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Achilles stood. I thought he was going to get out of her way, but he didn’t. He moved into the small space between tables, towering over her. “You wanted answers. You’re getting them. They won’t make sense. Not at first. But if you want what happened today not to happen again, you’ll sit down.”
“No.” That candle flame burned brighter and brighter. My cheeks ached with a smile I hadn’t even realized was on my lips.
“Sit down, Leonora.” Achilles spoke like a general whose orders were always obeyed.
She lifted one hand, raised her middle finger, and shoved it in his face.
That was it. The laugh that burst out of me was rusty, harsh, and unfamiliar. As one, my friends’ and brother’s heads whipped toward me.
All of them wore similar expressions of shock, except for Hector. With wide eyes, so like my own, he studied me with wonder.
“Please. Miss Ophidia,” Hector said, while staring at me. “I know this is asking for your trust when we’ve done nothing to earn it. We’ll explain as much as we can.”
“As much as you can?” Her tone was bitter.
He nodded. Hector had let his brown hair grow much too long and it fell across his eyes. My own hair was shoulder length, and self-consciously, I tucked it behind my ears.
“That’s all I can promise.”
Her gaze went from Hector, to Orestes and Pollux, to Achilles, and finally to me. With a huff, she sat, pulled her bag onto her lap and frowned. “Fine. Talk.”
Leo
Hector and Paris.
Achilles.
Pollux.
Orestes.
My mind went back to the time that should have been the most exciting time in my life. The days and weeks after discovering that shard of pottery in the sand. Instead, my advisor, Diana Regan, had turned the discovery around. Accused me of acting outside the bounds of my thesis research. Of misleading her. Of taking credit when it was due her.
For a while, I was certain that I was going to lose my funding, my job, and my future. But my experience with another woman—my mother—taught me to keep my cool and stick to the facts. To this day, I was certain I’d saved my own skin because I refused to stoop to her level.
This—however—this was the sort of level to which Dr. Diana Regan, expert in war and pagan rituals, would fall.
And this sort of detail—having these men pretend to be named after Trojan heroes—it seemed like a calling card. A giant middle finger, sort of like the one I’d flashed at Achilles, directed right at me.
I was curious. How were they going to explain this? A tiny bead of fear welled up inside me, because there was also what Achilles had done.
Diana had asked him to kill me.
I shook my head, realizing that Hector had begun to speak and I’d missed most of what he’d said.
“I’m sorry. Can you start again?”
Hector blinked slowly, drawing attention to his bright blue eyes. He licked his lips, nodding, while trying to hide his smile. “Of course. I was saying—those are our names. And we don’t know who Diana is. But this does have to do with the piece of the seal you found.”
Seal?
His smile died immediately. He leaned forward, elbows propped on his knees and stared at me. “Pollux told us about it. He saw it in the British Museum.”
“You weren’t too far off.” Pollux jumped in. “Like many ancient artifacts, there are people, religions”—he seemed to search for the word and finally settled on—“oaths, that are sworn to it. What you found?” His voice was so deep, it drew me in, and I leaned even closer. He placed his arm on the back of my chair, where he gripped the wood and squeezed. “It was never meant to be found.”
“So you’re like the Freemasons or something?” I racked my brain for groups like the one he’d described—one with a legacy that was passed from one generation to another. There was the Skull and Bones Society, though they were only a couple of hundred years old. The Bilderberg Group, which was political, and again, only a hundred years old or so. The Order of Assassins. But they had dissolved back in the twelve hundreds. Of course, there were tons of religious groups, The Order of St. John, The Sovereign Military Order of Malta…
But I wasn’t aware of any that had to do with the Trojan War. Just because I didn’t know any, though, didn’t mean they didn’t exist.
