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Starting at Danny’s feet, H scanned all the way to the top of his head. “You look like shit.”
“Yeah,” Danny said. It surprised her he took the criticism from the man he’d just been arguing with. “Haven’t been training much this month.”
“You doing Z’s job for him? We’ll need to go back to basics.”
Danny exhaled his disagreement. “I’m not going anywhere with you, old man,” he said, retrieving his gun and tucking it into the waistband of his pants.
“Where you gonna go?” H asked as Danny began to turn away. “What’s waiting for you out there?”
Danny’s focus stuck to the floor. “We don’t know ‘cause Minotaur is dead and you won’t do a damn thing about it.”
“I want to know just as much as you do, but we do that, and it starts all over again.”
“I’m okay with that.”
“No,” H said, propping himself on the desk again. “There’s nothing here to rebuild, son. It’s over.”
“I spent my whole life following every order. Twenty-four seven, training, fighting, working, doing everything you ever told me,” Danny said to H. “And now it’s just over…” He took a quick breath. “I won’t let you erase two decades of sacrifice.” Something about that sentence was familiar. The flicker of recognition on H’s face suggested he knew it too. “What you really meant was your sacrifice. You were happy for everyone else to sacrifice everything, so long as you got to play the hero for Helen.”
H shook his head. “It wasn’t like that.”
Danny swaggered a step closer to him. “PK is the only one I trust and he’s already proved he’d pick them over me… This is the only life PK’s ever known. He doesn’t understand that this isn’t living… I don’t want to put PK in the middle either, he’s so damn sharp. If he figures it out…”
“How did you—”
“I always look to PK and know my predicament is nothing compared to his… PK can’t love. Nothing about him isn’t manufactured. Controlled. Owned. I should never have let that happen either.”
“Daire—”
“What do you think would’ve happened?” Danny asked. Except H called him Daire. Was that his real name? “If they found out you were communicating with her? It was against the accord, right?”
“If you read the letters, you know the truth of that,” H said. “Damn, Carrie should’ve known better than to retain evidence.”
The letters. That’s why she recognized the quotes. Tess hadn’t written them out with such detail on her notepad.
“They’d have killed you,” Danny… or rather Daire, said. “Not before they killed Helen and Pandora… Except they weren’t here, were they? Who were you closest to here? Remind me.”
“I would never have let them hurt you.”
“Maybe,” Daire said. “You were gonna be dead anyway. What did it matter if they took me down before or after? I don’t care about combat, you trained me for that. I do care that you didn’t give me a fighting chance. Intel is the key to survival. You could’ve let me know what the fuck was coming down.”
“I didn’t want you in the middle.”
“Because you thought there was even the slightest chance I’d choose them over you?”
“Your loyalty is to Olympus. It always has been.”
“I was six years old.”
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
“You’re always talking about that,” Daire muttered and moved away from H again.
H wasn’t going to let Daire’s accusation stand. “Sometimes I forget. When I’m with PK, I believe that there’s purpose…”H recited.“They sent PK overseas. I couldn’t leave him. It’s no excuse, I know you won’t understand… I wanted so much for us, for PK, and I couldn’t deliver on any of it… If I thought PK would come, I’d drag him along and we’d all be together.You read that too?”
“I read every word, and I got it. All you went through, all of you, you blamed it on me.”
H sprang to his feet. “Not a second of it.”
