90

90

The Answer Is No

To say that slipping into blissful sleep wrapped in your lover’s arms on a mountainside…only to wake up alone in your own cold bed is disorienting would be an understatement.

I didn’t expect cuddles and declarations of undying love. Obviously. Well…mostly. What my secret heart wants—for last night to have meant something—is a revelation that isn’t a thunderbolt. It’s soft, like butterfly wings.

This is different from my crush on Boone. That was a lonely girl’s innocent feelings, someone who simply wanted a connection and his was the only friendly face in the crowd. But with Hades…it’s something else.

With Hades, it’s still a connection, but it’s also protection, tenderness, and survival. It’s danger, frustration, and all his damned secrets and trusting him anyway. It’s fairness and respect and understanding.

It’s seeing and being truly seen in return.

And maybe…maybe it could be more.

Which is why this morning is jarring to say the least. Yes, we were both clear about what last night was, but this feels like either running or abandonment. I mean…not even a note?

Okay. Benefit of the doubt, I tell myself. Maybe Hades wanted to give me a little privacy. Or he’s asking the staff for my favorite foods for breakfast. Or he likes to shower early in the morning. I’ve decided that if gods eat, sleep, and fuck, then they must shower. Although that instantly-dressed-and-styled snap thing might indicate otherwise.

Or he knows today is the next Labor and I need to focus.

Except my head is entirely with Hades. And I can’t make that stop while I shower and dress, which I do with more haste than care, at least until I’m checking my vest. That, I take my time to go over carefully. Thankfully, Hades got my axe back from Hephaestus for me. I’d left it pinning that automaton’s tentacle in the window.

But Hades isn’t at breakfast, either. Charon and Cerberus are.

I give Ber’s head a scratch before I get myself toast and tea. Pretty sure my stomach wouldn’t appreciate more for a lot of very good reasons.

Charon eyes my plate when I sit. “Hades would understand if you decided not to do this after all,” he says, almost casually, popping a slice of apple in his mouth and chewing.

“I know.”

“Boone would understand as well.”

“I know that, too.”

Charon breathes in and out audibly, sandy hair falling into his eyes. He’s hated this plan for me to win the next two Labors since the moment we told him about it. A growled “the fuck you are” was a pretty clear indicator, which made Hades stare him down coldly. He only eased up about it when I explained it was my idea, but Charon has remained against it.

I grin. “You’re a bit of a mother hen, you know?”

Rus lets out a woofy wheeze of a laugh that fills the room with the strong odor of smoke. Cer and even Ber join in when Charon pushes the eggs around on his plate with a grumble.

Then Ber swings up to look past me before nudging the other two heads. I don’t need to look. I knew Hades was there before the dog did, as if my body is so attuned to him now that I could be a Hades location app.

Charon looks past me as well. “Tell Lyra not to do this.”

I also turn slowly…to encounter a wall of absolute indifference.

He looks through me. I might as well be one of the dead souls down here, I’m so invisible in this moment. And if anyone knows what invisible feels like, it’s me.

Only this is so much worse.

Like razors over my skin, leaving a thousand little cuts.

“Lyra knows what she’s doing and what she wants,” Hades tells Charon.

“Do you, Phi?” Charon demands. Then he levers to his feet, chair scraping against the stone floor with a protesting screech. “Don’t screw this up just because—”

He cuts himself off when Hades’ expression goes utterly blank, his voice bored when he speaks. “She is my concern, not yours. Feel free to fuck right off.”

I lean back at that. I may not have spent a lot of time around them, but that is not how these two talk to each other.

With a lethal scowl, Charon shoves his plate across the table and then disappears. Cerberus snorts at Hades before he follows, leaving me alone with him.

His jaw might as well be hewn from granite. After a second, he looks at me like he has to force himself to. “Ready?”

That’s it?

That’s…it?

Screw that. Why is he being so weird? As far as he’s concerned, we had phenomenal, consensual, no-strings-attached sex and that’s all. Being a dick to me now is not required. I already understood the assignment.

