Chapter 69
Confessions
LYRA
The reset. Was it my fault? The question is echoing like the Ghost of Christmas Past.
Cronos pauses at the tunnel entrance to check over his shoulder, and I don’t change my face fast enough. He takes a single look, and his features…harden.
Then he beckons me forward, and somehow, I manage to make my feet work. When I make it to him, all he says is, “Wait.”
I frown. But I also wait.
I wait while our merry band of misbegotten gods and Titans makes our way back through the spiraling tunnels to the others.
Cronos doesn’t even walk with me, instead far ahead with Rhea, murmuring something in her ear that I can’t catch.
Which is probably why it surprises me when, as we’re nearing one of the tunnel turn-offs to our latest safe room, he stops walking, hanging back until I draw even with him.
Boone notices and does the same so that the others continue on but the three of us are left.
“This is between Lyra and me,” Cronos tells him.
I get in just ahead of Boone’s protest. “I have something I need to tell him.”
After all…Cronos saw it in my face. He is going to get it out of me anyway. No need to hide it.
When Boone doesn’t relax even a tiny bit, I whistle a signal. It’s okay.
With a nod, he turns around and follows the others.
Cronos leads us a different way, eventually taking a tunnel that I haven’t been in before. This tunnel has cells, like the others, but they’re quiet, and I can’t tell if they’re empty or the inhabitants have reasons to be quiet.
Either way, my skin crawls a little more with every step we travel deeper into the mountainous rock base.
Cronos finally stops at one and passes his hand over the lock.
The door gives with a quiet click before swinging open.
He waves me ahead of him into a very small chamber, not even big enough to lie down on the floor and stretch out comfortably.
The me who arrived in Tartarus not that long ago would have been terrified when the door closes and the lock turns with a loud, echoing snick.
But I’m not afraid. Not of Cronos. I glance around and then at him. “Privacy?”
He nods. “Also a safe place to do what I’m about to do.”
Again, if I didn’t know him like I do now, that would have come off as a threat, all dire-voiced and serious.
I can’t help the way my lips twitch. “We’ve really got to do something about your delivery.”
“My delivery?”
“The scary-as-shit Titan.” I give an exaggerated shudder. “So ominous.”
His expression flattens. “I was not ominous just now.”
“You were.”
“I was not—” He cuts off, giving me a closer look. “You’re stalling. Why?”
Damn. Time to rip off this Band-Aid. “I…I think I’m the reason that things are so different and that time did a hard reset.”
When he turns even more serious, it’s not scary, it’s formidable, and there’s a part of me that squirms. The part of me that went unnoticed for so long, thanks to my curse.
Which is when I realize that I don’t want to disappoint him—any of them, really, but for some reason I can’t pinpoint, especially him.
“Don’t say more yet,” he warns. Then Cronos—the god of time, the King of the Titans, son of Primordials Uranus and Gaia—sits on the ground crisscross applesauce.
There’s something you don’t see every day.
He beckons, and I sit on the ground facing him and wait for whatever he does next.
“I’m going to change what you are seeing right now.
We’re not moving locations. We’ll still be safely locked in this room.
Even if the bell goes off, the Pandemonium can’t get to us.
But it will feel like we leave. You and I are going to travel into my mind, where we can talk and only the two of us will ever know what was said. ”
“Damn. There are heads of state who really wish they had that power,” I mumble.
Cronos huffs a laugh. “There are gods who wish they had this power,” he says in a dry voice.
“I bet.”
An amused chuckle follows me into darkness and silence.
Not scary or oppressive but warm and comfortable. Safe. Sound comes back to me first. Laughter. Children’s laughter and… “Do I hear sea lions barking?” I ask.