CHAPTER TWELVE
REAVER
The Inferno hums like a furnace beneath my skin. Not metaphorically. Literally. The floor vibrates with every cheer from the pits, the walls sweat flames, and the air tastes like hot metal and old sins.
It feels too much like home.
Too much like Treachery.
The chains might be gone, the brands covered, but my body didn’t get the memo.
Every breath scrapes like iron rings closing around my ribs.
My wrists twinge phantom pain under the leather cuffs I still wear out of habit, and I swear I can feel rough stone at my back, even though there’s polished obsidian there now.
And over all of it—over the fire, over the echo of screams rising through the stone—Kennedy’s face burns behind my eyes.
Her laugh. The smudge of ink she always gets on the side of her hand. The way she says my name like it’s a diagnosis and a promise all at once.
And that crow circling over Boston like a black omen. Pestilence’s smug little smile. The way her lips shaped the words:
I found you.
Found her.
Every beat of my angelic heart sounds like a countdown.
Boom. Boom. Boom. One beat closer to too late.
I drag my gaze back down to the obsidian basin at my feet. My blood is drying in dark streaks along the rim, turning sticky where it’s begun to clot. The water inside it has gone still again. Black, merciless, empty. Nothing left of the vision but a hairline crack splitting the bowl in two.
If it ever showed truth, it’s gone now.
“Fuck you too,” I mutter at my own reflection, a warped smear of gold eyes and scars beneath the surface. I swipe my hand across it anyway, like that’ll shake Kennedy’s face back into view.
It doesn’t. Just ripples, then that same dead black.
Behind me, the room creaks. Hades shuts the door with quiet finality, the sound soft and somehow heavier than a slam.
The office is all rough stone, mismatched shelves, and a wall of glass that looks out over a river of fire.
Books are scattered everywhere from when he knocked them aside to unearth this cursed seeing bowl.
He grabs a rag from a shelf, moving like he’s done this a thousand times—cleaning other people’s blood off his floor.
“That look,” he mutters, glancing at me as he swipes at the red splattered across the cracked marble. “That’s the same look I had the day Themis took Aradia from me.”
His tone is too casual, like he’s commenting on the weather. Like we’re talking about a bar fight, not the day the universe dropped a target on Kennedy’s back.
“Don’t.” The word rips out of me, low and sharp. I slam my fist down on the nearest table hard enough to crack the thick wood straight through the middle. “Don’t compare what I feel to your tragedy.”
One of the legs gives, and the whole thing lurches sideways. A stack of books slides to the floor with a slap and a thud. Dust jumps in the air, burning in my nose.
Hades’ mouth curls. Not a smile, something uglier.
“Tragedy?” He lets out a humorless laugh, the sound dry and rough as gravel. “Is that what they’re calling millennia of regret now?”
“For you, maybe.” I flex my sore hand, shaking splinters out of my knuckles. The bones knit almost instantly—angelic metabolism, bless it—but the ache stays. “I’m not you.”
He tosses the rag aside, grabs the half-empty goblet of Ambrosia from his desk, and downs what’s left. The gold liquid catches the torchlight before he slams it down so hard, the stem snaps.
He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand. “No,” he says, eyes flashing silver in the firelight. “You’re worse.”
I scoff. “Thanks. Really making me feel supported here.”
“I knew what I was doing,” he goes on like I didn’t speak. “When I went after Aradia. I knew the curse, knew the cost, knew I was going to burn everything down, and still took the match. You—” His stare cuts into me, too sharp. “You still think this is about love.”
I turn on him so fast, my wings flare on instinct. Golden feathers snap wide, trailing sparks and embers. The heat in the room surges, reacting to my temper like it always has.
“She’s been taken, Hades.” My voice comes out rough, shredded on the edges. “This isn’t about some poetic grand fucking gesture. Pestilence has her.”
“I know.” He slams his own empty goblet down, glass shattering, liquid gold splashing onto the floor. It hisses when it hits the hot stone, burnt sugar and ozone rising in a sharp puff. “And storming blindly into Pesta’s game will only guarantee her death.”
“She’s not dead.” The words leave my mouth like a vow, pulled from somewhere deep and old in my chest. “Not while I can feel her.”
That finally makes him pause.
One black brow lifts slowly. “Feel her?”
My hands ball into fists at my sides, knuckles popping. The skin across my scars pulls tight, the long one over my chest throbbing in time with that relentless countdown beat.
