Chapter Twenty-Five Aphrodite
Chapter Twenty-Five
Aphrodite
Aphrodite felt distinctly pleased with herself as she stepped out of the club.
Not only had she led Julia into distinctly non-Ellene-approved behavior, she’d collected some crucial tidbits about the woman’s past. An ex-boyfriend who’d betrayed Julia, broken her trust?
Aphrodite knew that information would prove useful, even if she wasn’t sure how just yet.
She peered down the darkened street, wishing that she had Ares’s nighttime vision. Where were all the taxis? The street felt eerily deserted. Graffiti lined the neighboring buildings, which might have housed basement raves or tattoo parlors or, for all Aphrodite knew, overpriced apartments.
She started toward the intersection ahead, relieved to once again inhabit her own body.
Wearing another woman’s skin always gave her a vague sense of irritation, like an itch she couldn’t scratch.
She reached down to tug Abby’s pants upward—they were too loose as well as too short, and Abby’s silk shirt was tight over Aphrodite’s chest—but Aphrodite lacked the energy to cast an illusion spell.
For once, she was too exhausted to care what she wore.
“Where are you headed, sweetheart?” a deep voice asked. “I’d love to buy you a drink.”
Aphrodite stiffened. She hadn’t heard the man approach. He looked to be in his late thirties, tall and powerfully built, with pale eyes that lingered over her body.
“Thank you for the offer, but I’m going home. To my husband.”
Her husband. Aphrodite suddenly longed for Hephaestus—for his warm hands, his kindness. If he were here, this stranger wouldn’t have dared to hit on her.
But Hephaestus was gone, hundreds of miles away, because she had arranged it. Because she didn’t want him here tonight.
Aphrodite cast a glance over her shoulder, wondering if she should head back to the club. But she was more than halfway down the block, and there was a major intersection ahead, where streetlamps cast bright pools of light over the sidewalks. She quickened her pace.
Undeterred, the stranger fell into step alongside her. He was dressed in a tailored shirt and jacket, an expensive watch gleaming on his wrist. But Aphrodite knew better than anyone that money was no indicator of how a person would behave. Of whether you could trust them.
“Your husband?” the man scoffed. “He shouldn’t have let you out alone. A beautiful woman like you, walking the streets at night by herself?”
The intersection was barely twenty yards away. Aphrodite heard approaching traffic, which surely meant that she could find a taxi. She was acutely aware of this man’s body, filling up the space next to her.
“As I said, I’m heading home. Please leave me alone.” Aphrodite tried to sound firm, but there was a flicker of the old fear in her voice, and this stranger likely heard it.
He stepped closer. Too close. Stupidly, Aphrodite kept thinking that the situation would resolve itself—that he would keep leering at her but stop before actually harming her.
Still, Aphrodite reached within for her power, just in case.
Nothing.
The lake within her, normally teeming with magic, felt as hollow as a scooped-out gourd.
She was drained, unable to summon even the flimsiest thread of enchantment.
Her hand flew to the necklace at her throat, but the girdle’s magic was too entwined with her own—she couldn’t use it, not when she was this depleted.
When the man moved, he was fast.
In the span of a heartbeat, he’d flung Aphrodite backward, into a narrow alley. Her head snapped against the stone wall, her vision blurring. Buildings loomed to either side of her, but their windows were shadowed and dark.
Aphrodite opened her mouth to scream, but the man’s arm pressed against her throat, cutting off her air.
She struggled to breathe, to fight him off, scrabbling and kicking at him.
But the weight of his body pressed urgently, inexorably, against hers as he reached down to rip at Abby’s pants in a rough, practiced motion.
She no longer felt like a goddess. Suddenly, she was a mortal girl again, unable to stop those stronger or more powerful from doing what they wanted.
· · ·
It happened in the seventeenth year of Aphrodite’s mortal life, after her parents sent her to work in the house of a wealthy family.
“We can’t afford to keep you at home anymore. Not with your brother getting married,” Aphrodite’s mother explained, her voice hard. “Who knows,” she added, with a bitter glance at her daughter, “perhaps you’ll make something of the opportunity.”
Aphrodite knew precisely what her mother meant by that. She also knew what happened to women who gave their bodies too freely. They ended up pregnant and alone, without any prospects at all.
She tried to keep her head down, to work without attracting any attention. But it wasn’t long before the young master of the house took notice of her.
He was so painfully handsome, as well-spoken and polished as a prince from a fable.
Aphrodite didn’t stand a chance. He followed her about the house as she swept floors or folded laundry, speaking such passionate words of love and devotion that she couldn’t help but relent.
He brought her gifts of money, which she refused, and of flowers, which she wove giddily into her hair.
