Chapter 1
We’re So Screwed
LYRA
Fuck the universe. I knew it hated me. I just didn’t think it would be this petty.
Besides, becoming a goddess should’ve come with perks. Sparkly powers. A throne. Maybe a brief vacation somewhere that didn’t drop me onto a stone bridge suspended over nothingness, with a yawning abyss on either side and a door looming in the distance like a punch line I’ve already heard.
Not that it matters what it looks like. I know where we are.
Tartarus.
Not because I recognize it, but because I was standing on the other side of the double doors of the massive gates to this place when one opened.
Worse? I dragged Boone in with me. One of my few friends—who already died once thanks to me and the Crucible Games. Sure, I won and pulled his soul into godhood, so yay, happy ending. That only lasted a few weeks.
Now he’s here. Again. With me. In this hellhole.
I shoot him a quick side-eye, but he doesn’t turn. Just grits his teeth and stares forward. Which is code for very worried and pretending not to be.
I take a breath. The air tastes like iron on my tongue. Or maybe that’s dread. Because I don’t have to ask who yanked us through the gates. I already know that, too.
Cronos.
King of the Titans.
By all accounts, the mold all assholes have been made from ever since.
After all, his son Zeus had to get it from somewhere.
This guy swallowed all his children the day each was born to subvert a prophecy that he’d be overthrown by them one day.
I mean, I’ve heard of crappy fathers. Mine wasn’t exactly a poster boy for Dad of the Year. But Cronos was next level.
Is.
Not was.
Is. He’s standing right in front of us. As tall and muscled as the hero of a novel, with hair as black as onyx only touched by silver at the temples, and a thick, dark beard that hides the cut of his jaw.
And gods, he looks like Hades. Not in the way parents sometimes do, but bone-deep, uncanny—like looking at an older, more brutal version. No wonder Hades always carried a shadow he couldn’t name. This is where it came from.
But if the gods are beautiful, I’d say Titans are radiant. Like, it’s actually hard to look directly at Cronos.
I’m not sure there’s a word to describe how remarkably, overwhelmingly, hysterically bad staring at this Titan is. My heart is pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears, my rib cage expanding and shrinking visibly with every panting breath.
Keep calm, Lyra.
Something hits the gates at my back. “Lyra!” The shout is so faint, I can barely make it out.
I spin around and flatten my hands on the double doors carved in scrollwork that looks like thorny vines. Oh gods.
Hades.
My soul reaches for his through the barrier between us, but there’s no way through.
No way to him.
No, no, no.
I swipe an impatient hand across the tear sliding down my cheek.
I can’t lose him. I won’t. Not after we just found each other.
I suffered in silence with Zeus’ curse that no one would ever love me all my life, and still I survived the damned games the gods make us mortals play in their stead.
I earned immortality and a life of happiness at Hades’ side. He deserves happiness, too.
This can’t be happening.
Only I know, down to my marrow, that there’s no possible way for even the mighty god of death to fix this. Yet I’m still silently screaming for him to get me out of here.
A sob breaks free as two thoughts strike in rapid succession. First…he’ll blame himself for this. It’s a truth as inescapable as Tartarus.
And second…I should have paid more attention to Rima’s prophecy during the Crucible—a vision of Hades burning down the world. A future I honestly thought we’d stopped from happening. What else did Rima say?
The pounding gets more and more violent, until I feel the shake of it in the narrow bridge of solid rock beneath my feet. I think for a wildly hopeful minute that the gates might give way, and then…the pounding stops.
And so does my heart, leaving me hollow inside.
I try to feel Hades, feel a flash of emotion from him to tell me that he’s still there, but the effect of him giving me his blood during the Crucible—allowing me to sense what he’s feeling in any given moment, especially the strongest emotions—has already worn off almost completely. Nothing comes to me.
“Lyra!” Hades’ voice is even quieter now, muffled, like he’s farther away. What are the others with him doing? Dragging him back?
