by Amelia Wilde
“Yes,” he says, and he sounds satisfied. Pleased.
A knock at the door crushes the moment under its heel.
10
Brigit
Zeus lets out an irritated hiss and gets us both to our feet. I could collapse into bed right now and sleep the rest of my life, but no. Not now. Not with someone at the door. In the hall he nudges me toward the bedroom and I go, but only so I can step into fresh clothes and splash water on my face.
Straighten my shoulders.
Go back out.
Zeus has one hand brace on the wall, his head bowed over something in his hand, and my stomach curdles.
“What is it?” Both of them straighten up like they’re caught hiding something illicit, but that’s not the baseline for a man like Zeus. Part of me wants to turn around and retreat back to the bedroom, but I don’t. I go to the foyer and cross my arms over my chest. “Which one of you is going to tell me what you found?”
It’s a picture Zeus holds now, and he hands it over to me with all the heat and light gone from his face. “James has been snooping around Demeter’s business.”
Then he turns and walks away, a leisurely stroll through the living room.
“Someone had to do it,” James calls after him.
“Not you, if you’re hoping to keep your job.” Zeus disappears into the kitchen. I hear the freezer open and close and meet James’s eyes before I look at the picture.
“You keep going back, but—”
“I’m not turning my back on them.” His jaw ticks. “It’s getting worse.”
I’m afraid to ask what he means, and it turns out I don’t have to. The glossy photo in my hands is proof.
It’s taken with a zoom lens through a window. A nice one, I think, since it’s not very grainy, even though you can tell it was taken from a distance. One of Zeus’s women is centered in the frame, her hands up against the window. And the man behind her, with his hand around her throat—I recognize him. He watched Zeus finger-fuck me in his lounge my first week at the whorehouse. I’ll never forget his eyes.
And the girl—
I don’t know her name, can’t remember it, and that makes me feel the most guilty. She’s hurt, a bruise painted across her face, and the way she’s standing looks painful. It’s difficult to tell from the picture, but there’s a suggestion of marks around her neck, peeking out from behind his hand. I fold the picture in half and try to ignore the sting of tears in my eyes.
“This is really bad,” I tell him. James nods, face solemn.
“Are you staying for a drink?” Zeus steps out of the kitchen and back into the living room, a glass in his hand. “Or are you going to leave me in peace and keep your job?” He’s smiling, but it’s filled with warning.
“I’ll go.” James takes the photo out of my hands and shoves it into one of his pockets. He pauses at the door and opens his mouth like he might say more, but leaves without another word.
My chest aches with the knowledge that I’m here, safe, and the rest of the women are being hurt. Possibly maimed. She could kill them, and I know it. Zeus knows it. And yet he’s just in the kitchen—
I stalk over to find out what’s so absorbing in the kitchen and find him at the stove, putting a pot of water on to boil.
“She’s hurting them,” I announce. I’ll pretend he hasn’t seen the photo. I’ll give him this chance. I wish he would take it instead of taking a box of pasta shells down from a cupboard. It’s so ordinary, so deliberate, and I’m not hungry. “I told you they needed you, and now she’s hurting them.”
“I saw.” He finishes his drink and abandons the glass on the counter. “She’ll have to walk a fine line if she wants to keep them in working order.”
I swallow what feels like pure acid. “And none of that bothers you?”
Zeus shrugs. “Why should it? I’ve already taken the loss.”
The loss. Like they’re furniture or food supplies and not people. I stand up tall and plant my feet in the doorway. “You’re just scared, then. You’re a scared, pathetic man. Too scared to face your own sister.”
A grin lifts the corners of his mouth, giving me a slow view of perfect teeth. One moment he’s a man in a kitchen and the next I can’t fathom how brazen I’ve been. “You think so little of me, sweetheart.”
Then he turns back to his pot of water and the box of noodles.
Fine.
If he won’t save them, I will. How hard can it be? Demeter is one woman, and if these men would just act, they would figure out a way. People’s lives are on the line. I stalk back out to the living room and flop down on the sofa.
For a moment.
And then I tiptoe to the door, step into my shoes, and slip out. The darkness is interrupted every so often by streetlights. Front Street. James said they were on Front Street. I’ll find Front Street, I’ll find the building, I’ll do something. It’s better than nothing.
My bravado fades the farther I get down the street. Is it better than nothing? I have no phone, no purse, and no weapon. I have no plan.
Well, neither does he.
The night wind wraps around me. The city buildings shape the whisper of the breeze, making it echo back and multiply, which is why I don’t hear him coming until it’s too late.
