“I don’t know.” My admission tasted like failure. “But whatever it is, it’s bad. She’s scared, and Alex doesn’t scare easily.”
“Scared of what?” Aries asked. “This Derek guy?”
“Maybe.” I shook my head. “Or maybe Derek doesn’t exist. Maybe the whole story is fabricated.”
“You think she made him up?” Adonis looked up from his notebook, pen poised.
“I think she gave us exactly what we wanted to hear. A story that explains why she’s back without giving us any real information.”
Zeus nodded slowly. “That’s what I thought, too. She’s too careful. Too rehearsed.”
“She’s always been a good liar.” I hated myself for saying it. “But this is different. This isn’t her usual bullshit. This is survival mode.”
“Survival from what?” Caishen leaned forward, his calculating eyes narrowed. “What could be so bad that she’d come back here after four years?”
That’s the question, isn’t it?
“Could be anything,” Hermes said. “Bad debt. Pissed off the wrong people. Got involved in something illegal.”
“She worked at a strip club,” Hyperion added. “Those places attract all kinds of trouble. Drugs, trafficking, organized crime.”
“She said she was a cocktail waitress,” Apollo pointed out.
“And you believe that?” Aries snorted. “Come on. A girl who looks like Alex, working at a strip club in Rapid City? She was dancing. Guaranteed.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to defend her, but he was probably right. “Even if she was dancing,” I said carefully, “that doesn’t mean she’s in trouble. Plenty of girls do that work and walk away clean.”
“But not Alex,” Zeus said quietly.
His words hung in the air like a death sentence.
Because he was right.
Alex never did anything clean. She never had.
“What do you want me to do?” I asked, looking at Zeus. “You want me to push her harder? Try to get the truth out of her?”
“No.” Zeus shook his head. “Pushing her will just make her shut down more. You saw how she reacted when I assigned Abyss. She’s already defensive. We push too hard, she’ll bolt.”
“And if she bolts, we lose any chance of protecting her,” Hades added.
“Protecting her from what?” I demanded, frustration bleeding into my voice. “We don’t even know what we’re protecting her from. Could be nothing. Could be she’s just paranoid because of a bad breakup.”
“You don’t believe that,” Atlas said, his voice flat.
“No,” I admitted. “I don’t.”
Silence settled over the table.
“She’s hiding something big,” Coeus said, his fingers tapping on his laptop. “I can feel it. And whatever it is, it’s going to blow back on us big time.”
“Then we need to figure out what it is,” Caishen said. “Before it becomes our problem.”
“It’s already our problem,” Zeus said. “The second she walked through that door, it became our problem. She’s Poseidon’s sister. That makes her family. And we protect family.”
“Even when family won’t tell us the truth?” Aries asked.
“Especially then.”
