The Strait of Messina
Alexander
Many times, when I looked at the reports about all the Olympian Houses, I thought all of it was a joke. “We’re all the playthings of the gods,” Nikos had told me once, and I’d secretly agreed.
But I’d never felt it more keenly than I did today. The head of House Zeus, reduced to a mere escort. Unable to help his own soulmate and instead delivering her to another Alpha.
It would have been humiliating if it hadn’t hurt so much.
But I’d known, when I agreed to this, that there was no other solution.
Damon Blackwood’s logic was sound, even if every cell in my body rebelled against it.
His shadow power was able to dampen the curse in ways my presence never would.
House Zeus’s aura didn’t suppress the curse.
It fed it. House Hades was the only that could help her.
So here I was. On a House Zeus charter over the Mediterranean, flying my mate from Samos to House Hades territory.
Once we arrived in the United States, Elara Blackwood would be waiting at a private airstrip to take custody of the woman I loved.
I’d do everything I could to keep Andie safe, even if that meant handing her to someone else.
Helena had chosen the seating arrangement on the plane.
She’d put Andromeda in the forward cabin, herself in the adjacent seat, and me in the rear.
We were separated by ten feet of aisle and a silence that weighed more than the aircraft.
It was the right call. Every foot of distance between my mate and me was a foot less pressure on the curse.
The plane was a House Zeus model, built for Alphas who couldn’t always contain their power.
Hephaestus-forged alloys, capable of absorbing and redirecting electrical discharge without frying navigation systems, lined the hull.
The cabin lights ran on shielded circuits.
It was the safest aircraft in the world for someone like me, and it still felt like a cage.
“So.” Andromeda’s voice carried from the forward section, aimed at the window rather than at anyone in particular. “How long until we reach House Hades territory?”
For the most part, she’d been quiet since Helena had told her the plan. I hated it. I almost wished she were kicking and clawing at me again. It would have been better than… this.
Helena smoothed the hem of her dress over her knee. “The trip will take ten hours, give or take. Elara will meet us at the airstrip.”
“Elara.” Andromeda repeated the name as if she were testing its weight. “The cousin. The one who volunteered to babysit me.”
“The one who offered to help,” Helena corrected gently.
“Right. Help.” Andromeda finally turned, and her gaze skipped past her mother and landed on me. “At least we’ll finally be free of each other, isn’t that right, Stormwright? You must be relieved.”
I held her stare. The pomegranate-and-white-tea scent of her filled the cabin despite the air filtration. It was threaded with the acrid burn of the curse reacting to my mere existence.
“I’m not relieved,” I said.
“No?” She arched an eyebrow. “You should be. Once this is done, you can go back to running House Zeus. You’ll no longer be inconvenienced by a broken Omega dragging down your reputation.”
Helena put her hand on Andromeda’s arm. “Andie. That’s not what this is.”
“Then what is it, Mother?” The edge in her voice sharpened, but she didn’t pull away from Helena’s touch. “Because from where I’m sitting, it looks like everyone on this plane agreed that I’m too much trouble to keep.”
“No one said that,” I told her.
“You didn’t have to.” She turned back to the window. The Mediterranean stretched below, painfully blue. “Does this arrangement mean I can at least go back to my business? Or is Elara going to lock me in a shadow dungeon and call it therapy?”
“You’ll have your life back,” Helena said. “Your apartment. Your work. Elara will be nearby, not hovering over you. That’s the whole point.”
Andie laughed, a short, bitten-off sound that held no humor at all. “My life. My life was planning weddings and paying rent and having dinner with my fathers on Sundays. Not collars and curses and being shipped across the Atlantic to live under a stranger’s claim.”
“Elara isn’t a stranger,” Helena argued. “I’ve known her for years. She’s competent, she’s decent, and she won’t—”
“Won’t what?” Andie cut her mother off. “Won’t hurt me?
Won’t trap me? Won’t make me feel like my own body is trying to eat me alive?
” Her shoulders were rigid under the thin fabric of her blouse.
“You don’t get to tell me what she won’t do, Mother.
Not when everything you’ve ever told me has been a lie. ”
The silence after that had teeth. Helena’s eyes met mine, and the look in them carried the weight of every decision that had led us here. I looked away first.
Andie stared out the window. Helena stared at her hands. I leaned my head back against the seat and breathed through my mouth, trying to filter out the scent of my mate.
The minutes passed. Helena murmured something about the meal service, and Andromeda declined without looking up.
I declined, too. The thought of eating made my stomach turn.
Outside the windows, the coastline of southern Greece gave way to open water.
The distant gray smudge of mainland Italy appeared on the western horizon.
We were making good time. Ten hours, Helena had said. Less than nine now.
I was counting down the hours until I lost her. And the worst part was that she was right there, close enough to touch. And I could do nothing except sit in the back of this plane and wait for it to be over.
Then the plane shuddered. “Just weather,” Helena said to Andie. “Southern Italy gets rough air.”
She was wrong. I could feel it the way I felt my own pulse. Turbulence wasn’t unusual, but I should have felt any potential storm much sooner. I sat up and pressed my palm flat against the armrest. A deep structural vibration hummed through the Hephaestus alloy and resonated in my teeth.
A second, harder shudder made the glasses on the service counter rattle together. The air outside the hull felt wrong, thick with energy that didn’t belong. Something vast and cold was building beneath us, rising from the ocean with terrible purpose.
