Chapter 90
Aphrodite’s Lock
LYRA
I wait at the edge of the bridge over the abyss, watching as Boone and Persephone whisper to each other.
She’s not coming with us. She wanted to, but Boone said he couldn’t handle it if she did.
She has hardly left his side since he woke from being healed and I removed their glamours.
As I watch, he leans over and kisses the tip of her nose.
Color rises in her cheeks, and he grins, but even I can see it’s full of worry.
Then he walks away.
Over to where I wait. He still looks like shit, but we waited an entire day, through more and more quakes, through the worry that the next one would bring everything crashing down on us. But he had to heal.
“Last time,” he says.
We hope.
I don’t say it out loud. I just nod. I’m not sure I have that kind of optimism in me right now.
“Are you sure?” I ask for the thousandth time. “Whoever glamoured us wanted us to go in there together. What if—”
“We already talked about this. There are too many what-ifs to count,” he says.
Arguing with him is only going to delay the inevitable, so I nod.
“One,” he begins. And we both half crouch, ready to jump. “Two—”
Someone shoves me hard in the back, and I pitch into the darkness in a flail of arms and legs. I hear Boone yell, but can’t see, already too far down.
Godsdamned darkness of the abyss, and there’s nothing I can do but fall. And fall. And fall.
And then I’m not.
The heat is what hits my senses before anything else. Heat and…
“Fire,” I whisper.
Cronos said all they know about this Lock is that it involves fire, but this is… What is this?
I stand in the center of a pristine room.
Circular. Cut from marble—gray marble that appears sheared and polished to a dull metal sheen.
I am in the center of a round platform with stairs that lead to the walls.
No, not walls…to a red, glowing pit, like a moat that follows along the walls.
From the tops of the ceiling around the circumference, fire falls in a curtain to be contained by the pit in the floor.
While the heat is manageable, I have yet to be stripped of my powers, so it’s about to get much more uncomfortable.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say Hephaestus created this room for Aphrodite. It looks exactly like the volcanic forger god’s taste. But he didn’t exist yet when the Titans were trapped down here. Did Aphrodite have the original power over fire?
Bigger question…what is she going to do with it?
“Boone!” I call out.
He’s not here with me. I’m completely alone—
I whirl at the sudden movement behind me…and then gasp at the face looking back.
Not Boone, but…
“It’s okay,” Cronos says. “This was my choice.”
“No!” The cry comes from my soul because I know what this means.
“You have entered the Lock of Aphrodite,” a familiar, husky feminine voice rings out.
Panic manifests as physical pain that rips through my heart and then sears along my veins to every nerve. “You can’t be down here!”
Ignoring Aphrodite’s replica, I run across the platform to grab his arm, hard, searching overhead frantically with the half-baked idea that I can throw Cronos back to the bridge or something.
But Hestia told me in that first Lock. The only way out is forward. There is no forward for Cronos. Not in a sealed Lock. Not when our powers get stripped. I return to human, but he…
“No, no, no, no,” I mutter.
“Lyra.” His voice is entirely calm. Not like mine.
I’m not listening. Checking the room for any exits, still holding on to him.
He says my name again, and I round on him, fury following hot on the heels of the panic. “What have you done?”
I’m yelling, but he fucking smiles at me. The damned Titan actually smiles. “This is the only way.”
Only way. I’m shaking my head. “No,” I snap. “It’s not. It can’t be.” He’ll die down here.
“Opening my Lock,” Aphrodite’s guardian says behind us, “takes sacrifice to test the purity of your intent.”
Sacrifice.
The word flays me as I meet Cronos’ eyes.
Blue like Zeus’, but his face, while I used to think he looked like Hades—now Cronos is just…
him. The Titan father who frightened and annoyed me to start has become something more.
Something I didn’t want to name until we got out of here.
Something I thought we had time to grow…
Oh gods.
His gaze is trained on my face with patience. With knowing. With utter, terrifying acceptance.
“Sacrifice.” The whisper tears from my lips. “Please don’t do this. Please don’t—”
“Two hearts must enter,” Aphrodite continues. “One for the fire. One to be set free by that ultimate act of pure love.”
One for the fire. That’s the sacrifice. One of us must die, and since this place will kill him anyway, I already know who he intends that to be.
“You can’t.” I desperately claw at him, trying to hold on to him hard enough to keep this from happening. “There has to be another way. I’ll kill myself. I’ll reset time—”
“I won’t be there if you do,” Cronos says. “We learned that with Themis.”
Because Titans are only made of powers. When he’s stripped completely, there will be nothing left.
Hades, help me. How can I go to you without your father, who loves you?
“Please,” I choke out, shaking him a little.
His expression gentles, turning tender. “This is what love looks like, Alani.”
My chin wobbles, tears blurring his face. I dash my arm over my eyes. “But I need you—” I cut off the plaintive wail in my throat.
Cronos puts his hands to my face, wiping my hot tears away. “I have always thought of you as a daughter.”
