would have killed Eurydice. Probably not literally, but the thing that makes her her would have withered up and died. She’s not like the rest of my sisters; she’s soft. I wanted to give her space to preserve that for as long as possible.”
His expression sobers. “I don’t know if you’ve done her any favors on that note.”
Sadness weighs at me. “We’re all beginning to realize that now.” We all have to grow up and face the reality of Olympus eventually, and I can’t help but wondering if we should have torn the veil from my youngest sister’s eyes earlier. Maybe she wouldn’t have fallen in love with Orpheus and had her heart torn asunder. Maybe she would have seen him for what he is—a fickle artist forever in search of his muse. She might have served that purpose for a time, but it was never going to be permanent. “We all have to learn that lesson eventually.”
“Some earlier than others.” Eros tilts his wineglass, watching the red liquid shift within its confines. “You never made a misstep.”
I almost laugh. “I made plenty. Even with my mother’s warnings, I thought for sure Olympus couldn’t be as cruel as she claimed. I was wrong.” So much to encompass those three little words. I was wrong.
Everyone was so incredibly nice at first. Oh, not the other children of the Thirteen—they gave me and my sisters a wide berth—but those a little further out from the seat of power. So nice. So friendly. So sickly sweet. At least until I heard my so-called friends discussing how disgusted they were with me, my body, my looks, my country bumpkin ways. They thought I would be more like Helen or Perseus or the other popular children of the Thirteen. I was a waste of time and space.
I stopped trying to make friends after that. It was the first time I realized my mother might have a point with how she dealt with people outside the family. No one was to be trusted. Instead, they fell into one of two categories—potential enemy or potential ally.
Lessons in this city always hurt, and the intervening years haven’t done much to soothe that ache. I really, really hope this situation with Eros isn’t another hard lesson that I’m destined to learn through pain.
