27. Eurydice

27

EURYDICE

Watching Orpheus paint has always unwound something in me. For a man who is so present in every room he walks into, when he paints it looks like he’s in another world entirely. After today, I would like to be in another world entirely too. I know there are hurried meetings happening behind closed doors concerning the threat against the city. Part of me wishes that I could be listening in.

The rest of me knows better.

I did my part. Now my responsibility is ensuring Hades keeps his word to Ariadne. I don’t expect he’ll go back on it, but even if I don’t understand the full implications of her information, this reveal is about to do the equivalent of kicking a hornets’ nest. He’s going to have so much to worry about, it will be easy to let the promises to Ariadne go unfulfilled. The potential oversight is understandable, and not a reflection on him, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to let him get away with it. Ariadne put herself in great danger to help us, and I want to ensure that we actually help her back.

But not tonight.

Tonight, I’m going to lie here and let Orpheus paint me. We’ll release some of the pain still lingering between us. It’s strange to realize I had already started to forgive him before he ever made the journey to the lower city. The fact that he came, that he’s so invested in penance and doing whatever it takes to make things right…it means a lot. The man he used to be never would’ve considered apologizing, let alone engaging in the kind of things we’ve done since he arrived.

Watching him now, doing an activity I’m intimately familiar with, he should look like the old Orpheus. But he doesn’t. There is a heaviness to him, a weight he’s willingly caring around. Some people might call it maturity. I don’t know if that’s exactly the right word, but he seems content enough with the burden.

“Do you want to talk about what happened today?”

I concentrate on maintaining the position where he’s arranged me on the chaise, with one arm draped over my head and my body stretched out. He ensured I would be comfortable, propping me up with pillows so I can hold the position for an extended period of time. It still takes effort not to move. “You don’t normally like a lot of chatter when you paint.”

“There isn’t a lot left in my life that’s ‘normal.’ If you want to talk, I’m happy to listen.”

His words scratch at me, an itch I can’t quite reach. It takes me several long beats before I realize the problem. “What about what you want?”

“What I want doesn’t matter.”

I tense but remind myself to relax at the last minute. Even though we’re speaking, his brush moves at a steady pace, making the trip from paint to canvas and back again. “That’s bullshit, Orpheus. I understand you feel guilty for fucking up, and that’s why you’re paying penance, but that doesn’t mean it has to become your entire personality. You’re a whole human with thoughts and feelings and needs.”

“Am I?” His brush hesitates, and then goes back to the canvas. “I thought I was your dog.”

I glare. “Don’t do that. Don’t dirty what we shared in the last couple days. You enjoy being on your knees as much as I enjoy putting you there, but that isn’t the entirety of our relationship, and you know it. You’ve wronged me, but I’ve forgiven you for it. To keep hauling around your guilt is selfish.”

He flinches as if I reached out and struck him. “Well, we’ve already established I’m a selfish asshole. I guess I continue to play to type.”

“Stop. Doing. That.” I have to concentrate to stop gritting my teeth. “I don’t want to be the albatross you string around your neck for the rest of your life. Can you see how that would be more of a burden than anything else? You’ve always had hopes and dreams and ambitions, Orpheus. Those didn’t just go away in the last year, even if you buried them deep.”

He sits back with a sigh. “If you want an honest answer to this question, it’s going to prove just how selfish and worthless I am.”

No matter what else is true, I don’t like seeing him in pain. But if we have any chance at a future, we need to get this kind of thing figured out now. If Orpheus is more in love with the idea of paying penance to me than he is in love with me as a person, it will never work. I don’t know if that fear is irrational or not, but his reluctance to name the things that he personally wants worries me. “Tell me.”

He stares at his painting for a very long time, so long that I think he’s trying to get out of answering the question. I’m about to press him again when he says, “I just want to paint. That’s all I’ve ever wanted. I only did all the other shit, the networking and the partying and playing the golden boy to the legacy families, because it made my mother happy. She loves me—and it’s not a conditional love, either—but I think there’s a part of her that can’t help wanting me to mirror her ambitions and take the family further than she did.”

I can see that. Calliope used her modeling as a way to open doors for her, and later her family, into the upper tiers of the legacy families. She was never shy about wearing her ambition on her sleeve. In Olympus, that’s practically a virtue. I’m nearly certain that her positioning helped her eldest son become Apollo. He deserves the title, and he’s one of the best of the Thirteen in my personal opinion, but it was her ambition that secured him the spot, not his own.

As for Orpheus, no doubt she wanted him to follow in her footsteps. To use his art as an entrance to even higher levels of politics, to pave the way for an advantageous marriage that would ensure their family remained among the legacy families and create a possibility that his children could be future members of the Thirteen.

His relationship with me was never going to serve that purpose. My mother may be Demeter, and now my oldest sister may be Hera, but so much of Olympus still sees us as countryfolk, as outsiders. Calliope likes me well enough, but I’m not the partner she would choose for her son.