A heavy coldness takes me over, freezing the heat out of my veins and leaving in its wake an ache so deep that I can’t breathe. Can’t think.
“One day, you’ll understand.” He glances past me to Aphrodite, who stands at my back. “I am the sacrifice.”
“No!” I try to pull away. To whirl on the goddess and take his place. But he holds me fast, and behind me, I hear her end it.
“So be it.” I’m vaguely aware that she sounds…resigned. “Your test starts now.”
I grip Cronos by the wrists and try to yank him away, drag him to a safety that doesn’t exist. Not down here. But he’s as immovable as always. “You can’t leave us—”
There’s a zap of pain down my spine as my power is stripped from me.
I feel Cronos slip something into my hand and manage to look down at the little carved butterfly.
He put the pieces back together. I force my head back up only for my eyes to go wide, my agony turning to panic because Cronos is glowing.
Glowing and…disintegrating.
Horror steals any of the breath left in my body, and I choke.
Even dying, he’s stronger than me. Holding me steady, he leans forward and places a soft kiss on my forehead, like a blessing, and whispers words I don’t hear. Then he releases me and, before I can stop him, takes a step down the platform toward the circling wall of flame, still dissolving.
Already dead.
I follow with some unhinged thought of dragging him back, but my hand immediately blisters, and I hiss, jerking away. I’m too human now to get that close to those hellfires.
Then I whimper my distress. It’s like an invisible barrier I can’t cross, and he knew it would be.
“Cronos!” I scream his name, throat raw as I pace the line of heat like a feral animal.
He turns his head to meet my eyes. More of him continues to disintegrate, like his body is turning to dust and blowing away, becoming nothing as it floats off.
“Don’t cry,” he says, taking another step.
“I’ve known for a long time now that this was the only way.
” His skin, what’s left of it, starts to blister.
He doesn’t stop. “Like you did with Isabel, I’ve tried ten thousand ways, but in the end…
” Another step, and his clothes catch fire.
He hardly seems to notice as he tips his head to one side, his eyes in a face already losing shape taking in my features with a look so full of his heart it makes mine shatter.
“A father should always be the one who sacrifices for his child.”
My knees give out, unable to hold the weight of my heartbreak any longer, and I fall to the ground. “No! Please, no.”
“Tell Rhea that I will love her even in the ether.” One more step down. “Tell my children that their faces are the images I held on to when I died. That I always loved them.”
I wrap my arms around my middle, rocking, hardly able to see him through my tears. “Cronos…”
“When you’re ready…when you need me…come find me…in our cell.”
The next step brings him to the edge of the pit, and I’m not sure which is worse, the burning or the disintegrating.
I reach out for him like the incredibly powerful Titan could still take my hand and stop this. “Father,” I whisper brokenly. “Don’t go.”
The trace of his smile is the last thing I see before he pitches himself into the flames, gone too fast for me to comprehend.
I’ve learned the hard way—when Boone died, when Meike died, when Isabel died over and over in these time resets—that there is always this moment when, no matter how loud it is around me, the world goes silent with the dreadfulness of what just happened.
It’s too horrible for the mind to comprehend quickly, and even in the next few moments, it feels like it can’t be real. Like it can be fixed.
But I can’t fix this. I can’t reset. I can’t put him back together.
Gone.
Cronos is just…gone.
“Congratulations.” Aphrodite’s voice rings hollow.
That terrible word hits me so wrong, I feel like the goddess took a spear and drove it through my heart just to be cruel.
“You have unsealed my Lock,” she says. “You have been tested and proven worthy.”
Now she’s just twisting the spear. I’m not the worthy one here. Cronos is. Cronos should be here for this.
I bury my face in my hands, and my shoulders heave through sobs so deep, they can’t even crawl out of my throat.
“You are free of the prison of Tartarus,” Aphrodite announces.
Not like this. It shouldn’t have been like this.
The icy sensation of my powers returning rips through my body so fast that I feel myself spasm around it, but the pain shocks me into a new stillness and silence. When it’s over, I shakily lower my hands from my face to find that the room has changed.
At opposite ends of a familiar, blank, rock-hewn room, two doors burst open.
The one behind me, in the wider curve of the pie piece, I know leads to the Titans waiting in the chamber around the Locks.
The one before me defies physics. Because through that door is the bridge across the abyss, leading to the way out.
At my back, Rhea screams her husband’s name.
I clap my hands over my ears, unable to bear her pain.
A muffled clanking noise sounds outside the chamber I am sprawled in, and I raise my tear-blurred gaze to the double doors at the end of the bridge—the massive gates of Tartarus with their swirling carved designs.
More distinct clanks follow, echoing through the chamber, and even Rhea goes quiet by the seventh.
There is a small silence, and then…the gates that have held the Titans at bay for thousands of years swing open soundlessly
So easy. Like a breeze could have pushed them wide all along.
We are free.