Chapter 36
POSEIDON
If they had hurt her, no force in the universe could save the motherfuckers from my fury.
The words tasted like salt and tempests in my mouth.
Theseus and Guinn were the ones who pieced it together. The name slipped from Drakos’s venomous tongue. From there it unravelled: Cadmus, Thebes, the birthplace of the Spartoi. A desolate citadel left to ruin, its belly carved into a labyrinth of tunnels older than memory.
That was where Ixion’s stench led us; that was where they had taken her.
We hit them like a tidal wall.
The ruined city exploded into motion—steel and shadow and raw, pissed-off divinity. Hundreds of Ixion’s soldiers flooded us, armed to the teeth, faces masked and hungry for a spectacle. They met more than gods; they met brothers.
Zeus fell into them as a thunderstorm incarnate, lightning tearing the air in jagged, beautiful screams. Whole ranks folded beneath his bolts, struck down by falling suns.
Hades moved in a dark tide, shadows becoming claws that ripped men from bone and folded them into nothing. Thanatos was a scythe—cold, inexorable—cutting through ranks with a whisper of death that left no fear, only the polite forgetting of life.
Erebus unleashed wolves made of night; they leapt and shredded, eyes like hot coals. Perseus was a blade of furious theatre, moving with an animal grace, blades carving a symphony of ruin through flesh.
Jason—gunmetal and muscle—sprayed controlled, brutal geometry into the press. Bronte’s magic floored them as they stood, and Persephone wielded shadows with the wrath of a pissed-off goddess.
I dry-drowned them—saltless, suffocating pressure that folded men inward; air turned traitor to their lungs.
My hands were the sea’s law; where I swept, men found themselves flung to the stone as if tossed by waves that had learned to break bone.
The air reeked of ozone and hot fear and the metallic tang of old bargains being paid in full.
We took the enemy. We took them together.
When the last of the soldiers pitched and stilled, a ringing silence settled, the kind that happens after thunder and before you remember to breathe. I moved through the hush like a storm walking home, heart thudding so hard I could hear it in my teeth… and then I saw her.
Cordelia stood framed by ruined banners and falling dust, blood and grit on silk—my Little Red against the grey in her tattered dress. Behind her, Ajax slumped—a treacherous shadow, his face split with hatred and something close to panic.
My gaze dragged back to her: her flesh was mottled with blood and bruises, her body and face battered, but still she stood. The sight punched the anger out of me, leaving only a rush of relief so fierce it almost broke me.
My beautiful Little Red… kardia mou. The world narrowed to the sight of her—alive, stubborn, infuriatingly fierce.
Time stuttered, idiotically slow, like some thief trying to snatch the last coin.
Ajax moved with animal speed, the kind born of fear and stupid courage. In the same heartbeat, my lungs filled with the sight of steel leaving his hand: a blade, cruel and bright. It arced—silent, precise—heading for her back.
She didn’t even have the grace to scream properly.
Her face changed in the span of a breath: confusion, a flash of betrayal in the wideness of her eyes, and then the raw, gut-wrenching comprehension of metal entering flesh.
She dropped like a stone, the air rushing out of her in a sound I will never forget; a sound like a breaking mast, like a gull falling.
I tore. Every god in the vicinity tore, but I tore faster. My shout split the air—a sound that should have upended mountains. Zeus hurled a bolt that cleaved Ajax where he stood; the man was ash before he hit the floor, his ambition unmade in a clean white crack of light.
But all I saw was Cordelia falling, and then I was on my knees beside her.
I hauled her into my arms as if I could hold the world together with the force of my grip.
Her body was small and warm, then cooling even as I pressed my mouth to her forehead like a prayer that had run out of words.
She looked at me—eyes wet, the defiance never quite leaving—but there was a fragility there now I had never allowed myself to confront.
‘Kardia mou,’ I begged—the nickname like a crack of home. Her fingers tried to find my face and faltered.
Her breath came and came less as I counted each exhale as if counting stars. Blood rose between us, dripping from her lips, slow and stupid and absolute. I felt it like the tide pulling away—pieces of her that I could not drag back.
She smiled once, a thing full of pain and mockery and some terrible pity. When the final breath left her, it was a small, inadequate sound. The light in her eyes dimmed like a candle with a gust.
I held her and screamed to the sky, into the bones of the city, and nothing answered but the thud of my own breaking.
The world narrowed to the shape of her absence. The tempest inside me bled out into a silence so complete it felt like burial—alive, aware, and endless.
‘Poseidon, let me touch her.’ Persephone laid her hands on my love, and her face blanched.
‘It’s too late, my queen,’ Thanatos said. ‘A soul reaper has taken her.’
I cradled the corpse of my obsession, and the brothers clustered, stunned, around the ruin of what we had failed to protect.
There was no storm now, only the slow, infinite ache of a sea gone still.
Persephone’s eyes shone with a cold, merciless light—something that had nothing to do with mercy and everything to do with retribution. Hades gave her a solemn nod.
‘Zeus. You know what to do. Give me ten minutes,’ she demanded.
‘But—’ Zeus started, panic cracking his composure for the first time I’d seen in centuries; Persephone cut him off like a blade.
‘You will do this, or your name will never be uttered by any of us again.’
Persephone and Thanatos disappeared into the aether.
Bronte’s whisper came after, raw and tiny: ‘Zeus… please.’ Tears traced dark tracks down her cheeks.
Zeus’s hands trembled as he stepped forward. He made a motion—slow, ceremonial—towards Cordelia’s body. I felt the world tilt sickeningly as the king of the gods approached, and the air hummed.
I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t look at any of them.
I turned away and pressed my face into the soft, copper-salted curl of her hair, clutching her to my chest as if I could hold her together by force of will.
Her weight was impossibly small; everything about her—breath, heartbeat, heat—had faded like tide pulling back from the shore.
I wept then, more sound than thought, ugly and animal, the noise of a god undone.
‘Poseidon,’ Hades’ voice was steady and low, an anchor in the dark. ‘Give her to Zeus.’
I didn’t want to. My arms tightened, claws in the fabric of her sleeve. The thought of handing her over—of trusting the king of lightning with the last thing that mattered—felt like betrayal and salvation all at once.
But Hades’ tone left no room for argument; it was not a request. It was a command.
I stayed turned, because if I looked, I might crumble into a tsunami no god could come back from; my grief pressed against my ribs like a tide-locked stone, heavy and inexorable.