“She’s magnificent. Deadly and capable and clever enough to bypass all my people and escape with you.” I don’t mean to say it—or for it to be true—but the words fall between us all the same. I watch Hecate closely. “She’s also desperately in love with you.” Her mouth thins, but there’s something in her eyes, something deep and soft andcaring. It stops me short. I stare. “You love her, too.”
“Yes. I do.” There’s something in her tone, in her expression, something I’ve only ever seen directed atme.
I’m a special kind of fool for thinking there might be an avenue to a future between the two of us. I have a burning ember in my chest with her name carved on it in bloody letters, one the burns away any chance of a true relationship with someone else. I truly believed she had the same for me. It…hurts.
Hecate stalks toward me, stopping just out of reach. “This endsnow.”
“No, darling, it truly doesn’t.” I take no pleasure in the words. I haven’t taken pleasure in anything for a very long time. The game, perhaps, but we’re almost at its conclusion. Once Olympus falls, the future stretches out in a horrible, mundane gray blur. I don’t know how I’ll stand it, but that’s a problem for another day. “Too many dominoes have fallen. There’s no putting them back up. Olympus as you know it no longer exists. It never will again. It doesn’t matter if you kill me. The people will see it through.”
“Damn you, Circe.” She tugs at her braids. “If you’d just come back. Or sent word. I could have—”
I shake my head. “It wouldn’t have changed anything. Beyond that,yourtreasonous plan has hardly been bloodless. Whether through your path or mine, the old way of things was never going to survive.”
She clenches her jaw. “I won’t let you kill any more of my friends.”
“What friends, Hecate?” I motion around us at the empty house, testament to the ghosts we both share. “I’ll apologize again for Eros if it will make you feel better, but the fact remains that he would have put a bullet inyourchest if he had to choose between you and his beloved wife’s family. Or maybe you mean Hades, who has closed the entire lower city to you. Or, oh yes, Helen turned Ares. Certainly she’ll let her personal feelings get in the way of her brother’s orders.” I shake my head. “You have no friends, Hecate. Except Atalanta. And me, if you’ll have me.”
“Stop.”
“I could be your friend again.” I know better than to make thisoffer. She doesn’t want it, even if our history means she still wants me. But it’sHecate. If there’s a way forward for us, I mean to find it. She’ll see it as a manipulation, and maybe she’ll even be right, but I care for her. I never stopped. “More than friends, even.” I don’t step closer. She’s strung tight, ready to explode. There was a time when she never would have dreamed of hurting me; it’s long gone now. “I’ll even give you Atalanta once this is all over and she can no longer interfere.”
She makes a choked sound. “You can’t give me anything, Circe. You sure as fuck can’t give me a woman who hates you. Atalanta makes her own choices. She always has.”
“A fair point.” Gods, I love the way she says my name, even shaded with grief and rage. “But I could give youeverything else.”
“You are so fucking insufferable. It makes me want to—” She crosses the distance between us in a single step. I barely have a moment to tense, bracing for a knife between the ribs, before Hecate grips my face and pulls me down into a devastating kiss.
15Hecate
I am a fool, a traitor, a terrible friend. I have compromised what little honor I possess time and time again. What’s one more instance? Circe is right; I love Atalanta, even if I’ve never allowed myself to act on it, to speak it, to eventhinkit. I’m at the end of my rope, and that’s still no excuse for kissing Circeagain.
I catch her wrists and pin them at the small of her back. She’s tricked me twice. It should be reason enough not to kiss her now, not to allow her close, but this woman is the unplumbed depths of the ocean. I want to dive right into her, embrace her shadows, let her crush me in her embrace. The impulse is nearly suicidal and exclusive only to her, but I can’t resist it any more than the ocean can resist the moon’s pull.
It’s so much worse because she instantly kisses me back, her vicious mouth going soft and sweet as she opens for me. Even knowing what I do, she tastes like home. I’m terrified that she’llalwaystaste like home to me.
I break the kiss just enough to speak against her lips. “If you move, I’m going to stab you, and I won’t miss.”
Her laughter fills the room. “I’ve missed you so much, love.” Her voice cracks in the middle of the sentence, truth breaking through.
I’ve missed her, too. Even if she’s a different shape than the girl I fell in love with, one with even more jagged edges to bloody myself on. I drag my mouth over her jawline as I pat her down, removing her gun, ejecting the clip, and tossing both parts away.
She lifts her arms so I can wrestle her hoodie off her body, quickly followed by her tank top, leaving her in only a lace bra that looks like a sharp word could shred it to pieces. Circe always did like her pretties, though neither of us could have afforded something designer back in the day.
I kiss my way down her stomach to the band of her jeans, continuing my pat down. She’s got two knives in ankle sheaths, which is honestly surprising. Even knowing she held her own against Atalanta, that she orchestrated the downfall of Olympus, part of me can’t help but look at her and see a prissy rich woman like the ones I’ve been surrounded with since becoming Hermes.
Hermes. The title has come to feel like an extension of my identity in recent years. In the last couple days, that’s changed. Now it’s an ill-fitting shirt, tags scratchy and fabric dry and itchy. I want itoff.
Just like I want Circe’s pants off.
This is a mistake, but I’ve been making a lot of them lately. What’s one more? I send the knives skating away across the floor and tug her pants down, having to pause to pull off her boots before I can slide them off.
And then she stands before me in nothing but two scraps of lace that do little to cover the woman beneath. Kneeling before her like this, I can see the shadow of her slit through her panties, and there’s a hint of her pale-pink nipples beneath the lilac of her bra.
I suddenly don’t want to lift my gaze farther. If I meet her eyes and she’s got her derisive mask on, I might shatter. This is wrong and right and awful and beautiful and…
“Hecate.” She touches my chin, lifting my face. “Look at me.”
If I were stronger, if we were different people, if I hadn’t spent a decade of my life mourning this woman, maybe I could deny her. Maybe. I meet her gaze. My breath whooshes out. She’s both stranger and lover in this moment. When we were young, we told ourselves how worldly and jaded we were. It was true and not true. Trauma may strip away childhoods, but it is no substitution for years spent walking this earth.