The plane dropped. The stomach-lurching plunge threw Helena sideways against Andie and sent unsecured items crashing off the counter. The engines screamed as the autopilot fought to compensate.
I was on my feet before the aircraft leveled out.
“I don’t understand.” I moved toward the port window and pressed both hands against the reinforced glass. “The skies were clear until a few minutes ago.”
Helena had gone still. She wasn’t looking at the window. She was looking at me, and the expression on her face stopped me where I stood. It wasn’t surprise or fear. Recognition.
“I do,” she said. Her fingers whitened on the armrest. “This storm isn’t natural. We’re over the Strait of Messina.”
Everything rearranged itself behind my eyes.
The Strait of Messina. The narrow throat of water between Sicily and the mainland, where the two seas collided.
Here, the ancient energy of House Poseidon saturated every current and every depth.
Just as the lightning-infested waters of Maracaibo were sacred to House Zeus, the Strait was Orion Maris’s holy ground.
Here, his power was absolute. The residual hunger of the ancient monster Charybdis still saturated every molecule of salt water churning between those cliffs.
I’d stood in my father’s sacred waters and begged Zeus for a way to save my mate. Now Orion was standing in his, and the ocean was answering with a fury that shook the sky.
“He wants us to land,” I said. “He’s trying to force us into his territory.”
At this point, not even Helena could pretend Orion meant well. “Can you get us through?” she asked.
The plane bucked again, hard enough to crack the overhead compartments.
I braced against the bulkhead and pushed my awareness outward through the hull.
The alloys conducted my power cleanly, but outside, the storm fought back with a weight I hadn’t expected.
The energy rose from the Strait itself, pulled upward through thousands of feet of air by a will that played the ocean like an instrument.
But I was still the master of the sky.
“I can hold it,” I said through clenched teeth.
Taking a deep breath, I built a buffer around the plane.
The gift of House Zeus isolated the jet from the chaos outside.
The turbulence immediately eased. But Orion wasn’t willing to let us go.
The storm surged, and I had to push harder, pouring more of myself into the hull.
The cabin flooded with blue-white light, and the emergency strips along the floor kicked on in pale green.
Every scrap of my attention went into the sky. My vision narrowed to the interface between my power and the storm. The cabin shrank to a distant hum behind the roar of energy flowing through my palms. Everything dissolved into a single burning need—to keep this aircraft in the air.
Helena’s scream shattered the trance.
“Andie, no!”
Jolted, I ripped my hands from the hull. The buffer collapsed, and the storm slammed back against the plane with renewed violence. But I couldn’t think about that now.
The rear emergency exit was open.
Wind tore through the cabin in a horizontal gale. The depressurization alarm shrieked. Loose papers and napkins whipped into a vortex of debris that stung my face and blurred my vision. Helena was on her feet, braced between two seats, one hand stretched toward the gaping doorway.
Andie stood at the threshold. She held the doorframe with both hands, her hair whipping across her face in dark, violent streaks.
The wind battered her body, pressing her clothes flat against her frame.
She was looking out at the churning gray water below with an expression I had never seen on her face before. Calm.
“Andie.” I moved toward her. The wind resistance was enormous, and the plane lurched and shuddered with each gust. Through some kind of miracle, I managed to keep us in the air, but actually reaching my mate would be tougher.
“Step back from the door. Whatever you’re feeling right now…
you can’t trust it. It’s Orion. He’s manipulating the—”
“He’s not manipulating me.” She turned her head. Her eyes found mine through the chaos of wind and light and screaming metal. “He saved me before. Why not now?”
“Because this isn’t saving you. Andie, he’s trying to tear the plane apart.”
Something flickered across her face. Not doubt.
Something sadder than doubt, something that looked almost like grief.
She held my gaze for one more second, and in that second, I saw all of it.
The yacht. The curse. The collar breaking against her skin.
Every Alpha who had made decisions about her body without asking her permission, including me.
“He’s giving me a chance,” she said. “A choice.”
And just like that, she let go of the doorframe. She stepped forward, the way you’d step off a curb into a street you’d already decided to cross.
Then she was falling.
I threw myself toward the open door. Helena seized my arm from behind, as did my security staff. But I was stronger than all of them, and I nearly dragged them with me. And then Helena shouted into my ear in a voice I had never heard her use.
“If you follow her, you will die. The Strait is his domain. You cannot fight Poseidon in his own waters. You can’t save my daughter if you die.”
I stopped. Not because she was right, though she was. Through the howling doorway, past the wind and the emergency lights, I could see the ocean.
It rose. A column of dark water climbed from the surface of the Strait and met Andromeda in her fall. It cradled her, folding itself around her body with the gentleness of an embrace.
Andie sank into the rising ocean without screaming. The water closed over her, and the column withdrew. The surface of the Strait settled back into its ancient, churning gray.
The storm began to die. Without purpose, the supernatural pressure bled from the atmosphere. The wind lost its spiral intelligence. The clouds thinned and broke apart against a sky that was already forgetting the violence.
Orion had what he wanted. He didn’t need to fight anymore.
The crew sealed the door. The cabin repressurized with a mechanical hiss that felt obscene against the silence inside my chest. Helena released my arm and stood there swaying in the aisle. Tears ran down her face in tracks she didn’t bother to wipe.
I sat down and put my head in my hands. For the first time since the ritual at Maracaibo, I had nothing left to burn.