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“Look.” The strain shows in Poseidon’s voice. “We’re all here, sitting on the goddamn floor. To be honest, I thought we were past this.”
“Hades. I have it,” Zeus says. “Now let me finish this conversation and get Hercules—”
Hades makes a sound that would’ve scared the fuck out of me if I heard it during a mission.
“It has to be him. You know we can’t go. It’s not what Daisy wants, either, and if we show up there…”
Zeus doesn’t say what will happen if they go to where Daisy lives in California.
“I can’t go to California.” It comes out flat and empty. My brain doesn’t know what the hell to do in this information vacuum. Daisy isn’t important to me. She’s my not-cousin with whom I have never gotten along and never will. The fact that she gathered the combined power of her family to get me out of jail after I beat up a guy for her doesn’t mean I owe her anything.
“Herc. Please.”
When Zeus bailed me out of jail and brought me to live at his house, he framed it like he owed me the bedroom and the fancy school and the place in his family. It was nothing less than he’d do for any of the children born to women who worked for him at his whorehouse. It had been his mistake that my mother and I slipped through the cracks, and his alone, and he insisted I owed him nothing in return.
I’d love to believe that, but it’s not true. He offered me more than I can repay, even if I’ve never been his son. Even if I never will be.
“It’s against policy.”
“You make your own policy.”
He’s right. Idomake my own policy. I’m a highly sought-after security consultant. Most of my work revolves around digital security for firms with government contracts, which require a higher clearance level than most people in my field. Occasionally, though, I protect people on the ground. It’s a personal rule that I don’t protect family, and I made that rule for a reason.
“You’re going to get me killed over this.”
Silence.
In that quiet, my face burns with shame. My shoulder aches. I’ve been holding this rep too long, and I’ve been holding myself away from Daisy andher family,not mine, never really mine, for even longer. It’s a flimsy fucking excuse, too, because nothing has managed to kill me yet. I’ve survived beatings and shootings and hitting the ground from a height presumed to be unsurvivable.
What I want to do is the simple, easy thing—offer my life for hers. Daisy’s parents and her aunts and uncles and her cousins want her to come home. They can live without me. If I could give my life over the phone, I’d do it.
I’d have done it several times over by now. I’d have done it for my mother. I’d have done it for Ollie. I’d do it right now, but I can’t.
Deep down, I think Zeus knows this inconvenient unproven fact about me. At the very least, he has his suspicions.
Across the city, he’s sitting on the floor with his brothers because this is clearly so stressful for Hades that he’s having a brain problem. I’ve never seen the full result of one of those in person. If I refuse to take this job, will it kill him?
Will Zeus kill me?
If I hurt his brother, he’ll try, and then we’ll know for sure if I can die.
If Ican’t, I’m in for a lifetime of torture.
But the idea of being in the same room with Daisy again has my stomach in knots. My heart runs an obstacle course in my chest. I feel feverish, and chilled, and what the fuck am I supposed to do? Look at her like she’s not the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen? Talk to her like I don’t resent, with every cell in my body, that I can never have her? She is named after aDaisy,for the love of Christ. She’s delicate and pure, and I’m a tattooed asshole whose primary talents are brute strength and violence. It was bad enough when we lived next door to each other. Bad enough sitting across from her at dinner. Bad enough breathing the scent of her shampoo during all the bullshit family events Zeus and his brothers forced us all to attend.
I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for excuses, and I know it, like I knew my parachute wasn’t going to be enough to save Ollie.
Fuck. They can all hear me.
It’s a phone call, but the ask feels like a physical pressure. I don’t know which one of them is doing that over cellular data or if it’s my own jackass of a body trying to get me to agree. Out of nowhere, I think of a cool, shiny quarter in my palm. Handing it over to someone who needed it more. Beingproud.
“She won’t want me. We don’t get along.”
“Someone shot at Daisy tonight.” Zeus delivers this like he’s mentioning an inoffensive weather forecast.
The resistance band rips in two in my hand. The metal loop it was attached to flies out of the wall. I duck before it tears out one of my eyes, and then I’m on my feet, half the shredded band clutched in my fist.
“She wasn’t hit.” My mouth gets there before my brain does. If a bullet so much as grazed Daisy’s skin, her father and uncle would already be on a plane. “They didn’t get her.”