“Our souls brushed once,” I say. “The first time I touched her.” The memory flashes hot and bright—her hand in mine, the jolt like lightning up my arm. “I felt it then, like divine light pulling threads together. That doesn’t fade.”
Silence stretches between us, filled with the low roar of the fires below and the distant thunder of the fighting pits. Hades studies me for a long moment, eyes gone distant like he’s mapping something only he can see.
“So that’s what she did,” he murmurs.
Cold slides down my spine. “What who did?”
“Themis.” He spits her name like a curse, all that casual amusement leeched from his voice. “She pulled a page from her old script.”
He moves closer to the basin, his gaze flicking between the cracked stone and me.
“You may still believe your bond is holy,” he says. “But Themis never grants miracles that don’t serve her schemes. If you feel Kennedy across realms, it’s because she made it possible.”
My chest tightens. “You think Themis is behind this?”
“I don’t think.” His voice drops, low and sure. “I know. Pestilence could never have touched a mortal without divine interference. Someone from above opened the gate for her, and there’s only one being spiteful enough to use a woman you love as bait.”
The room seems to shrink, walls pressing in. The roaring of The Inferno outside fades until it’s more like a memory than a sound.
Themis.
I try to picture her the way I used to—radiant, perfect, the embodiment of Justice. It’s harder these days. Now when I see her, I see Treachery’s contract signature. I see Aradia ripped from Hades’ arms. I see Gabriel’s fall, the rift between worlds.
And now I see Kennedy caught in the crosshairs of a god I once served.
“Themis banished Aradia to humanity for choosing me,” Hades continues, his voice rougher now.
His eyes stay on the basin, but he’s not seeing it.
He’s seeing some other chamber, all polished marble and impossible sky.
“Over and over again, lifetime after lifetime, until she broke the cycle herself. And my punishment—” He gestures around the room.
The bar. The pits. The river of fire beyond the glass.
“My punishment was to watch from below. This is what your goddess does to those who defy her order. She punishes love.”
“I know how she punishes,” I say quietly.
“Believe it or not, I picked up a few clues during the whole banished to maximum security hellhole thing.” My tone is lighter than I feel.
Sarcasm as a life raft. If I stop, I’ll start doing something else, and that something else might involve ripping through this world and the next, just because I can.
“So why protect Themis now?” I add.
Hades laughs, and the sound is like ash and thunder. “I don’t protect her,” he says. “I loathe her.”
He finally looks at me, and for the first time, I see it—the deep, endless hatred there.
“But you,” he goes on, pointing a finger at me like an accusation, “you’re walking into her design, and trust me.” He gestures toward my wings, the gold gleaming like fresh coin. “Not even your golden blood survives that unburned. She’s more powerful than any of you know.”
Outside, the walls tremble as another fight begins in the pits. The crowd roars, a wave of ugly excitement rolling up through the stone. The sound makes my pulse pound harder, trying to drag me back into that mindset—opponent, weapon, arena, kill.
I swallow it down.
“Then tell me how to find Kennedy,” I say. “Before Pestilence or Themis decides she’s leverage. Something useless that they can just toss away after they get what they want.” I don’t have to elaborate on what they want. We both know they want or rather need—me.
He shakes his head, setting his broken goblet aside. “You can’t fight two gods at once, Reaver. You need truth before you go after vengeance.”
“I’ve been chained to lies for a thousand years,” I snap. “I’ve had my fill of both.”
I take a step toward the door. Every part of me is screaming Move. My wings twitch, and my muscles brace. The gate is only a flight of stairs and one very bad idea away.
Hades’ voice follows me like a curse.
“You go now, and you’ll make every mistake I ever made,” he says. “You’ll feed the same balance Themis thrives on—love, violence, ruin. She’ll let Pestilence tear open both the Heavens and Hell, and you’ll be the blade that makes it possible.”
I freeze with my hand on the iron latch.
I know my decisions will fuel both of their fires, but it doesn’t matter.
The only thing that matters is getting to Kennedy.
I don’t want to listen to Hades’ reasoning.
What I want to do is rip the door off its hinges and fly straight into whatever trap they’ve laid and dare them to try to keep me from her.
But he says blade, and all I can see is Barachiel’s—Asher’s—sword sliding into my chest. The white-hot pain.
The way the world went quiet for a moment, like even the war stopped to watch me fall.
Then waking up in Treachery, chained to a wall, realizing my own brother’s mercy was twisted into something else entirely.