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)
A pit opens up in my chest, a great sucking wound threatening to pull in everything around it. There have been more than a few occasions over the years where I wished I didn’t know Hermes as well as I do. This beats them all. “You fucked her,” I say numbly.
Her head jerks up. “What? No, I—”
“Don’t lie to me.” I fight my way to sitting. My shoulder is stiff, but it’s nothing compared to the agony ripping through my heart right now.
“I’m not. It’s not…” She huffs out a breath. “It’s complicated.”
I search her expression. I’ve memorized all of Hermes’s tells, and every single one of them says she’s trying to think of a better lie. Godsdamn it. “How long after I passed out did you wait before running into her arms? Five minutes? Ten?”
“That’s not what happened.” Her tone is low and fierce, but there’s too much conflict in her dark eyes for me to believe it. “It was more—”
“I don’t think I want to hear this.” I’m suddenly tired, so fucking tired. I lean back against the wall for the barest moment, gathering my strength. “I’ve watched you flirt and fuck and date your way through so many beautiful people during your time as Hermes.” The promise of maybe kept me afloat for years. Pathetic. She’s been tossing me crumbs, and I was grateful for the famine. “I never tried to stop you, never let my jealousy slip its leash, never said a sideways word about it. I understood that isn’t my place.”
“It could have been,” she whispered, not quite looking at me.
“Don’t you fucking dare do that.” The harshness of my tone surprises her. Well, fuck, it surprises me, too. I’ve kept a tsunami of emotions dammed up for far too long, and I have no one to blame but myself. I want to blame Hermes, but I was a willing participant in the con. “We both know the moment I tried to turn this into something more, you would have flitted away. The mission always came first. It had to come first.”
“Maybe.” She appears so miserable that I have to muscle down the instinctive desire to comfort her. “I care about you, too, Atalanta. I have since the beginning.”
The worst part is that I believe her. “It doesn’t matter.” Saying it breaks my heart. “Not while she stood between us. It was hard enough to believe we had a future with the ghost of her haunting you. Now that she’s here in the flesh? I don’t stand a chance. I was a fool to think I ever did.”
At that, she finally looks at me, really looks at me. “Don’t say that. I love you.”
Over the years, I’ve spent more time than I care to admit fantasizing about the moment when we could finally speak our truth and actually be together. That she’d speak those three little words and everything would be different. Now it’s happening and Circe ruined it, tainted everything with her bloody perfection.
“I love you, too.” I climb to my feet, feeling a little unsteady but unwilling to let that slow me down. “I’m going back to the lower city.” Somehow.
“What?”
“She’s too calm about that barrier.” My shirt is gone, but someone left me a spare set of clean clothes that I waste no time changing into. I register Hermes’s sharp intake of breath as I strip down, but I refuse to look at her. “Hades needs to find her team in the lower city and kill them before they have a chance to endanger the people behind the barrier. He can’t do that if he doesn’t know their intentions. He thinks they’re aiming for Persephone, so he’s focused there instead of wherever the machinery for the barrier is.”
“Atalanta.”
The agony in her voice makes me pause in the middle of lacing up my boots. I hate to hurt her. It feels like taking a blade to my own skin. Too bad she did it first. I make myself ask the question I’m not sure I want an answer to. “If I killed her today—yesterday—would you have forgiven me?”
“What?”
I finally look at her. Fool that I am, I can’t help drinking in the sight. Even tired and exhausted, she’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. Sharp chin, cute little nose, a mouth I’ve imagined spending hours worshipping.
I scrub a hand over my face. I’m so fucking tired. “If I’d stabbed Circe instead of the other way around, if I’d been smart enough to finish the job and kill her instead of walking away…” I take a deep breath. “You couldn’t have forgiven me. You would have tried, but it would have been the end of us.” Her mouth works, but for once, Hermes doesn’t have a quick reply. That’s answer enough. I nod. “Yeah, I thought so.”