I curl my fingers into the metal door like I can dig myself out or keep him here. “Don’t leave.”
But only silence answers.
I can no longer hear him. Putting my ear to the door, I close my eyes, listening for the smallest hint that he’s still on the other side, that he hasn’t left me.
“Hades.” His name is a whimper.
“He’s still there,” Cronos says behind me. Or murmurs really.
Even that quiet, I tense. Hard.
The Titan sounds like Hades, like his firstborn son, although the deep tones are rougher, raspier, like he’s been breathing in brimstone for too long.
“It’s the wards that prevent us from communicating with the outside world,” Cronos informs us, still speaking softly. “You won’t be able to hear him anymore.”
I drag my forearm across my wet face, then turn to face the King of the Titans, meeting Boone’s dark gaze on the way.
The newly made god of thieves is ready to fight if we have to, jaw rigid, hands in fists at his sides.
I give him the tiniest shake of my head.
Fighting seems like a guaranteed path to sudden, instant, and even irreversible death.
But that leaves one single thought circling my mind.
How do we get out?
The answer is simple. We can’t.
This is godsdamned—literally—Tartarus. Maybe if I think it enough times, reality will sink in.
Not even the Titans have managed to get out in millennia, and I have no doubt they’ve tried. Pandora’s Box was a gamble. A last resort. And it was supposed to let out only one person.
Persephone.
Speaking of… Where in the name of Olympus is the goddess of spring? She was supposed to be waiting on this side to escape, but Cronos is the only one with us.
What’d he do? Eat all the others like he did his children?
Cronos smiles at me. Sharks have more inviting smiles. Worse, he reminds me of Hades so much my heart keeps skipping beats, confused about what I should be feeling right now. Not attraction, of course, but certainly some sort of affection. Or maybe I’m slowly and quietly unraveling.
I let a single, sharp laugh escape. “Out of everyone you could’ve pulled through, you chose the two most useless to you. Nice work.”
Or maybe I’m unraveling fast and loud.
Boone tenses ever so slightly. Then gives a short whistle, the kind thieves use to communicate.
A warning.
One I ignore. I learned early on in the Order of Thieves—where Boone and I both grew up—that the way to deal with bullies is never to back down, and, when challenged, double down.
Cronos checks carefully over his shoulder, presumably at the doorway behind him. Checking what, exactly? Is he waiting for backup?
I lean to look around him. There’s no one else in here and no place for them to hide. The small doorway at the other end of the bridge leads off into a tunnel, maybe. Hard to tell in the light of the torches that burn in sconces around the room.
“You need to be quiet,” Cronos whispers, still turned away. “Or you’ll wake them.”
Ominous and mysteriously vague. My two favorite things. “Wake who?”
“Shhhh.” Cronos goes very still, continuing to look down the tunnel across the way. “They always get worse when you arrive.”
What?
I exchange a glance with Boone. The Titan has been locked down here a very, very long time. Clearly, it’s had an effect. Something to look forward to if we can’t get out.
Cronos jerks around to face me, and I straighten as his eyes twinkle, his lips tilting in a growing grin.
Yeah, that’s not creepy as fuck. “What?” This time I ask the question aloud.
“You think you’re useless?” Cronos says in a tone like a kindly uncle, but it’s still a whisper. “Seems like you’re the one not thinking clearly.”
I glare. “I think you’re a total, raging—”
Boone shoves his elbow into my side in the universal signal to shut up before the Titan smites you, and I wince.
Cronos moves faster than anything I’ve ever seen, and that includes the gods and several monsters. In a blur of movement, he doesn’t come for me. Instead, he gets Boone by the throat and slams him into the gates. I yelp at the sound of Boone’s head striking hard metal.
Cronos drops Boone like a rag doll and not the six-foot-two grown man he is. Then the Titan turns back to me like nothing happened.
Horror building, I stare behind him at Boone’s limp body in a heap on the ground.
His chest moves up and down. Thank the stars.
