The hope inside me gets stronger. This might actually happen. Thisishappening.
“Perfect.” Hecate motions to the neat stacks of papers placed on the table in front of her. “Let’s move on to the reform.”
And so it begins.
The rest of the day is spent in hot debate as the delegates advocate for their respective territories, with Hecate offering careful friction to guide them to unite againstherinstead of fighting among each other, but never enough resistance to stall negotiations.
By the end of the week, they’re making solid progress in carving out a new government that might actually work. Hades brings down the lower city barrier and we’re able to spirit Circe and her people out of Olympus on a ship. All of the Thirteen and the legacy families have disappeared as well; it surprised the fuck out of me that no one tried to go back on their word, but Circe’s executions of Peitho and Artemis were enough to scare everyone. We’re doing it. We’refinallyseeing our plan, a decade in the making, coming to fruition. It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And yet…
I spend hours every day watching Hecate’s back as she argues and manipulates and flatters by turn. I can see the active progress we’re making, the future we’re making better for all Olympians. It’s just…
“It’s good we’re not staying in the city,” Hecate says one night, sprawled across my chest in loose exhaustion. “I can keep up this energy because I know there’s an end date. It’s a lot more fun to topple a government than it is to set one up.”
“Yeah.” I smooth back her braids. “It’s a lot of talking and not a lot of action.”
She lifts her head to look into my eyes. “You don’t have to stay,you know. Circe found that house and is getting it ready for us. If you want to leave early—”
“No.” I’m not someone who was meant for a desk job or really any job that requires me to hold the same still position for hours at a time, but I’m not about to leave Hecate undefended. Nothing bad has happened yet, but that isn’t a promise for the future. “When we leave, we leave together.”
She huffs out a breath. “It’s safe enough.”
“We didn’t come this far to lose you now.” I press a light kiss to her forehead. “Besides, without you in the mix, Circe and I are liable to end up sniping at each other until we get irritated enough to go for our knives again.”
“Uh-huh.” She props her chin on her folded hands over my chest. “When you said that, there was a little thread of excitement in your voice. I didn’t know you were such a kinky bitch, Atalanta.”
I roll us, ending with her on her back and me braced over the top of her. “And Ididknow you get your rocks off by being a little instigator.”
“Guilty.” She wraps her legs around my waist, as loose and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. “I don’t know how to tell Circe this since she seems happy enough setting up house, but I don’t know if I’ll ever fit into a normal life.”
I settle on top of her. It feels like this conversation has been coming for days, but I’m still not ready. “Are we going to get jobs? Pay a mortgage? Is Circe?”
We exchange a look and burst out laughing. Hecate twines her arms around my neck. “We don’t have to have any answers now. First, we need to get Olympus to a stable enough place that theydon’t need me generating issues to unify them. Then, we’ll go to Circe and see what she’s been up to in the meantime.”
I lift a single brow. “So you caught that strangeness in the last phone call?”
“Oh yeah.” She grins. “She’s absolutely not telling us something, but for once, I’m not actually worried it will hurt us. She’s probably just, like, bought an entire street and set up her people in all the houses around us.”
As much as I want to say Hecate is being dramatic, the truth is that is exactly something Circe would do. More than that, I can’t blame her for wanting security in any way she can get it. She gets to take care of her surviving people in the process, and that’s not a bad thing. Some of them decided to go back to Aeaea, drawn by the news of changes Icarus Vitalis is making there, but most followed Circe to…wherever she is.
“I don’t know what normal looks like either, Hecate.” It’s easy to admit this in the intimacy between just the two of us. “I don’t know if wecanbe normal after what we’ve lived through, what we’ve done.” I brush a kiss to her lips. “But we’ll have each other and we’ll have the future, no matter what it looks like. That’s a win from where I’m sitting.”
“I feel the same way,” she whispers. “I didn’t dare hope we’d all survive this, and even now it feels like the rug is going to get pulled out from beneath my feet at the last moment, but…”
“We survived.” I kiss her again. “We will continue to survive. We’ll get Olympus back on its feet, shaky though it is, and then we’ll go see what our murderous girlfriend has been up to.”
“And then?”
“And then we take it day by day.” Another kiss, this one deepand searching. When I finally break it, I’m breathing hard. “We have so many days, Hecate. Weeks, months, years.”
She smiles against my lips. “Well, shit, it’s hard to be morose with you kissing me like that. Do it again.”
I do. Again and again, tugging her back from the dark place she’s gone, anchoring her in the here and now with my body and my touch. I don’t know what the future holds, and I might be bored out of my damn mind with all the paperwork forming a new government generates, but I’mcontent. Once we reunite with Circe and start the next chapter, I’ll behappy.
It’s more than I could have ever dreamed. More than I even dared hope for.
33Hecate
Leaving Olympus for the last time feels a little like leaving part of my heart behind me…and like setting down a massive burden I’ve been carrying for far too long. I have the utmost confidence the new delegates will represent the people’s interests. The future is wide open with possibilities and hope.
