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“Like fuck you will!” Jaxon snarls, lunging towards Mark, but four more Sons appear out of nowhere, grabbing him and hauling him backwards. Against two, maybe even three, Jaxon might have stood a chance, but they overpower him, holding him back as he tries to wrench free to get to me.
A hard, heavy hand grabs my elbow, and I wrench away, only to have another set of hands grab me from behind. “Easy there, sweetness,” a rough voice says in my ear, and I throw an elbow, doing my best to land it in his gut. I hit my mark, but it’s not enough. There’s more Sons, surrounding me, and even as I claw at one of them in front of me, managing to rake my nails down his face, I can’t react to all of them at once.
I don’t see the fist coming that connects with my jaw. I barely even feel it.
I’m quite literally out before I even know what hit me.
—
The room where the ritual is held is cold.
I didn’t know that, last time. Last time I was drugged, barely sensible of what was happening. I still don’t remember all of it, just vague hints, memories of a veil over my face and wine on my lips. Things that come back in dreams sometimes, even though I think I’d rather not remember at all.
This time, I’m awake.
I’m not on the altar. I’m bound, sitting slumped in the center of the room, my back to someone. I twist around and realize that it’s Dean, who is just beginning to rouse too. He jerks his head towards me, his expression crumpling as reality rushes in, and he realizes what’s happening.
“Fuck, Athena—” his voice is miserable. “Fuck. They—what happened? Where’s Jaxon?”
“I don’t know.” My mouth feels thick and dry. “The fight was rigged. Someone—I think it was Winter who paid her—someone got that Pixie girl into the fight to try and kill me. But I—”
I squeeze my eyes shut, wishing I could forget. I’ll never be able to stop seeing her face, wide-eyed and terrified, knowing that she was about to die as she felt her own blood spraying out between her fingers. I’ll never stop hearing that final sound. The way she choked as she tried to breathe.
I’ve killed someone. Someone is dead, and I did it.
“I killed her,” I whisper. “She tried to stab me, but I got the knife, and I—”
“Oh god, Athena.” Dean’s voice is a whisper, and I hear the regret in it, the way he’s questioning every choice we’ve made right now. “You can’t think about it right now,” he says, his voice low and as sharp as that blade. “You can’t think about it, okay? You’ll go crazy if you do.”
“How do you know?” I swallow hard. It’s so cold that I’m shaking, or maybe it’s shock setting in. “You don’t know what it’s like—”
“I do.”
“What?” I lick my dry lips, wondering if I’ve heard him correctly. “What do you mean—”
“There’s a number of things that Cayde, Jaxon and I had to do to prove we were men worthy of being the heirs to Blackmoor,” Dean says bitterly, looking away from me. “And one of those things was to each kill a man, shortly after we turned eighteen.”
I feel as if someone has sucked all of the air out of the room. “None of you ever said anything about that—”
“Should we have?” Dean shrugs. “What difference would it have made? It can’t bring them back. And if I’m being honest Athena, for myself, I wasn’t sure if you’d understand.”
“I’ve been so angry I could kill before,” I say quietly. “There’s people I feel as if I want dead.”
“Being so angry or so hurt that you’d kill for revenge and killing in cold blood are two different things,” Dean says quietly. “We were told that each of the three men had betrayed the family in some way. But I have no way of knowing if that was true. None of us did.”
I swallow hard, feeling slightly sick. “So why did you do it?”
Dean doesn’t say anything for a long moment, and the silence feels almost oppressive. When he finally speaks again, his voice is low and resigned. “I want to say that I had no choice. But the truth is, there’s always a choice. Any of us could have chosen not to kill them. We just couldn’t live with the consequences of that choice. So we killed them, because not suffering our fathers’ anger was worth more than the lives of men we didn’t even know.”
Dean shifts on the hard stone floor, and I try to turn, wanting to see his face. He’s turned away from me, his face shadowed, and I can’t make out his expression.
“What you did was different, Athena,” he says gently. “Pixie would have killed you. There’s no shame in fighting to save your own life.”
I want to believe that he’s right. But I don’t know if I can.
“I can’t stop seeing it,” I say thickly, trying not to cry. “I can’t stop hearing her—”
“I still see his face in my dreams sometimes. He begged.” I can hear the pain in Dean’s voice, and something that sounds almost like regret. “He begged me not to kill him, and I pulled the trigger anyway. I didn’t even hesitate. I knew it was what was expected of me, and so I did it.” His voice is faraway, as if he’s somewhere else altogether, not here with me. “Cayde struggled. I saw it in his eyes, but he did it too. Jaxon was the only one who tried to fight it. He tried to refuse. But in the end—” Dean shrugs again, and he finally turns his head to look at me. “We all killed them. We did what we were told to do. I could say we didn’t know better, but—”