One arm is bent under him at a bad angle, golden blood, the ichor of the gods we now are, trailing from a cut above his brow.
I shudder. He looks so breakable like that, god or not.
Like someone who never should’ve followed me through any door, let alone this one.
“Why did you do that?” I ask, fighting the urge to rush to Boone’s side. Something tells me I need to keep my eyes on the Titan if I hope to get us both out of here.
Which is when I remember my weapons. I reach up to grab the double axes strapped to my back. Only…they’re not there. I grab again, but I didn’t miss. They’re…gone. The straps still crisscross my chest, but the sheaths are empty.
When he sees what I’m doing, Cronos sighs. “The gates of Tartarus strip all who enter of their weapons, Lyra.” He’s still speaking barely audibly.
As I lower my hands limply to my sides, the last part of what he just said sinks in. I blink slowly at Cronos, a new band of fear ratcheting down on my lungs. “You know my name?”
He lifts his brows—can brows be disappointed? “Obviously.”
Right. “Um…how?” I ask, a tad distracted, and who can blame me.
“We’ve met.”
I rear back before I can bury the reaction.
Met the godfather of world-ending daddy issues? “Nope. Not even a little bit.”
I should just stop talking to him altogether. I’m not going to get sensical answers—just cryptic declarations and Titan-size ego.
My mind scrambles for options to get Boone and me out of here. Escape routes. Diversions. Bribes the universe might actually take. I don’t even know how we got here entirely. One second, we were standing on the threshold—and the next, we were in the lion’s mouth.
How the hells am I supposed to carry Boone out of Tartarus if he doesn’t wake up?
My mind finally relays the fact that I might not have my axes but I do have my tattoos.
The animals Hades gifted me are buried in the skin of my arm, and surely no one can take those away.
I go to wake them up, except Cronos is already there, moving too fast for even my goddess eyes to see.
He scoops me up under the armpits, holding me with my feet dangling off the ground, his grip firm enough that I can’t reach my arm to touch it and access my animals.
“Your tattoos are gone, too, along with your weapons.”
“I don’t believe you.” I kick out at him, but he doesn’t so much as budge at the impact.
“You are always so quick to fight,” he murmurs softly. Like he’s proud of me.
“You’ve only known me a few minutes,” I say. “How would you know that?”
Maybe I can try to teleport. My skill in that area sucks—Hades has been trying to teach me—but I can’t dangle here like a hooked fish, either. I will Boone to wake up. To move while the Titan’s back is turned.
“I know you well, Lyra Keres,” Cronos says. Then grows scary serious in a way that makes me still. “You will be our savior.”
My mind abandons teleporting. Just drops it.
Adrenaline floods so fast it feels like my skin’s turning inside out.
Because I believe him. Gods, I do. He knows me. Really knows me. It’s there in his eyes—too certain, too familiar. Like I already belong to some plan he made ages ago and forgot to mention until now.
“You’re wrong about being useless,” he says, still calm, still quiet. “You are very useful to me. And I will punish anyone who harms the one who will free me.”
I shake my head, stomach lurching. He hurt Boone…because he elbowed me? Because he thinks I’m going to free a Titan? And not just any Titan. The absolute worst one?
A bell chooses that moment to chime. Clear. Cold. Final. Like it’s counting down to something I won’t survive.
Cronos doesn’t let go. Just turns his piercing gaze toward the dark tunnel again.
“What is it?” I whisper.
The bell keeps chiming, and it sounds…off. Like it’s supposed to be a happy sound, akin to toy shops at the holidays, but instead is in a minor key.
“Son of a bitch.” With no warning, Cronos swings me around so abruptly that my feet fly out in an arc only to dangle over sheer nothing.
The abyss that edges both sides of Tartarus’ walls—that pit full of monsters—looms below me like the open maw of a kraken.
Fear claws its way up the back of my throat, and I start thrashing for real.
“It might be safer down there anyway,” Cronos says. “I hope you do not die this time.”
Then he fucking lets go.