Chapter 25

25

SELENE

A fist pounded on the locked door. I jerked toward it, shutting my journal and shoving it into the desk in one fluid motion. Hector’s claws tightened on my shoulder as I stood, my blood pounding in my head.

I’d wondered if this might happen. Had expected it, really.

It seemed impossible that I would make it through the night without enduring consequences for Hera’s death. After two hundred years of uncontested dominance, an Olympian vampire was dead. I was at least partially responsible for it, and they would never turn their ire on Zeus. I was the Titan, after all. The outsider. The true enemy. Of course they’d blame me.

Go, Hector , I mouthed, nodding my head toward the bedroom. He gave me an agitated ruffle of wings in response, but he flew off just the same, vanishing past the black silks I’d hung up to separate the rooms.

All the while, the fist continued to hammer.

“You can bang on the door as long as you like, but you’re not getting inside,” I called out, my voice steadier than my heartbeat. “I invoked the threshold curse.”

The pounding ceased. Silence stretched out behind it. Curious, I drifted closer to the door. Which one of them had come here to torment me? Hermes or Poseidon seemed the most likely, although I’d noticed the sharp glint in Artemis’s eyes when she’d looked at me. I pressed my fingers to the wood, flaring my nostrils.

The scent of blood and steel whispered through the door, conjuring the image of a silver-haired monarch with a vicious smile. I sucked in a breath and stepped back.

Ares had come.

Before I could think better of it, I grabbed the knob and ripped open the door. He stood in the corridor, leaning against the doorframe with his arms folded. But when he caught sight of me, he tensed. His eyes flared a more vivid red, but only briefly. So briefly, I wasn’t entirely sure I hadn’t imagined it.

“Took you long enough to answer,” he drawled, as if nothing out of the ordinary was happening. “May I come inside?”

“No,” I answered.

One corner of his mouth ticked up. “I haven’t come here to murder you, if that’s what you’re thinking. Now may I come inside?”

“You can ask a thousand times, but the answer won’t change. I’m never inviting you inside my rooms, Ares.”

He pushed off the doorframe, craning his head to look around me. “When did you invoke the threshold curse?”

I fought the urge to gape at him. “What? Why does that matter?”

His gaze landed back on my face, and there was something in his eyes that rattled me. It was that almost imperceptible flare of brighter crimson again, flecked with…what was that? Gold? “Just answer the question, Selene.”

“I did it the first night I was here,” I said, folding my arms. “Is that a problem?”

“So there’s no one else in there with you?”

“What? No. ”

“I can hear something. A rustling.” He cocked his head, as if he was listening closer, and an incredulous look crossed his face. “You do have someone in there, don’t you? Who in god’s name do you have in your bed? Don’t tell me it’s your advisor.”

I scoffed. “Why is that your first assumption?”

“Well, who else would it be?”

Instead of answering, I countered with, “Why are you here, Ares?”

He frowned, still looking past me. And then he tried to step inside, clearly forgetting about the threshold curse. The magic stood, as immovable as stone, and knocked him back. Lip curling, he rubbed his chest.

“If it’s one of the monarchs, I hope you realize you’re making a terrible mistake,” he said, his voice low and insistent.

With a level stare, I started to close the door. “I think I’ve heard enough.”

He moved as close as he could without hitting the curse’s invisible wall, his hands grasping the doorframe on either side of him. “Selene, wait—”

A rush of wings filled the air. Hector soared from the safety of the bedroom in a swirling black mass. With an agitated caw, he plunged toward me and landed heavily on my shoulder. Ares angled his head, a smile stretching across his angular face.

I heaved a sigh. Wonderful.

“You don’t have anyone in your bed. It was that gods-damned raven,” he said with a chuckle. “And yet you were more than happy to pretend you had a lover in there.”

“I did no such thing. You made that assumption all on your own. Now I’d like to get some rest. It’s been a long night.”

His eyes swept down the length of me. The crimson in his eyes burned bright. “Poseidon wants to kill you.”

I stood a little taller, caught off guard by the sudden change in conversation. “I expected as much.”

“If you leave your rooms, I’d take a weapon, if I were you.”

“Is that why you came here?” I couldn’t help but ask. “To warn me about Poseidon?”

“Essentially.”

With a furrowed brow, I edged closer. So close I could feel the power of the threshold curse pulsing against my gown. “I don’t get you, Ares. When I first arrived on this island, you were quick to put your dagger against my back and tell me just how much you wished to see me dead. Shortly after, you were dragging me out of the sea. And now you’re here, warning me to protect myself. So I’ll ask you again. What is it, exactly, that you want from me?”

Ares leaned closer, his eyes alight. His forehead brushed against the curse’s wall, and a thrum shook the floor. But instead of pulling back, I could have sworn he embraced it, relishing in the power that radiated between us.

“What makes you think I want anything from you?” he murmured.

“Everywhere I turn, you’re there. You’re always there.”

“And I always will be, as long as you’re on this island. Someone has to keep an eye on you.”

I shook my head, scarcely believing what I was hearing. “Because I’m a Titan?”

His lips curled, revealing his sharp canines. Tension pulsed between us. I held my breath in my throat, my gaze caught on the specks of gold flickering in his eyes. And suddenly, I knew what he would say before he spoke it.