With all that said… “I thought you were happy. You seemed like it when we were dating before.”

“I was happy.” He shrugs. “It feels good to have the spotlight of Olympus’s attention shining on you. It made me feel like a god. It wasn’t until you were gone, and I stopped performing for them, that I realized how fickle that light is.”

It’s a hard lesson to learn, and I sympathize. Not that the golden light of Olympus ever shined on me. I have been tolerated even more than my sisters because I never made waves, but that’s a long way from actual approval. My family’s presence is a bone in the throat of all the legacy families, a reminder that they rely so heavily on those of us who come from the countryside around the city. My mother won her title by popular vote of all of Olympus’s citizens, both those in the city and those in the country. And that, the legacy families cannot stand.

“But the truth is,” he continues, “that as bad as things were for the last year, there was also relief mixed into the whole mess. I didn’t have to perform anymore. Losing my art hurt, but the rest of it was all unnecessary window dressing.”

I almost point out that he had an arrangement with the gallery set up before everything that happened with us, but I bite the words back at the last moment. I don’t need to tell him that. He knows. He stopped painting for the last year, so he had nothing to sell. But he’s painting now.

I take a breath and relax back into my pose. “Okay.”

“Okay?” He leans around the canvas to frown at me. “That’s all you have to say?”

“Yes.” A perverse part of me wants to leave him hanging, but that isn’t fair. “You answered my question. You want to paint. I understand.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that.” I watch him hesitate, and then finally go back to painting. His expression isn’t exactly peaceful, but his movements are slow and methodical. It continues to soothe me as we sit in relatively comfortable silence. I don’t know exactly how long it goes on for, only that the light through the window has shifted, darkness creeping in as night falls.

Finally, Orpheus sits back and shakes out his hands. “It’s going to take me a while to get back up to speed. I’m out of shape.” He goes about cleaning his brushes, a line of concentration appearing as his brows draw together. “I hear what you’re saying, Eurydice. It’s going to take me some time to wrap my mind around it, but I am listening.”

“That’s all I ask.” I sit up and do some stretching of my own. No matter how comfortable the position, sitting in place for an hour and change leaves a person stiff. “I know you’ve said I’m your muse in the past, but I can’t be your everything. I don’t want to be. I want to have my own life, and I want you to have your own life—and I want us to choose each other.”

“And Charon.”

I study him carefully, but there’s no unhappiness in his expression. He states it as fact. Still, I don’t want there to be any misunderstandings between us. “I care very deeply about Charon too. Just as much as I care about you, though it’s a little different. He’s not an addition to the two of us, just like you’re not an addition to me and Charon. Maybe I could work in a pair, but I don’t think any of us could deny that it feels good to be a trio.”

“Yeah.” Orpheus grins suddenly. “It really does feel good to be a trio.”

As if on cue, the door opens and shuts down on the first floor. I lift my voice enough to carry. “We’re up here.”

A few seconds later, Charon walks into the room. He looks utterly exhausted, and he nods at Orpheus before he comes over to the couch and drops down next to me. I open my mouth to ask him what’s going on, but he slips an arm behind my back and tugs me firmly against his side. “Just let me hold you for a few minutes.” He holds an arm out to Orpheus. “Both of you.”

Orpheus only hesitates for a few seconds before he walks over and takes up the empty position on Charon’s other side. I swallow down my questions until Charon relaxes fully against me. It takes long enough to worry me. “That bad?”

“Worse. It’s going to be war. We don’t know the full scope of it yet, but it’s bad.” He brushes a kiss to my temple, more like he needs comfort than like he’s trying to give it. “Circe was the second Hera. Her information on Olympus is only slightly outdated, but if Hermes is on her side, then we’re well and truly fucked.”

Because Hermes would’ve been feeding her information. With her help, Circe would know our moves before we even had a chance to make them. Hermes is known for having secrets she shouldn’t, and if she’s passing those on to the enemy…if that’s the case, we never stood a chance of stopping this.

I try to reconcile the idea of Hermes as a traitor. It doesn’t feel right. But then, what do I know? Up until a year ago, I only interacted with her in passing. Once I came to live in the lower city, I spent more time with her though. She’s a trickster and clever enough that half the time I have no idea what she’s talking about, but to help instigate a war on the city that she is supposed to protect? “I’m not ready to believe Hermes is on her side.”

“I don’t want to believe it either. We’d be fools not to look at this from all angles though.” Charon takes a long slow breath. “But not tonight. The whole mess will be waiting for us in the morning. Tonight, I’d like to focus on the three of us.”

Orpheus carefully, almost tentatively rests his hand on Charon’s chest. “Yeah, I think it’s time we talked.”

It’s funny how, despite everything else I’ve dealt with in the last couple days, this is the thing that makes me most nervous. “So let’s talk.”