Chapter 16
Atalanta
I wake up to the throbbing pain in my shoulder, but the wound has lost the sharp sensation suggesting it’s about to get worse.
That’s good news, enough to make me feel slightly positive in perspective.
At least until I lift my head to see Hermes slumped in the chair next to my bed.
She’s not sleeping—hasn’t slept all night, if I don’t miss my guess—and there’s a distant look in her eyes. A very recognizable look.
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.”
“Circe’s faltering. She—”
“Killed Eros.” I hold her gaze as I say it. “She shot him dead while you watched. She killed him, Hermes. If that wasn’t enough to prove how little she cares for the people you value, then I don’t know what will be enough. She would have killed me if she were less sloppy.”
“Circe isn’t sloppy,” she says softly. “She left you alive on purpose.”
I refuse to think about that statement—or the strange sensation it draws forth inside me. That knife fight was… I exhale slowly and turn away. It’s been a long time since I’ve been tested so thoroughly, and I’m not liar enough to pretend my blood didn’t sing through the whole combat.
So, yeah, I guess a part of me understands Hermes’s inability to stay away from that woman. Circe is a flickering flame, beckoning the unwary and wary both, overriding hard-won survival instincts. A promise of warmth and pleasure, a delivery of pain and death.
“Do what you need to do,” I say finally. “If we both survive it, I guess I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Atalanta.” She shoves to her feet. “I’m sorry, okay? When I get close to her, my mind goes all soft and goofy. It was a mistake.”
All the right words, but she’s forgetting I know her better than anyone else on this earth.
I match her soft tone, injecting gentleness I don’t feel.
“It might have been a mistake, but it will happen again and again and again. She didn’t break down the door to this safe house last night. You went to her.”
“Not on purpose.” The worst part is that I believe her. Their shared history is a thread neither of them can break, even if they wanted to. And they clearly don’t want to.
She slept with Circe.
Jealousy lashes me again, sharper this time, biting deep. “You know what? I’m done with this conversation. I might love you, but it doesn’t mean a single damned thing. I have no claim on you.”
“I want you to have a claim on me,” she whispers.
“I know.” Without another word, I turn around and walk out of the room. She doesn’t follow me. I expected it, but it hurts all the same. Everything hurts.
I should be used to it by now. Loving Hermes is a lesson in pain and patience.
Even so, I’m not fool enough to believe she’s a slot machine I can put energy and caring into and get out sex and love.
She does love me. She wasn’t lying when she said it.
That just makes this whole thing all the more tragic.
Because she will always choose Circe.
I press a hand to my chest, just below the stab wound.
Ironic that both Circe and Hermes have hurt me in damn near the same place, if for wildly different reasons.
I stop before the front door and let the emotions roll over me.
They’ll potentially get me killed if I don’t deal with them now—or at least tuck them away safely to be dealt with later.
I love Hermes. She slept with Circe.
Circe left me alive. I’m attracted to her, even if I don’t like it.
If I get a chance, I will kill Circe. Hermes won’t forgive me for it, though she’ll lie and tell herself otherwise.
There’s a very solid chance none of this will matter because Hades and Zeus will have me killed when I return to the lower city after they specifically sent me away.
None of these things change my next action steps. The lower barrier is the only thing keeping Circe from taking the entirety of the city. It’s one goal the past Zeus never managed to accomplish, but he also never tried to launch a full-out assault across the River Styx.
I don’t know what happens if we kill Circe and drive out her soldiers.
Hades has been clear in his intentions to stay in Olympus, and so has Zeus.
Poseidon is a bit of a wild card, but he’s too damned honorable to leave the city if he decides the people need him.
He’ll follow the others because he’ll see it as the path of least destruction.
Which puts us right back where we started. The last decade of my life, all the blood and sweat and tears, for nothing. Everything will be the same; the people who need the most protection will be the ones who the boot lands the hardest on.
That’s a worry for a future me. Right now, I need action.
Even though I tell myself not to, I glance over my shoulder. The hallway is as empty as it was when I stalked into it. Hermes still hasn’t followed me. There’s no reason for that to make the fissures in my heart crack open all the wider. It’s nothing more than I expected. It just fucking hurts.
“Goodbye, Hermes…Hecate.”
I push through the door and out onto the street.
I wasn’t fully aware when Dionysus moved us, but it’s no surprise to find myself in the upper city warehouse district.
There’s even one of the legion of black sedans sitting at the curb.
I try the door and smile grimly to find it unlocked, the keys in the visor. “Thanks, Dio.”