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3
DEIMOS
I loathe this city.
The way it smells. The way it lingers on my skin like an oily residue that takes weeks to get rid even after I leave.
I’m aware that shitting on New York City doesn’t make me unique. But myreasonsfor shitting on this godforsaken place might set me apart from the rest. I don’t hate New York because it has a constant hard-on for itself—thought it does, and that gets real old real fucking fast. I don’t hate it for its pretentiousness, or its naked corruption. Nor do I hate it for the subway rats and cockroaches, or the junkies, hustlers, and predators that prowl its streets.
No, I hate the city I was born in because it’s here that I died, in a sense, when I was twelve. It’sherethat I learned far too young that hell was all too real.
My siblings all glommed onto this fucking city like it was Rome at the height of the Roman Empire. But me? I couldn’t get away fast enough, first to Knightsblood University and then to England, when our father—may God piss on his grave—moved the Drakos empire to London for a while.
After his death, and what happened to our uncle Vasilis here, my siblings couldn’twaitto move back to New York.
But I couldn’t wait to never see it again in my life. And that wasbeforeI knew Dahlia fucking Roy was part of the equation.
“What the fuck was all that about?”
I frown, blinking as I raise my eyes to Callie. I’ve missed my baby sister. I mean, yes, I’ve missed all my siblings, and our grandmother, of course. But Callie and I are the two youngest. And even though I’m six years older than her, I’m the closest to her age, which had a way of making us partners in crime when we were younger.
It’s sobering to see that “baby sister” of mine standing in front of me as a twenty-one-year-old woman.
“Deimos.”
I smile, lifting a noncommittal shoulder at her pointed and obvious question.
“Just introducing myself to your friend, Callie.”
She squints at me suspiciously. Of all of them, Callie comes the closest to seeing the real me, probably because I was the closest to her when we were young, before whatever I’d been born with for a soul was torn from me.
Maybe it’s because she’s the only girl. Or maybe it’s because my mask and my walls aren’t quite as strong with her as they are with Ares, Hades, and Kratos.
“Why was Dahlia scared of you?”
I smile a little more broadly as I stroll over to her, forcing the darkness and the monster back into its carefully forged cage as I pat her on the shoulder.
“Everyone’s scared of me.”
Callie rolls her eyes. “Don’t do that, D.”
“Do what?”
“That thing you do where you pretend everything’s fine when it clearly is not.”
Shit. I’ve been away from her too long. I’d forgotten my sister has always been a bloodhound when it comes to sniffing things out. She’s also direct to a fault, with all the tact and subtlety of a pipe bomb.
“You’re imagining things, Cals,” I grunt with as charming a smile as I can muster. Which isn’t very charming.
“Okay, but why are you even talking to her?”
“I’m not talking to her. I’m talking to you.”
She glares at me again, but I just smile and squeeze her shoulder. “See you out there, birthday girl.”
I’ve been more than content to live in London, drowning myself in the rigors of running the entirety of our family’s European empire by myself. Honestly, it’s a testament to my love for Callie that I came to this hellhole of a city tonight at all. I’m not sure I’d have come back for any of my brothers’ birthdays.
And if I’d known Dahlia was going to be standing in my goddamn house with my fucking family, I abso-fucking-lutely wouldn’t have come. That’s for damn sure.
