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She doesn’t even blink. She just smooths her fingertips over the chaise’s velvety upholstery and looks as if she’s trying to formulate words—there’s no surprise in her expression, no concern, no anger. Her face is just as blank a canvas as it was a moment ago.
“Will you come for her?” I demand.
“Come for her?” she repeats as if the idea were completely foreign.
“You come to the Underworld, and I’ll let her go… unharmed.”
She blinks then, slowly, her dark lashes perfect fans of lace against her alabaster cheeks. “The foolish risks that children decide to take are their own.”
For an instant, the rage inside me flares up to such an extent that I can barely breathe. My vision goes red, as though I’m seeing the world through a film of blood. Because I don’t believe she’s trying to bluff me, to convince me she doesn’t care and won’t come for her daughter. No, she truly doesn’t care.
Even though she knows I am more than capable of killing her only daughter. I can’t imagine birthing a child, rearing that child, and then discarding her so easily, as if she were a bit of décor to be replaced.
She’s too calm. Even diminished, I’m good at reading people. Especially those who are trying to hide how scared they are. In person, I can smell it on their skin, almost taste the pounding of their pulses like a sweetness across my tongue. Aphrodite isn’t panicking.
Which means she believes that even if I kill Penelope, that she can avoid being forced to avenge her daughter. Perhaps she’s planning something, plotting? If so, that tends to never go well for me.
It just makes the rage burn hotter.
“Don’t lie to me,” I growl. “I can see your blessing on her. It’s the only reason she could walk into the Underworld in the first place—because you gave her permission. Don’t pretend you didn’t know she was here.”
Aphrodite says nothing. She only gives another one of those slow, languid blinks of her amethyst eyes.
“Do you not even care?” I snarl, taking a step closer to the shield. “Does it truly not concern you that your only daughter is going to die down here, because you are still suffering hurt pride?”
Instantly, Aphrodite’s face smooths into a beautiful, remote mask, as if I were looking at one of her many, many statues.
“At times,” she says in a voice so cold it should leave frost on the steel of the shield, “lessons must be taught.”
With a scream of tortured metal, my fist goes straight through the shield and into the rock wall behind it, making the keep around me shudder on its foundation.
My chest heaves, lungs pumping air as though I’ve just completed a three-day campaign in full armor. I’m so fucking furious that my arm is shaking, as if my body is trying to burn off some of the rage before I explode from it.
I snap my arm down and the shield slides off my arm to clatter to the floor. There’s a crater punched into the wall behind where it hung—evidence of the fact that I can’t control my temper. I’ve never been able to.
My breath comes out ragged from between my clenched teeth. My jaw creaks, and I have to relax the muscles there before something cracks. The frustration inside me is an inferno, raging. The need to lash out is overwhelming.
I’ve been dreaming of my revenge for a millennia. Countless years devoted to just how I would escape this noose, and what I’d do when I was finally, finally free. Just over two centuries ago, Aphrodite finally gave me my chance, when she birthed a half-mortal daughter, and left that daughter unprotected in the mortal world.
And now, after all the rage, after all the waiting, all the biding of my time, the means to enact my revenge is finally in my hands.
And I find myself resenting what it is I have to do.
SIX
PEN
I am definitely freaking out.
A jittery feeling is crawling through my limbs, like I’ve got bugs under my skin, and if I don’t move, it feels like I might actually go insane.
Okay. So, I’m locked in a room, in a castle, in Hell.
I have an extremely short amount of time to rescue the soul of my sister from a furious, trapped god, who seems completely incapable of being reasoned with. And who also may or may not want to kill me. And my only shot at release is that my extremely self-centered mother would ransom herself over to probably be killed in order for me to go free.
Right. Like that’s going to happen.
My head swims, and I brace my hands on my knees, trying to breathe until the sparkles fade from my vision.
