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)
“Not exactly.” She sighs. “Hera knows that I’m working with you. She made no secret of it when I initially came to the lower city. They let me go because Hades and Zeus weren’t interested in keeping captives, not when I’m a liability because of my training and knowledge. I’m honestly surprised they let me back into the lower city.”
“You’re made.” Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. I should have thought about this after she drove me out into the country to intercept Hera a few days back, but I’ve been distracted. If I’d thought about it, I might have assumed Hera would keep her mouth shut since I saved her godsdamned ass. But Atalanta was made, and she went back. “What the fuck were you thinking, going back there?”
Atalanta is quiet for so long, I find myself holding my breath waiting for her answer. Finally, she says, “I wasn’t thinking. I just had to get away, and my training kicked in. Hades and the others needed to know what Circe is planning, even if that meant they tossed me in a cell or dungeon or some shit in the process.”
She’s right, but I can’t help focusing on the first part of that sentence. She wasn’t thinking clearly because she was so hurt by my sleeping with Circe. I clear my throat. “I’m sorry. I know I said it, and it doesn’t change anything, but I’m sorry.”
“You’re right: It doesn’t change anything.” She hesitates. “But I think I understand why you did it. Her magnetism is…something else.”
The way she says it… I sit up in bed. “Did something happen?”
“No.” Atalanta laughs, but not like anything is funny. “At least not yet.”
20
Atalanta
I spend the next couple of days recovering. Or that’s what I’m told I’m doing when I’m stuffed in a room, hooked up to an IV, and checked in on every fifteen minutes like clockwork. One of the people checking on me is even a doctor, so I guess that holds up. The rest are a combination of Athena’s and Hades’s people, ensuring that I’m not here in some elaborate double-triple-I’ve-lost-count cross. As if I have the energy for that shit. Or the desire.
I don’t think the search for Circe’s people is going well. Everything has been too quiet. I’m almost pathetically grateful when Achilles walks into the room with his usual rolling swagger. He’s a large man with golden skin, dark hair and beard, and an arrogance that has a tendency to fill a room to the point of suffocation. For all that, I like the bastard.
He’s not smiling as he pulls a chair over to the side of my bed and straddles it. “This is some shit.”
“Where’s your sense of adventure?”
He gives me a severe look, his dark eyes missing their normal charismatic shine. “You can do that with other people. Don’t do it with me.”
That startles a laugh out of me. “We’re not friends, Achilles. We never were.” Not with him coming up under Athena and me under Artemis. It was months after the Ares tournament—and everything that came as a result—when I switched from Artemis to Athena, so we never actually worked together. I liked what I saw of him in the tournament. He’s bold and arrogant, but he can back it up with skill. Even so, I don’t know him.
“You’re right. We’re not friends. Maybe we could have been under different circumstances.”
“Probably.” This conversation is awkward and weird, and I don’t like that I’m sitting down for it. There’s no room to move if he attacks. “Are you here to snip off a loose end?”
He laughs, the bastard. “I might have been trusted by Athena at one point, but I’m sure as fuck not now. No, if she decides to remove the threat you represent, she’ll probably do it herself. And sending me to murder an injured woman in bed isn’t exactly Ares’s style.”
He has a point. “Then why are you here?”
Achilles sighs, as if I didn’t already anticipate this being bad news. “You can’t stay in the lower city. No one is interested in tossing you in a dungeon—even though Hades keeps insisting he doesn’t actually have a dungeon—and we can’t spare the manpower to set a guard on you. It wouldn’t work anyway. I’ve seen what you’re capable of, which means it would have to be me or Patroclus watching you, and we can’t spare either of us right now. Ares needs us.”
I should have seen this coming. I suppose I did, but I wasn’t thinking clearly after waking up to discover Hecate’s betrayal. It doesn’t matter that I don’t actually have a romantic claim on her; knowing she fucked the woman who caused all this pain, the woman who stabbed me, hurts. It would hurt even if I only saw her as a friend, and it hurts all the more for me being in love with her. Knowing she loves me back only makes the pain spike deeper, hotter.