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“You want my protection?” he said. “That includes eliminating threats. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but my target is a threat to you.”
Quickly shaking her head, she needed to get his agreement soon. “Z wants to put Olympus back together. H didn’t know that Three was bringing me here. The night we got here, Z put in a call to P and H… Ares was there too. Z wants them to figure it out. To put everything back to how it was.”
“He thinks he can trust H again?”
Tess licked her lips. “I don’t know. I thought the same thing, but what’s the alternative? Ares said it to H, if they take Z down, H won’t be far behind. That’s why he refused Operation Zulu three months before it was offered to H.”
“Damnit,” he mumbled, his attention snapping forward. “They offered it to him first.”
You know, for all the love the three men had for each other, they didn’t communicate very well. Daire had told her in bed that he and his father didn’t talk. Turned out the brothers had their secrets as well.
“Why would H loop you in and keep Ares in the dark?”
“Ares is Olympus born and bred,” he murmured. “It birthed him. It’s his mother.” And his connection to his biological mom who was an Olympus agent too. “It’s him, isn’t it? You want Olympus to have a chance because Ares wants it.” Digging her teeth into her lip, she didn’t reply. The way he exhaled betrayed her lack of words was answer enough. “Ares can get just about anyone to do just about anything. Charm, persuasion, violence, he has a lot of tools at his disposal. H taught him well, taught me well too. If you’re putting yourself on the line for them, I’ve gotta tell you there’s a chance whatever you think is going on isn’t real. There will be a larger play.”
Like Daire pretending to be someone he wasn’t in order to get close to her?
“It doesn’t matter why I’m doing this. You have to think about you. Olympus rises again, you’ll have your home back too. You’ll be with H and Ares again.”
“Even if Olympus rises, I’ll still kill Z.”
Astounded, she asked, “Why?”
“It’s my mission. Until he stops breathing, I haven’t accomplished it.”
“Maybe H wants to do it himself.”
Styx inhaled. “If he did, he wouldn’t have given it to me. Killing is my thing… if it’s with my bare hands, all the better.” Probably registering her horror, he shrugged. “Death’s a part of life. I got a taste for it young.”
Yeah, by killing his own father.
“In Vegas, you were close, right there. Why didn’t you reach out to Ares?”
“I don’t know where his head’s at. The sparring is one thing, we trained every day, all day, for hours, days, weeks at a time. We’ve taken each other to the brink of death, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose.”
“On purpose?”
“Boys will be boys.”
If Daire said that, she’d smack him and tell him not to be glib about his brother’s life. Doing the same thing to a man who’d just admitted his favorite hobby was committing murder wouldn’t be a great idea.
“You didn’t approach him because you thought he wouldn’t keep your secret or because you thought you might try to kill him?”
“With the way it went down… what he thinks or assumes… if I approach him and he wants to kill me…”
Hanging in the air with her mouth open, she waited for him to finish, but got to the end of her patience. “If he wants to kill you, what?”
“I’ll let him.”
A shot of something went through her stomach. Alarm? Fear? Sorrow? She didn’t know, it was just such a raw truth.
“You’d let him kill you?”
He nodded. “He deserves to, for the way things went down, the Exodus… We left him vulnerable, we’re not supposed to do that.”
“Out there on his own, you mean? He’s capable.”
“More than capable,” Styx said. “He was always better at the mission crap, the patience, figuring things out, strategy, tactics… I was kill now, ask questions later. I can be unpredictable, volatile. Put him on edge… Guess hanging with me taught him how to process and put up with it on post, but he didn’t like it in the field… He put up with a lot of crap from me, took more than one beating for me, a bullet or two, a blade here and there… But politicking wasn’t us. We saw how it was at the top, what H put up with. We were each other’s backbone. No secrets, not within our ranks…”