“Because you are who you are , Selene. The ultimate fleshborn Titan.” With a knowing smile, he pushed away from the doorframe, turned his back on me, and vanished down the corridor. I stood there, my hand clutching the fabric near my heart. Hector’s claws dug deeper into my shoulder, though I barely felt the sting.

If I’d held any lingering doubt before, I didn’t now. Ares knew everything , and his unspoken threat hovered in front of my heart like the sharpest wooden stake he could find. He would be watching me. And if I gave him any excuse to share the truth with the others, he would. Or he would take care of me himself.

Either way, he had the upper hand in this twisted little game, and he knew it.

J ust after dawn, another knock sounded on my door—much quieter, much more timid. I’d lost my battle with insomnia. Despite the luxurious sheets and soothing breeze blowing in from the open balcony doors, sleep eluded me. I couldn’t stop replaying the night’s events over and over and over, recalling the flames that licked the side of Hera’s face and hearing her screams as the life burned out of her.

And so it only took moments for me to crawl from my bed, pad across the floor, and pull the door open.

“Come in, Orpheus.” I stepped aside and motioned him into my rooms.

He shuffled inside. As always, his face was tight, and he clasped his withered hands together. I wondered if they were feeding him here. His eyes darted around the room as he licked his lips. A nervous tick I’d seen him do a million times.

“Something happened last night,” he said urgently. “What was it?”

I sighed and plopped down on the velvet chair beside the desk. Then I patted the free one beside it. “It’s a long story. You’re going to want to sit down.”

Orpheus’s lips went bone white. He sat and tucked his hands into his lap, waiting as I told the story of the very first Olympian monarch death. It took at least half an hour to explain it all, from discovering the blood in the kitchen, to the sacrifice, to the trial where Hera’s life met a brutal end. And then I stopped there. I saw no need to tell him about the subsequent visit from Ares.

When I finished, Orpheus leaned forward and arched his brow. “It was the blood moon that got her? That’s certainly interesting.”

“You seem surprised,” I said.

“I wouldn’t have guessed it. Yes, the vampires of Troy have shown weakness to it, but I assumed the Olympians wouldn’t face the same issue.”

“Because it doesn’t harm me?”

“Precisely. And while Aether cursed the Olympians with sensitivity to sunlight, a blood moon is not a sun. Far from it.” He leaned back in the chair, the wood creaking beneath him. “This is very interesting indeed.”

There was a glint in his eye now. His shoulders were high, and his body seemed to hum with energy, where he’d practically been crawling when he’d first come into my rooms. This news had really perked him up.

“Careful, Orpheus. One might start to think you want the Olympians to burn to death.”

An uncharacteristic chuckle escaped from the depths of him. “I can’t say I mourn for High Queen Hera of Arcadia…” He eyed me. “And you certainly don’t look torn up about it, either.”

I scowled. “She’s no better than Zeus. Did you know she farms mortals, just like he does? I’m glad she’s dead.”

And I let it happen.

Orpheus’s expression suddenly sobered. “Who’s taking her crown?”

“Who do you think?” I thought back to the image of those two crowns perched on their columns, blood splattering the marble. What would happen to them now? Would the columns remain as they were for future Nekros or would they take one of them away? Were we still the Thirteen Crowns?

“Of course he did.” Orpheus’s jaw tightened.

“So what do we do now?” I asked. “One of the crowns is dead. Half the Olympians blame me for what happened. The other half…well, I don’t know what they think because they got away from me as fast as they could. Zeus clearly plans for Nekros to continue, but everything just seems so…”

“Precarious?” he finished for me.

“Exactly. That’s a great word, by the way.” I tugged my journal from where I’d hidden it in the desk and added the word to the long list I kept on the back page.

“You should stop writing in that thing. If the wrong person got their hands on it…” His chair creaked as he leaned forward to read what I’d written down. But I snapped the book shut, hiding my scribbles.

“It’s fine, Orpheus. Just tell me what we should do about Nekros.”

He hesitated, that familiar three line pinch appearing between his eyes. I could tell he wanted to argue more about my journal, the way he would have done when I’d been young. My mother had given him free rein to supervise me, which meant he’d expected obedience from me. It had been difficult for him to let go of that once I’d been crowned queen.

But he sighed, acquiescing to my request. “We continue with Nekros. That appears to be what their god wants. And what their god wants, he gets. He cleared the sky so that the blood moon could kill Hera, and now he likely expects you all to carry on as if nothing has happened.”

And then I finally voiced the question that had been rattling around inside my brain since the moment it had happened. “Was it Erebus who did that? Or was it me?”

Orpheus gave me a long, considering look, then rose abruptly. “That is a question you should not speak out loud, not even in the privacy of this room. It was Erebus, Selene. He controls the night sky. Do you understand me?”

I frowned. There were things that had happened back in Troy. Things that had passed through the corridors in whispered rumors. I’d been born beneath a blood moon. And every year, on the celebration of my birth, the silvery light of the moon transformed into that vibrant crimson. I’d asked my mother many times what it meant, but she’d never had an answer for me.

Judging by Orpheus’s reaction to my question, her silence hadn’t been due to nescience. She knew why, and she hadn’t wanted to tell me. Just like a hundred other important things she’d kept to herself. She and Orpheus had always expected me to be content with the lack of answers.

And so I flipped open my journal and added another word to my list.

Orpheus frowned. “What in god’s name are you writing now?”

“One word,” I told him. “Malcontent.”