The gods had betrayed both her sons, MonakribosandApostolos! And she was done with them.
Now alone in the wake of her mother’s fate, Bet’anya faced Apollymi without any help whatsoever. Her dark caramel skin turned pale. The Atlantean goddess of wrath, misery, and the hunt was the last one standing.
She would be the last one to fall.
But as Apollymi reached for her, she hesitated at the sight of Bet’anya’s distended belly. The much younger goddess was pregnant. About to give birth any day by the looks of her.
In that moment, rage and pain warred within her heart. Most of all, compassion flared deep as she felt the pangs of a mother who’d lost her child, not once, but twice. How could she deliver such pain to another?
Her breathing labored, Bet’anya met her gaze levelly, without fear or deceit. Of all the goddesses in Katateros, she was by far the most beautiful. Half Egyptian and half Atlantean. Her exotic features were sharply chiseled, and framed by a wealth of thick ebony hair that set off her almond-shaped eyes to perfection. Apollymi could see why the Egyptians called her Bethany. In Atlantean, Bet’anya meant “keeper of misery,” but in her father’s language, Bethany meant “oath of grace.”
A far more fitting moniker for such a fetching creature. “I didn’t incarcerate you or hunt your son, Apollymi. I took no part in their cruelty. The one time I thought I’d stumbled upon your son in the human realm, I came to you with that information and not the others. I never breathed a word to them against either of you.” Tears choked her. “You know it’s true. I came here today to leave this pantheon forever so that I could have my own baby in peace, away from their politics. Please, do not do to me what I did not do to you.”
The girl was right and Apollymi knew it. No matter how much she wanted Bet’anya’s blood, she couldn’t kill another innocent baby. Especially not onthisday. Not while the soil was still damp and stained with the blood of her own son. “Who among the gods is his father?”
“The father’s mortal. Human.”
Human …
There was something Apollymi would have never suspected from a goddess she knew hated that disgusting species even more than she did. “His name?”
“Styxx of Didymos.”
For a moment, Apollymi couldn’t breathe as her rage renewed itself with a vigor unprecedented.
Of all the mortals, inallthe world,thatwas not the name to give her.
Not today.
Not after she’d seen through her son’s own eyes the life he’d lived and what had been done to him because ofStyxx of Didymos…
Damn him! For Styxx was the prince she’d chosen to bond with her own son to protect him from the gods who’d been hell-bent on killing her precious Apostolos. The human twin brother who was supposed to have protected her child and his birthright!
Instead, Styxx had stood by and allowed her son to be slaughtered and betrayed. Of all men, he was the very human whose throat she wanted most to personally rip out!
She felt her eyes turning from silver to red as her Destroyer form took over.
Bet’anya stumbled away and wrapped her arms around her belly to protect her baby. “Please, Apollymi … my baby’s innocent.”
“So. Was. Mine!”
Both of them. And yet her sons had been given death sentences by the gods.
All of them.
Before she could stop herself, Apollymi reacted on instinct.
And she returned to the goddess what her pantheon had done to her.
In the blink of an eye, she ripped Bet’anya’s son from her belly with a furious scream.
Bet’anya staggered back and fell to her knees. Gasping, she stared at her unmoving son in Apollymi’s hands, and she reached out to touch him.
But Apollymi wouldn’t have it. No one had shown her an ounce of mercy. Not once.
Therefore, she delivered it back, full force. She blasted Bet’anya away and turned the bitch into a statue like all the others. Let her sit out eternity in a fathomless void where she could hear and see, but never again move or be part of any world. It was what they all deserved for what they’d done to her.
What they’d done to her children.
