Page 18 of Taming Winter

"Clearly," she snorted.

Her attention went to Dany as my other friend stepped out of the car. Her head tilted to the side in a silent question, to which Dany shook her head and stuck her tongue out in a gag. I rolled my eyes at them both. "Grow up and let's get this moving along."

"Of course, Your Highness," Lam responded with a sarcastic bow.

The three of us remained silent as we shuffled past the soldiers milling around the main floor of the castle. My friends knew better than to allow in listening ears, and I was even more grateful for their caution now. Our silence didn't break until we were locked within my soundproofed study, though I nervously searched for any sign of a listening device. My brother could be listening anywhere, but it was a risk I would need to take.

"Zeus is the one who put a hit out on me," I breathed out the words as though they pained me to hold. My shoulders lifted as the statement left me, though both of my friends' expressions went wide with horror.

"He hired Thane—I mean, Wolfe?" Lamia barked.

I nodded. "So that he could install our tight-assed friends downstairs."

She snorted. "Fucking of course. He definitely has been spying on us, then."

"No surprise there," I retorted with an eye roll.

Dany gasped. "Oh my goddess, what if that was the reason he never let you buy more souls? He wanted the castle to be vacant of soldiers, so he could place his own!"

My heart stuttered. He had said that signing contracts with wraiths was immoral. The two women in the room had been granted approval because they wished to be by my side, for whatever reason. Just enough company to keep me compliant, I realized. He knew I would be more resistant if I didn’t have any companionship. The thought hurt more than it should have. This was small compared to the other things he had done to me, and yet, I had lived in isolation for centuries, with only the two women in front of me as company. He had done that to keep me vulnerable.

"He probably wanted to make it harder for me to rise against him," I muttered. Wraiths were near impossible to kill, and I controlled them completely if they signed a contract with me. It would give me undead soldiers, not afraid of death and desperate to follow my every whim. That was too big a risk for Zeus to take.

Why had I let him control me? The more I unearthed, the more my rage rose to a ferocious boil. I was furious with Zeus and the other immortals supporting him, but I was more upset with myself, because I had been a fucking idiot.

"That fucking prick," Lamia snarled. I shared the sentiment.

"Well I thought my gossip was juicy, but now I'm not so sure. Hades might have shown me up," Dany piped up. She flopped into a chair nearby, and Lamia and I followed suit.

"We can decide who has the more fucked-up story later, just tell us," Lamia responded.

Dany sighed and waved her hand. “Your brother is doing some shady stuff."

"Yeah, no shit," I retorted. We had already assumed as much, which was why we had sent Dany into the servants' quarters of Zeus’s home to sniff out information. Dany held an invaluable skill set; the woman could peel information from a person more effectively than torture. I had witnessed it with my own eyes on multiple occasions. She crumbled her target's walls with casual conversation. Then with one bat of her pretty eyelashes, they were gushing their innermost secrets.

"It's worse than we imagined, Hades. He's using this as a cover-up. The servants say this whole blight was intentional."

A bomb had fallen on me, leaving me scrambling to pick up the pieces. Fucking Apollo. He wouldn't have crept out of whatever hole he hid himself in to travel to Zone 1 for a few measly murders. He wouldn't have mobilized that quickly, meaning he had already been there.

Zeus had manufactured a story to cover his movements before. It was what had allowed us to take over to begin with, after all. Swarm the news with stories of god-like beings conquering the monsters that went bump in the night so they wouldn’t stop to consider how those same immortals were taking positions of power within their government. By the time anyone was any wiser, it was too late. Except now he was making me out to be the monster and condemning hundreds of our people while he did it.

"Do we have any idea what he's covering up?" I asked, my eyebrow raised.

Dany shook her head. "No, I asked around, but the servants all shuttered up. I didn't have time to dig further before we had to rush out."

She tossed me a pointed stare, at which I scowled. "My brother tried to kill me. The plan changed," I retorted. She shrugged but let out a huff. She did not like coming away empty-handed on gossip.

"What do we do?" Lam asked, her tone surprised but calm. She was always the voice of reason.

"We're going to ruin their plans, of course," I responded. A level of acceptance for the situation I found myself in washed over me. Zeus had been building up to this for a while, possibly since the assassination attempt. This was a small step in whatever endless game he played. He had already vilified me as the malevolent god that forces humans to stay in line. I was done with his games. I would not be the good little sister that took my mistreatment with a smile on my face.

If he wanted me to be the villain, so be it.

CHAPTER 18

WOLFE

I bathed and now sat on my cushion, leaning against the wall with my mind spinning. What the fuck was I doing? I wasn’t the type of man to fawn after a woman who opened her legs for me. Sex was transactional and nothing more. Don't get me wrong, I was a generous lover. I wanted my partners to enjoy themselves as much as I did, but I wasn't buying roses or wedding rings after.