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Adorable.
“Are you ready to get back to work?” Achilles asked.
“She just woke up,” Orestes countered. “Hasn’t even stood up yet.”
“Right.” She cleared her throat. Just seconds ago, she’d been comfortable with me. Leaned against my shoulder and held my hand. Now, she straightened her shirt, her hair, and gripped her fingers nervously. “I’m just going to go…”
Moving fast, she hurried upstairs. I traced her footsteps over the floor to the bathroom. “We were in the middle of a conversation,” I cut out.
Achilles dropped into a chair near Orestes. The wood creaked, but it held. “Is that what the kids are calling it now? What’s up with the pillow, mate?”
Lifting my hand, I made a show of flipping him off.
He leaned forward, causing the chair to groan. “Be careful, man. We don’t know if—”
“Gods, Achilles, I think we’ve learned by now she has no ulterior motives,” Orestes burst out. “She’s a historian, or archaeologist, or whatever it is. She was only interested in the seal academically.”
“And we told her what would happen, and she searched for it anyway.” Despite Achilles’ light tone, there was nothing funny about his words.
“It’s worked out,” I replied. “Everything.”
“Disagree,” Achilles replied. “Until that seal is sitting hundreds of thousands of meters below the water, I won’t relax. I can’t.” He gazed around the room. “Where are Paris and Hector?”
I thought they were upstairs, still asleep. They’d stayed awake long after Orestes and I had begged off.
“I think they’re out on the moors,” Orestes said. He glanced over his shoulder out the window. “Paris isn’t… well.”
No, he wasn’t. Paris took on the weight of the world and blamed himself—fairly or unfairly—for everything.
The gods.
The war.
The seal.
The fate of the world.
Feet padded down the stairs, and I whirled away from my friends.Who cares about the rest of the world?
The words rushed across my mind, but the problem was, we were dealing with the end of everything. And Leo was mortal. If we weren’t successful, if we didn’t drop that fucking shard of the seal into the ocean, then Leo would stop existing.
And I wasn’t ready for that. I’d barely just begun to feel—to feel anything again.
“I want to know something, and I want you to tell me straight.” Leo started speaking even before her foot hit the bottom stair. “What happens when all the pieces of the seal are found?”
Leo
During my minutes-long shower, something had occurred to me, and I wanted to bang my head against the wall. I could probably blame it on learning that these men had walked right out of the pages of my history books, but that didn’t make it right.
They hadn’t wanted me to find the pieces of the seal because they said the world would end. What did that mean?
I didn’t even bother to dry my hair before I hustled my ass through brushing my teeth and throwing on clothes.
The three men exchanged a glance.
“What do you mean?” Achilles asked.
“What happens? Pretend I didn’t know about you, and I took the two pieces I found and I put them with the third. If those were the only pieces of the seal and we brought them to the British Museum, what would happen?”