Aphrodite began unlocking the door of her room at night so that he could slip in.
What a fool she was, listening to his empty promises. But she’d been young, and mortal, and believed him when he said he would marry her.
Then one night at dinner, his father announced the young man’s betrothal to an heiress.
Aphrodite was heartbroken. That night, she kept waiting for her young prince to come find her—to explain what had happened, maybe beg for her forgiveness.
When her bedroom door opened, she turned toward it hopefully—but it wasn’t the young man she’d fallen for.
It was his father.
In that moment, all Aphrodite’s youthful illusions were brutally shattered. Obviously, her beloved had never cared about her at all. She had been nothing to him but an object of lust, something to be used and discarded. Why else would he have told his father about their arrangement?
Aphrodite tried to say no. When the master kept walking toward her, she said it again, louder—No, she screamed, shouting at him to stop.
No one came to her rescue. The other servants in this wing of the house clearly knew better than to interfere.
She tried to duck around him and run, but he was faster and stronger than she’d expected.
He knocked her to the ground, pulling up her skirts, pressing his weight atop her.
Aphrodite tried to resist, shouting, scratching at his face with her fingernails.
But he just grabbed her golden hair and knocked her head against the floor, hard.
As he began to move methodically atop her, Aphrodite stopped shouting. Silent tears streamed down her cheeks, her body growing numb. She felt crushed by his body, by the knowledge that she was helpless. Unable to fight back.
· · ·
Now, pressed against the wall in that back alley, Aphrodite felt it all again: the suffocating fear, the knowledge that she was at the mercy of someone stronger and more powerful.
No, a voice deep within her protested. She was no longer a mere mortal, she was an Olympian goddess.
Once again, Aphrodite reached for her magic, not really expecting to uncover much, but she was suddenly motivated by something she hadn’t felt in centuries: desperate fury. Outrage, that this man thought he could hurt her, that he could hurt any woman.
A wave of incinerating magic surged out of her.
The man flew violently backward, landing in the middle of the alley.
Aphrodite stood there, trembling from the sudden surge of power. Where had it come from? She must have unlocked a reservoir of magic she didn’t even know she had.
She fixed her eyes on the man who’d tried to hurt her, reaching for those last vestiges of power. The magic didn’t want to answer her call. Maybe it was only meant for self-defense.
Aphrodite frowned, summoning the magic with her last iota of strength. Slowly, as if it felt reluctant to leave her, the power streamed from her body in invisible threads, snaking toward the man on the ground.
Except that he wasn’t much of a man anymore. His bones began to shrink, his fingers becoming little claws, his eyes turning small and beady. The unshaven scruff of his beard stretched into whiskers.
From beneath the pile of expensive clothing crawled a rat.
“Serves you right,” Aphrodite muttered, well aware that he could hear her. “You act like vermin, you deserve to be vermin.”
She managed to keep her head high as she walked out of the alley, though it took every last ounce of her willpower not to stumble.
Her vision was blurred, her limbs heavy and brittle.
She ran her tongue over her lips, which felt as cracked and dry as if they’d been sunburned.
Aphrodite had pushed her magic far past its limits, farther than she’d even thought possible.
Swaying as if drunk, she made it to the intersection.
A taxi pulled up minutes later and she poured herself into the backseat, closing her eyes.
When they pulled up to the Mayfair house, Aphrodite flung a wad of bills toward the driver without counting them, then walked with agonizing steps to the house.
Hermes and Julia might be back, and the last thing she wanted was for anyone to see her like this.
Once she was safely in her room, Aphrodite hurried to the en suite bath, where she peeled off her clothes and stumbled into the shower. She turned the water as hot as it would go, then sank onto the marble tile floor and wrapped her arms around her legs, shivering.
Until tonight, she’d forgotten how it felt before she became an Olympian—the sensation of utter helplessness, of being without the protection of her magic.
If Aphrodite were demoted from the Council of Twelve to make room for Julia, most of her powers would be stripped away.
She’d be no better off than Persephone or Hestia or any other of the lesser goddesses.
Able to do some minor illusion magic but nothing real.
Nothing that would keep her safe.
One thing was abundantly clear: Aphrodite could never again find herself as defenseless and powerless as she’d been tonight.
Which meant she had to get rid of Julia, once and for all.
When she emerged from the shower and wrapped a fluffy white robe around herself, Aphrodite reached for her phone. She sent Hephaestus a single message: Really wishing I had gone to Paris with you.
She did a quick Google search then. In a matter of minutes, she’d found Senator Preston Hayes III, whose son Preston Hayes IV had attended Harvard with Julia.
Aphrodite checked the time. It was only eight p.m. on the East Coast; a staff member was probably still in the senator’s office.
She looked up the phone number and dialed.