“Thal, hold on, baby,” I whispered as the first hot tears finally broke through my mask, stinging my cheeks.
“I’m okay, Daph,” he wheezed, his face pale as ash, but his eyes were still locked on mine. “Help them! Don’t let her get away!”
I looked back, my vision blurring.
Aidon and Zeno were locked in a desperate, hand-to-hand struggle against the final three guards. Aidon managed to drop one with a precise shot, but the others were the fiercest we’d faced yet. One of them lunged with a roar, his fingers locking around Aidon’s wrist and tearing the gun from Aidon’s grip. With only his fists to defend himself, Aidon lunged at the nearest guard like a wild bull, charging forward with fists swinging, refusing to back down without a fight.
The man’s feet slipped out from under him, and he fell to the ground, his gun sliding across the concrete feet away. Aidon straddled him, grabbed his head, and began slamming it into the concrete floor, blood splattering everywhere. The man lost consciousness almost within seconds, but Aidon was consumed by rage.
He kept going until the man’s head was nothing but a bloody pulp.
My eyes darted to Zeno, and my heart sank as I watched him fall to the ground, losing his footing.
The last guard stood over Zeno, his gun aimed straight at Zeno’s forehead. I tried to scream, but my voice was trapped in the wreckage of my lungs.
A single shot rang out from behind me, striking Rhea’s guard in the back of the head. He collapsed in a heavy heap to the ground, a loud thud echoing through the air. I spun around, expecting another wave of Rhea's men, but instead I saw the woman from the roof standing there, a smoking gun in her hand and a cold, sharp expression.
Zeno didn’t move. He didn’t reach for his gun or scramble to his feet. He stayed on the cold concrete, staring up at the woman, at Cassandra, with such raw, agonizing recognition that it made my blood run cold. For the first time in my life, I saw the King of Olympus look like a man who had seen a ghost.
“Cassandra?” His voice was a broken rasp, a sound of pure, unadulterated grief. He reached out a hand, his fingers trembling, as if expecting her to dissolve into ash. “I saw the warehouse go up. I saw the roof collapse... I thought you were gone. I thought I’d lost you to Rhea’s fire.”
Cassandra didn't move to help him up. She stood over him, her long hair casting shadows over a face that looked carved from ice. The smirk she’d worn for the rest of us was gone, replaced by a gaze that could have frozen the desert.
“You saw what you needed to see to keep running, Zeno,” she said, her voice a low, terrifying hum. “You didn't see me reaching through the smoke. You didn't see me waiting at the edge of the docks. You saw a way to start over, and you took it.”
“No,” Zeno whispered, the word a frantic plea. “I tried to get back. I spent years searching for the one who set that trap. I built everything—this city, the casino. It was all for the debt I thought I owed your memory.”
“Then consider this the first payment toward the interest,” she snapped, her eyes flickering with a decade of resentment.“You owe me a life, Zeno. I just saved yours. Now we’re even. For now.”
I watched them, and the foundation of my life shattered. Every good girl, every hour on the shooting range, every diamond choker Zeno had ever locked around my neck—it wasn't for me. It was for the ghost Zeno was trying to resurrect. I wasn't his ward. I was his penance. I was a living, breathing placeholder for the woman he’d failed to save. I looked at the blood on my hands and realized I’d spent ten years trying to earn the love of a man who was only looking at the space where someone else used to be.
I looked at Thal, whose face was pale but his eyes were fixed on me. He saw the realization hit me. He saw the moment Zeno’s pedestal crumbled into the warehouse dust.
“We have to move, Daphne,” Thal groaned, his voice pulling me back from the brink of the revelation. “Rhea isn't done. And neither is she.”
Cassandra was already turning back toward the shadows of the warehouse. “The back exit is clear. If you want to live to argue about the past, follow me. If not, stay here and wait for Rhea’s second wave.”
I gripped Thal’s hand and pulled him to his feet. I couldn’t imagine the pain he must have been in, but we didn’t have time. As we hobbled toward the car, I glanced back at Zeno. He was finally standing, but he wasn't looking at the exit, or at the blood on the floor, or even at me.
He was staring at Cassandra’s retreating back, and I realized that for Zeno, the battle with Rhea was over, but the war for his soul had just begun.
Twenty-One
ANEW BEGINNING
DAPHNE
The morning was so still and fragile that I hesitated to break its silence with even a single word. It felt as though we had so much left unsaid, hanging in the air like the faint light streaming through Thal’s window.
As the first rays of sunlight seeped in, illuminating the edges of the room, I found myself at a loss for words, overwhelmed by the rush of feelings inside me.
Thal was safe, though injured and weak.
He was alive, and in a few weeks he would be fully healed. The bullet had narrowly missed vital organs, sparing him something far worse.
My hands were steady, a clinical, icy focus taking over, the one Zeno had spent a decade drilling into me. I treated his wound as a tactical failure that needed to be erased.
As I packed the jagged line of the bullet’s path, the doctor watched me with silent, wary respect. Every time my fingersbrushed Thal’s skin, that detachment cracked. Zeno had trained me to be his shadow, but in this light, I was Thal’s lifeline.