“Absolutely.” I abandon my breakfast on the table and cross the terrace…and I deliberately don’t stop until I’m right in front of him, close enough that a deep breath would brush my breasts against his chest. Then I hold up a hand in the air, like I’m pressing it to the invisible, glass wall of distance he’s erected between us, higher and thicker than before.

I wait.

I wait for him to look me in the eyes, and when he does, I smile. Just treat me like you have before, I’m saying with that smile.

For the briefest of seconds, his own expression gentles, and there’s a lightning flash of tender need curling through me.

But in the next instant, it’s all gone, scorched away under a diamond-hard determination that makes no sense. He presses his palm to mine, and we blink out of existence. When we blink back in, we’re standing in the front courtyard of his residence in Olympus. But he doesn’t step back. And he doesn’t lower his hand.

We stand there, close together, palm to palm, and I stare into eyes that show me a mere glimpse of the battle raging within him. A battle that is well beyond the folly of a god and a mortal getting involved.

What in the hellfires is going on with him?

I open my mouth to ask, but his gaze lifts above my head and the familiar mask of the closed, brooding god of death slips into place.

“Are you here to speak to Lyra?” he asks.

I look over my shoulder, breaking the connection of our hands and feeling as if Atropos cut the line of our fates in that instant.

But I can’t let any of that show because Rima is standing just inside the gate, watching.

Rima. None of the others. Not even my allies.

“Yes,” she says, looking between Hades and me.

“Good luck in the next Labor,” he says to me, gaze aimed at my forehead, before walking away.

I look at the ground, everything focused on the sound of his feet getting farther and farther away. I hear a small click—the door to the house opening. Then a pause.

“Don’t die, Lyra,” he says quietly.

After what almost sounded like a plea, the snick of the door closing behind him feels oddly final, and I can’t contain my flinch.

Rima approaches, and I force myself to look at her. Focus on her. She glances between me and the door as if she worries that if she gets too close, Hades will reappear and punish her for interrupting us. The fear in her eyes is unmistakable and impossible to ignore.

“He won’t hurt you,” I assure her.

Her gaze, deep-brown eyes almost consumed by the black of her pupils, settles on me. She shakes her head, and I don’t know if she’s rejecting what I said or something else.

“I am here to tell you that we all discussed your proposal.”

I figured. I can also tell by her expression that the answer didn’t swing my way.

A new heaviness joins the weight that’s been slowly growing since the moment I woke up alone this morning.

This weight is different, though—made of guilt, disappointment, and desperation.

“The answer is no?” I ask, and my voice threatens to crack, but I control it.

“That is correct.”

“All of you?” My allies didn’t want to come tell me themselves? I don’t ask about that. It would show weakness.

“Also correct.”

My lungs let go of all their air, and my shoulders round over as my heart shrivels. “Do you mind if I ask why?”

Her back goes ramrod straight. “Zai wanted to deliver this news himself. But I insisted I be the one to tell you. We are saying no…because of me.”

I frown. “You? Why? It’s a good deal for everyone—”

“My blessing from Apollo is the gift…” She says the last word with a dubious burr in her voice. “Of prophecy.”

Wow.

And…okay? “I don’t see how—”

“The problem is, I can’t control the gift. It chooses what to show me.” She makes a face. “This has not been helpful throughout the Labors because my gift shows me the same thing…only one vision…over and over.”

Dread oozes through me like stagnant water through a bog. “What does it show you?”

“Hades as King of the Gods.”

“I know you don’t want that,” I say slowly, “but it’s nothing to fear. He is good—”

“In my vision, he is in a towering rage…and burning down the world.” She says this starkly, with a tremor in her voice that becomes visible in her hands, her face turning pale and sort of green. Her fear is so heightened, she can’t hold it in. “And no one—not mortals, not the Greek gods, not any other gods—can stop him.”