I’m off the ground before I have a chance to turn around, up in Zeus’s arms. “Put me down, asshole.”
He laughs, loud and cutting.
“If you wanted to make me a prisoner, you should’ve given me to your sister.”
“Do you honestly think, sweetheart, that I would let the mother of my child wander around the city at night on some suicide mission?”
“I don’t know,” I shoot back. “One minute you’re so understanding, you’re giving me options, and the next you’re refusing to do your job.”
“I no longer own a brothel,” he intones, and I snap my lips closed and grit my teeth. There’s no point. There’s just no point.
We reach his house and go in, and he insists on carrying me all the way up the stairs, which would be romantic in any other circumstance. I’m still seething when the inner doors close behind us.
He lets me go ahead of him.
Or else there’s something I’m missing. What am I missing?
I stop in the middle of the living room and whirl around to face him. “What’s wrong with you? I can’t—” The rest of my sentence withers away.
The space he left, I realize now, is for the oversized push of his anger.
He’s not calm. He’s furious. At me. For even trying to put myself in harm’s way. I can’t understand it, not really, because all those other women are constantly at risk and he just doesn’t care.
The set of his jaw says how dare you.
His eyes say run.
I bolt the second before he does and if it weren’t for all the time he spent forcing me to lay around and heal I wouldn’t be able to do this at all. As it stands there’s a faint pull in the center of my back. Not enough room to run. Not nearly enough room.
I take the corner at the back of the house too close and my shoulder hits the wall, a bright burst of pain, and then I’m heading for the bedroom.
It’s a dead end.
I know it is, but there’s a tiny piece of me that thinks if I beat him there I can claim sanctuary, I can find an escape hatch, I have options.
My options run out at the foot of the bed.
Zeus catches me around the waist and I shriek my surprise at how easy it is for him to swing me fully around so that he’s the one who lands on the bed first, me on top of him, his body taking all of the limited impact of the bed. As soon as I’m close he scrapes his teeth along my collarbone. He doesn’t seem to care if there’s a chance he might draw blood. Doesn’t seem to care if it hurts.
Good. Neither do I.
What I do care about is that he is always so clothed. I wrestle away from him and claw my way underneath his shirt, which is a different shirt from before, dark and expensive. He lets me
tear open three buttons before he lifts me off of him and turns me onto the bed.
Zeus kneels over me and strips off his shirt and I am so transfixed by the reality of him that I don’t bother paying attention to what he does with his pants, only that they’re gone.
That he moves over me and thrusts in hard, and damn it, damn it, fighting with him, provoking him, makes me wet. So wet. It makes me live for him. He fucks me like a punishment and that only heightens the pleasure I get from being taken like this. Possessed. Like I belong to him so completely that he can do no wrong.
Which might be true.
“Come,” he commands, and I’m ready to laugh at him, ready to throw it back in his face that he can’t make me come just by telling me to.
Except.
My whole body has wrapped itself around that word, around his need, and my laughter gets choked off by a rolling tension in my muscles. Zeus slows his pace and whispers it into my ear again. I might as well be a puppet on strings. I’m on the edge. I’m so close.
I fight it off.
“Why are you doing this?” My words are broken up by deep thrusts. “You can’t do this.”
“Oh, I disagree.”
“Go after them, and I’ll come.”
A dark laugh. “That’s not a bargain you want to make, sweetheart.”
“I do,” I insist, but I’m struggling to focus on anything but him, but the pulse between my legs. “I want to—to—”
But he’s moved, somehow, repositioned himself so that my clit is under the direct assault of his body and in the end I’m too weak to stop it from happening. The winding tension breaks like a wave and Zeus catches my cry in his kiss and fucks me until I’ve come down, all the way to the pillow, all the way under the covers, with the heat of him on my thighs.
I’m midway to sleep, halfway into a dream, when the memory of how he moved me, how he caught me, floats delicately into my consciousness.
He was so careful.
11
Brigit
In my dream several nights later, Zeus’s office is changed. He’s left the theater largely intact and his desk sits at center stage, slightly angled so that if he sat down to write he would be in deliriously perfect profile to the audience. There are no chairs but I’m trapped in the main aisle anyway. A light comes up over the desk and he ambles in from stage left and sits down. Opens his journal. His hand moves over the page in steady strokes of the pen. Then he lifts his head. “I told you to stay on the second floor.”
I open my mouth to answer, but I’m already there—already in the scene. The woman who emerges from the shadows has my face. She comes to the front of the desk, and unlike me, she’s showing. Her hands rest on her belly as she considers the man at the desk. I’m on tenterhooks, I’m on tiptoe, waiting to see what I’ll say.
