10. The Heraion #3
The shore behind me erupted with lights, torches or flashlights illuminating the beach.
My arms burned as I forced them through the water, each stroke fighting the current that wanted to pull me sideways.
Salt water splashed into my mouth, my nose, my eyes.
The silk slip wrapped tighter around my thighs with every kick.
House Hera’s ancestor was the wife of the first House Poseidon Alpha. Penelope and Odysseus. Maybe it will help me. Maybe the sea will recognize her bloodline and show mercy.
But the Aegean felt nothing like merciful. It felt ancient and utterly indifferent to my terror. The current strengthened as I swam farther from shore, pulling harder now, threatening to drag me out into open water.
I’d drown in darkness here without anyone knowing where I’d gone. My fathers would never find my body. They’d never know what happened to me.
I kept swimming anyway, refusing to stop, refusing to let Helena’s priestesses drag me back. And then, my outstretched hands hit something solid in the empty water.
Pain exploded through my palms and up my wrists, radiating into my shoulders. I gasped, choking on seawater. Instinctively, I tried to press on. But there was no way to move forward. I’d just run into an invisible surface, smooth, cold and absolutely immovable.
No. This can’t be happening.
I ran my hands along the barrier, searching desperately for a gap, a weakness, anything. But the shield remained perfectly consistent, transparent enough that I could still see the horizon beyond but solid as reinforced steel.
It was a House Athena ward. Their strategic barriers could contain entire battlefields, imprison armies, withstand siege weapons and divine powers alike. They were the Olympians’ ultimate defense, completely unbreachable by anyone without Athena blood.
Helena had caged the entire cove. Probably the whole damn island. She’d commissioned a ward that turned Samos into an inescapable prison.
Why this? Why now?
But I knew why. Because I’d always run. Always fought. Always refused to accept the chains they tried to wrap around me. So she’d called in House Athena to build a cage I couldn’t escape, no matter how desperately I tried.
The fight drained out of me all at once. My arms stopped moving. My legs stopped kicking. The current pulled at my exhausted body, and I let it, sinking beneath the surface into cold darkness.
What was the point? Helena would just drag me back. Cassandra would apply more healing fire. The priestesses would watch me more carefully. I’d accomplished nothing except proving I was exactly as out of control as they claimed.
Something bumped against my side.
I jerked in the water, instinct overriding resignation. Another bump, this one more insistent, pushed me upward toward the surface. I broke the surface gasping, arms flailing for purchase that didn’t exist.
A sleek gray form surfaced beside me, blowing air through its blowhole with a distinctive whistle-click. A dolphin. Another appeared on my other side, and their bodies kept me afloat without any effort on my part.
The dolphins clicked and whistled to each other, the sounds carrying both above and below the water.
Their skin felt smooth and warm against my chilled body, so different from the cold Aegean but somehow familiar.
Like the horses I’d tended with Elias and Robert, with their soft noses and gentle eyes.
My throat closed on something that might’ve been a sob. I pressed my face against the nearest dolphin’s flank and let them guide me back toward the shore I’d tried so desperately to escape.
The beach materialized through my blurred vision, torches blazing along the sand. Helena stood at the water’s edge, her pristine white robe abandoned for something darker and more practical. She waded in as the dolphins brought me closer, her face twisted with panic.
“Dear Hera, what were you thinking?” Her hands caught my arms, pulling me from the dolphins with shaking urgency. “If not for Orion’s dolphins… You could be dead.”
Orion’s dolphins.
The name cut through my exhaustion like a blade. Orion Maris. The head of House Poseidon who’d hosted that disastrous party on his yacht, who’d caught me stumbling drunk in the corridor and offered quiet concern. Who’d said he hoped to speak with me again in ‘less intoxicating circumstances’.
He was here. On Samos. Close enough that his dolphins had responded to my potential drowning with immediate help.
The idea of another Alpha sniffing around me turned my stomach. I’d had enough of Alphas and their certainty that they knew what was best. But as Helena hauled me onto the sand and wrapped a blanket around me, a different thought crystallized.
Maybe all along, I just had to fight fire with fire.
Alexander Stormwright thought he could stalk me, curse me, destroy everything I’d built. Helena thought she could cage me on this island until I submitted to their ‘treatment’ and accepted my role as a cursed Hera Omega. But Orion Maris wielded a power neither of them could control.
And maybe the only way to extinguish a storm was with an ocean.