Total pages in book: 102
Estimated words: 95458 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 95458 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 477(@200wpm)___ 382(@250wpm)___ 318(@300wpm)
“Hecate,” I hiss.
“In the flesh.” She goes for the gun.
I had my people prepare for the eventuality that someone may try to do something foolish and heroic. I didn’t expect Hecate, but it makes no difference. Antigone and Nerissa are there in a heartbeat, grabbing Hecate—because I refuse to call her Hermes—under the arms and hauling her off me. Too easy. She never would have let herself be taken so easily.
Something metallic flashes in her hand. “Knife!” I cry out, forgetting to keep my tone modulated to my public persona.
Antigone dodges a split second before Hecate makes contact. It’s enough for her to break free, though. She dances back, twirling her knife in a careless way. “You know, there’s a reason public executions went out of style ages ago. Murder is deeply distasteful and all that.”
It takes effort to rise gracefully to my feet instead of scrambling, but I force myself to do it. To tilt a smile to the audience who are roaring their displeasure and confusion. “Since when has Olympus frowned upon murder…Hermes?”
She sidles to the side, not moving toward Peitho but getting between me and…Eros and Psyche?
Demeter finally rouses herself from whatever disassociation she’s indulged in. “Circe, you’re about to lose the crowd.” She doesn’t speak loudly, but she’s close enough for me to pick up the words all the same.
She’s right. Hermes is beloved by the people of Olympus. I have no intention of killing her, but they don’t know that. If they think she’s threatened, the tide may turn against me. I can’t allow that to happen. The moment requires decisive action. I resolutely turn away from Hecate and focus on my current intention. Peitho. I lift my voice, my microphone ensuring my words will cut through the chaos. “Peitho, for your crimes during your reign as Aphrodite, you are sentenced to death.”
“Damn it, Circe!”
Movement as Hecate tries to throw herself at me again. Too late. She’s too damned late. It’s the simplest thing in the world to pull the trigger three times, taking the bitch twice in the chest and once in the forehead. Peitho slumps to the ground, blue eyes blank and unseeing.
A roar goes through the crowd, but I can’t begin to tell if it’s in support or denial. Calm settles in my bones. This may not have gone off as seamlessly as I initially planned, but it did go off. The Aphrodite who presided over my kidnapping and forced wedding, who I begged for freedom only to be denied, is dead.
One down.
There are a few dozen trials to hold once I get my hands on the rest of the Thirteen and the legacy families, but only a handful of them are ones I personally care about. Poseidon. Hades. Athena. Zeus, even if he’s not the same man who hurt me. Sins of the father, as the saying goes.
I’m so focused on Hecate, staring at me with those pretty, wide brown eyes as if I’ve shocked her by doing exactly what I said I intended to do, that I don’t see Eros coming. He launches himself over the edge of the stage with a smooth move I’d admire in other circumstances and sprints toward me.
I take one measured step back and raise my gun. “Not another step.”
“Circe, don’t.” Hecate’s voice cracks on the last word. She sounds so much like her old self that my head whips around to look at her when I should be focusing on the incoming threat.
Her beauty breaks the shards of heart left in my chest even further. Gone is her splashy fashion, bright and shiny like a two-bit magician. She’s wearing black pants and a black hoodie, her boots laced up tight. She looks a lot like the girl I used to love. Enough to give me pause.
The distraction costs me.
Eros grabs for the gun, and he’s much more effective than Hecate was. His blue eyes, so like his mother’s, are murderous. “I’m putting an end to this now.”
He’s stronger than me, but that matters little. I release the gun, using his confusion to pull my second one. Every plan must have contingencies, and that includes personal defense. “No, you’re really not.” I shoot him twice in the chest.
The shock on his face, the condemnation, stings as he stumbles back and presses his hands to his wound. He goes to his knees and slumps over, going paler yet as his blood paints the stage around his body. This man has as much blood on his hands as I do, and yet he looks at me as if I’m the monster in the room.
Demeter shoves me aside, reaching his fallen body the same moment Psyche does. The women sink to their knees, their dark heads bowed almost identically as they frantically try to stop the bleeding.
Antigone starts to move forward, but I shake my head. “Leave him.” I turn the gun on Hecate, but she’s standing with her arms down, shock written all over her pretty features as she stares as Eros. At least that will be simple. “Take her.”