I felt their claws inching toward my back even before they touched me just as we came to the massive golden doors, spanning from the ceiling to the floor. I bit down on my lower lip, stopping my power from flaring out. These shackles I wore were powerful, but this thing living inside of me was chaos. It was pure, wild energy I didn't know how to control.
At least not yet. But I will learn.
The tips of their claws touched my back just as the doors opened, and in the last second they retreated, pushing me through the barely open door and into the illuminated room, with white marble floors and the dais on the opposite side, where their mighty leader sat.
Many times over the course of my life I had met those that appeared to be sunshine and everything nice, and most of the time they were the ones you needed to be afraid of. They were the ones hiding in plain sight, presenting themselves as the saviors, the benefactors, the good managers and perfect fucking colleagues. I've learned the hard way that just because something shines, it doesn't mean it is good.
Just like not everything that's dark isn't bad or evil.
True evil sat on the thrones made of gold, looking down at those they thought were beneath them. Men with small fucking dicks, sitting in their ivory towers while the rest of the world crashed and burned. They used their power like a whip,threatening those that dared to go against them. Disposing of those they regarded as threats and destroying the world we knew.
I couldn't help myself but smirk when I saw the worried look on Zeus's face the deeper I went inside the room, comparing him to all those men I had met over the course of my life. It didn't matter if they were mortals or Gods, they were the same. Their greed, their need for more and more and more, could only destroy innocent lives. Maybe I couldn't stop the CEOs of the companies, or the manufacturing of the guns that killed thousands of innocent people who were presented as the evil ones just because they wanted to be free, but I could stop Zeus.
Even if it was the last thing I'd do.
"Kneel!" His voice boomed around us, and one by one, the immortals and mortals standing around us, lined in two perfect rows on each side of me as I walked toward the fucker, knelt to the floor. Including the harpies that came with me.
But I didn't kneel. I would never kneel for any man—God or otherwise.
Zeus's eyes connected with mine, his fury evident in those blue depths, but he didn't scare me. Not anymore.
The little fragments of a time long ago when I was just a Goddess of Spring, eager to please every single one of these immortals, came rushing into my mind. How afraid I was of this bitch sitting at the dais, elevated above everyone else. How powerful he seemed to me back then, because I didn't know better. I was just a simple girl, wishing to live the rest of her life in peace and quiet, far away from these pompous asses.
But they didn't let me.
I saw them behind him, kneeling like good little puppies—Hera, Ares, Athena and several other Gods. Almost everyone that hadn't been there at the meeting, keeping their eyes to the floor, kneeling to the fucker who would sacrifice them withouteven blinking. But they were here by choice, not by force, and that was one thing I needed to remember.
They weren't the victims. They were the perpetrators, the fuel Zeus needed to fulfill his fucked-up vision of ruling the entire world.
They were the enablers and they would pay, just like he would.
"Kneel in front of your king!" came from the back row, and my eyes connected with Ares, the God of War. The motherfucker who held me as his father plunged that knife through my gut, poisoning me.
"A king?" I laughed. "I see no king." I mocked them. "I see a coward." My feet carried me closer to them, closer to all these traitors living their perfect little lives, thinking they were untouchable. "I see a bunch of immortals, kneeling in front of a coward, thinking he would save you." Ares stepped in front of the dais, the vein on his forehead pulsing, his eyes two razors trying to slice through me. But didn't he know? I already lost almost everything.
My soul, Persephone's soul, had already lost more than any of them could imagine and we were back for revenge.
A sharp stab of pain sliced through the backs of my knees, sending me tunneling down to the floor. Ares laughed, joined by the three harpies now standing behind me.
"I told you, you would kneel," Zeus said somewhere from the top. "They always kneel!" He laughed, joined by all his brainwashed minions. Perhaps it was suicidal offending them in their home, but I didn't care. Not anymore.
I straightened myself and stood up, keeping my head high. Higher than ever before.
Retribution shone in Zeus's stormy eyes, but I didn't care anymore about him and what he could do. I had already felt on my own skin what his kind was capable of even when I offerednothing but an olive branch and a solution for everyone to live in peace. But men like him didn't want peace. They wanted chaos, power and destruction of anyone and anything that stood in their path.
"And I told you," I smirked, my head tilting as I watched the color drain from his face, "I would never kneel. Not for you. Not for anyone."
Theclick-click-clickof heels over the marble floor made me look away from the coward in front of me and toward the sound, where a red-haired woman walked toward us, her eyes and face set in stone as she observed me. Zeus straightened, his chest puffing, and it would've been hilarious if it wasn't for the fact that I knew her.
I knew her face.
I knew her viciousness.
And I knew she was sometimes worse than Zeus himself.
I didn't miss the way Ares looked at her, or the way his entire body tightened the closer she came, completely ignoring the fact that Zeus stood not far from them. The fool in front of me kept looking at his mate, while his own general fucked her with his own eyes, completely oblivious to what was happening around him.
Hera didn't change in all these years, her eternal beauty as cutting and as vicious as she always was. I wonder if she got tired of being Zeus's little lapdog and took things in her own arms after the First Great War with the Giants, or if she was always the manipulator while the God who thought he was in charge was just a puppet.
