Page 181 of Lovely Venom

“Fuck,” I mutter, scraping a hand through my hair.

I don’t know how to reconcile these two versions of her. The beautiful, fragile, deeply traumatized woman I first met—who also happens to have the blood of my mortal enemies running through her veins.

Some things are indisputable.

What happened between us at Sanctum was real. She had no way of knowing who I was then, and her reaction when she found out was genuine terror. I understand now why she ran that day. Because she realized then what I’m realizing now.

This was never supposed to be more.

It feels like a bad joke, and I’m still waiting for the punchline. With every passing hour, I try to make sense of it, but I can’t. All I have to go off of right now is the word of a man who was clearly fucking delusional. But as confused as Elias was about his imaginary relationship with Chantel, everything else was crystal clear.

Thalia Stavros was Ares’s aunt. After she married Lucas Drakos and moved to New York, her relationship with her family grew distant. Ares and his father believed Lucas had created this rift, but after Thalia died, it got worse.

According to Elias, Lucas would only allow contact with Thalia’s daughter Katarina at formal gatherings that were few and far between. They suspected that Lucas was hiding something, but they couldn’t confirm it.

So when the opportunity presented itself for Ares to spite Lucas, he seized it with both hands.

He tasked Elias and Andreas with smuggling Katarina to Seattle, where she could hide in plain sight under a new identity.

At Ares’s instruction, they delivered her to Mariella, which inevitably led Mariella to form a friendship with her.

It was a series of events that created a spark that over time turned into a wildfire. She infiltrated our lives slowly, drip-feeding me the poison that became an obsession, and I drank it so willingly.

That spark also created the first ember of infatuation for Elias. In his mind, he felt as if he had saved her. But he didn’t have a chance to nurture that fixation until five years later, when, as luck would have it, Ares assigned him to watch over Chantel.

For a year, he spent every waking hour learning her routines and documenting her life to the point of insanity. She had no idea he was there, and when she saw him in the club, he was nothing more than a friendly face from her past. But to him, those small interactions were far more significant.

He’d already been escalating when he received news of Marco’s impending return. He’d made plans to remove him from the picture, but he found a new target in me when he saw that I was protecting her.

In his own words, I ruined everything for him when I attached myself to Chantel, and Ares saw the writing on the wall. He told Elias this development would be useful to him and reassigned him to another position, which sent him into a full-blown spiral.

The one thing Ares didn’t account for was that Elias was a fucking lunatic. When he became the obstacle between him and Chantel, Elias started plotting his demise too. Before he made his final grab for Chantel today, he sent word to New York about what Ares had done. He hoped that it would start a war between the Greeks, and Ares would be a natural casualty of that.

Whether that’s true remains to be seen, but it presents another problem.

Chantel’s father is coming for her, and now my only choices are to go to war or let her go forever.

The thought splinters inside me.

I already know what I can’t do, and that option has far-reaching consequences that won’t only impact me.

It could destroy my whole family.

As if she can sense the lingering fire of resentment in the room, she stirs from sleep and opens her eyes.

When they land on my silhouette in the chair, she sucks in a breath and sits up.

“Cristian?”

“Is it true?”

My question charges the air between us, heavy with the weight of her deception and my anger. But beneath that, there’s an undercurrent of something raw.

Something broken.

I half expect her to deny it, but instead, she dips her head and swallows.

“Yes, it’s true,” she whispers. “I’m Ares’s cousin…Katarina Drakos.”