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)
By the end of the week, they’re making solid progress in carving out a new government that might actually work. Hades brings down the lower city barrier and we’re able to spirit Circe and her people out of Olympus on a ship. All of the Thirteen and the legacy families have disappeared as well; it surprised the fuck out of me that no one tried to go back on their word, but Circe’s executions of Peitho and Artemis were enough to scare everyone. We’re doing it. We’re finally seeing our plan, a decade in the making, coming to fruition. It’s exhausting. It’s exhilarating. And yet…
I spend hours every day watching Hecate’s back as she argues and manipulates and flatters by turn. I can see the active progress we’re making, the future we’re making better for all Olympians. It’s just…
“It’s good we’re not staying in the city,” Hecate says one night, sprawled across my chest in loose exhaustion. “I can keep up this energy because I know there’s an end date. It’s a lot more fun to topple a government than it is to set one up.”
“Yeah.” I smooth back her braids. “It’s a lot of talking and not a lot of action.”
She lifts her head to look into my eyes. “You don’t have to stay, you know. Circe found that house and is getting it ready for us. If you want to leave early—”
“No.” I’m not someone who was meant for a desk job or really any job that requires me to hold the same still position for hours at a time, but I’m not about to leave Hecate undefended. Nothing bad has happened yet, but that isn’t a promise for the future. “When we leave, we leave together.”
She huffs out a breath. “It’s safe enough.”
“We didn’t come this far to lose you now.” I press a light kiss to her forehead. “Besides, without you in the mix, Circe and I are liable to end up sniping at each other until we get irritated enough to go for our knives again.”
“Uh-huh.” She props her chin on her folded hands over my chest. “When you said that, there was a little thread of excitement in your voice. I didn’t know you were such a kinky bitch, Atalanta.”
I roll us, ending with her on her back and me braced over the top of her. “And I did know you get your rocks off by being a little instigator.”
“Guilty.” She wraps her legs around my waist, as loose and relaxed as I’ve ever seen her. “I don’t know how to tell Circe this since she seems happy enough setting up house, but I don’t know if I’ll ever fit into a normal life.”
I settle on top of her. It feels like this conversation has been coming for days, but I’m still not ready. “Are we going to get jobs? Pay a mortgage? Is Circe?”
We exchange a look and burst out laughing. Hecate twines her arms around my neck. “We don’t have to have any answers now. First, we need to get Olympus to a stable enough place that they don’t need me generating issues to unify them. Then, we’ll go to Circe and see what she’s been up to in the meantime.”
I lift a single brow. “So you caught that strangeness in the last phone call?”
“Oh yeah.” She grins. “She’s absolutely not telling us something, but for once, I’m not actually worried it will hurt us. She’s probably just, like, bought an entire street and set up her people in all the houses around us.”
As much as I want to say Hecate is being dramatic, the truth is that is exactly something Circe would do. More than that, I can’t blame her for wanting security in any way she can get it. She gets to take care of her surviving people in the process, and that’s not a bad thing. Some of them decided to go back to Aeaea, drawn by the news of changes Icarus Vitalis is making there, but most followed Circe to…wherever she is.
“I don’t know what normal looks like either, Hecate.” It’s easy to admit this in the intimacy between just the two of us. “I don’t know if we can be normal after what we’ve lived through, what we’ve done.” I brush a kiss to her lips. “But we’ll have each other and we’ll have the future, no matter what it looks like. That’s a win from where I’m sitting.”
“I feel the same way,” she whispers. “I didn’t dare hope we’d all survive this, and even now it feels like the rug is going to get pulled out from beneath my feet at the last moment, but…”
“We survived.” I kiss her again. “We will continue to survive. We’ll get Olympus back on its feet, shaky though it is, and then we’ll go see what our murderous girlfriend has been up to.”