But something jolts me out of the dream and back into the bedroom.
To the sound of Zeus breathing evenly beside me in the bed.
I prop myself up on one elbow and watch him for several minutes. He’s really asleep. I put my hand out to shake him, hesitating at the last moment. Get up, I would say. We’re not done talking about this. There has to be something I can say to convince him to go after his people. I just don’t know what it is, and I can’t stand it.
The covers seem like a prison in miniature so I throw them off and pad to the bathroom. The dream I had about his office is already fading. The image of the stage is the only thing that lingers. They gave the suggestion of his office with only three pieces of furniture. The desk. The chair. The bookshelf.
The bookshelf.
My heart climbs hand over hand into my throat, pounding there in a last-ditch attempt to get me to see this obvious, obvious thing I’ve been ignoring.
I pull my robe off the chair on the way out and wrap it tight around my waist. Zeus doesn’t stir as I leave the room. I linger in the living room for a minute to see if he wakes up and follows me out, but he doesn’t.
The office feels cavernous and haunted in the middle of the night. Goose bumps prickle my skin on the fast walk to his desk to switch on the single lamp there. It does nothing to calm my nerves. With the light on, he’ll see me right away if he comes down.
“He’ll see you anyway,” I say out loud. “Stop being a coward.”
It’s only a few steps from the desk to the bookshelf.
Yes.
I was right.
The very top shelf is another row of random books like the ones upstairs.
The rest of the shelf is filled, end to end, with other journals.
Older journals.
If the doctor drew my blood right now she would find it sparkling with anticipation and guilt and hope. There has to be something in one of these books that will tell me what to do. There has to be a key to unlock him, to throw back the shutters that come down over his heart whenever anyone makes the completely reasonable point that he should rescue the people he’s promised to protect.
Please, let him have organized them by date. He is a businessman. He keeps numerous ledgers, all kinds of ledgers, and these have to be the same in this one way, otherwise—
I don’t let myself think about what will happen otherwise. The tops of the journals are uniformly hardcover on the second shelf. I skim my fingertips over them, feeling the dips to the pages.
This is forbidden and wrong, to dig into him like this without permission. I shake the struggle off my shoulders. He’s never going to give me permission to read these. We’re never going to huddle over them and search for clues.
I saw his face the last time he caught me here.
About halfway across the shelf I pull one out at random and open it to the middle. I’ve gone back a long time. I desperately want to read everything, every word in his neat handwriting, but I summon all my self-control and skim.
Who names a person Aurelia? It’s a bad omen. Her son will end up getting stabbed in cold blood by his colleagues, if she has a son. This Aurelia is too much of a wreck to work the floor, much less have sons. I don’t find this irritating, however. I might come to regret giving her the job. We’ll see if she keeps insisting on her nickname. Reya—ridiculous.
I pause with a hand over the page. Ridiculous. But he didn’t find her ridiculous, not at all. He hasn’t mentioned her once in all the time since we’ve left Olympus.
He hasn’t mentioned her out loud.
This isn’t what I’m looking for and I put it back on the shelf, but it nags at me so painfully that I move quickly back to the desk and flip open the journal on the top. Oh, god, even now I want to look for things about me. I want it so much my eyes burn. But I don’t. I look for Reya’s name instead. And I find it, a few pages from where the writing ends in this one.
Arrangements for Aurelia Colette Blake
Catholic service at Cathedral of St. Mary
Burial at Holy Cross
The dates next to all these are from ten days ago, when I was adrift in a sea of painkillers. Did he go? The list continues.
Private viewing for family only
Did she have a family? Most of the women at Olympus weren’t in contact for one reason or another. Or they were trying not to be in contact, like me. Maybe it doesn’t matter once you’re dead. Maybe people come to your funeral anyway, even if you were royally pissed at them. I don’t know what’s worse—imagining him there, trying not to command all the attention in the room or not there at all.
I get my answer at the bottom of the list.
Anonymous donation by proxy—courier note to parents re: stated wishes for service and burial
This is included above the name of a bland-sounding shell company.
I close the journal and collect myself.
Before this. Whatever I’m looking for, it has to have come long before any of this. Before Reya came to Olympus. Before Zeus lived here. I’m looking for his childhood, and that could take a long time.
Time I might not have. I skip down to the next shelf, where the journals be
come smaller and less uniform. At some point he started buying the same one over and over again—or, more likely, having them made personally for him. This shelf is a mountain range of book covers, rising and falling. The one I pull out is medium-sized with a beat-up red cover. The only red cover.
Demeter is killing birds again. She thinks it will get his attention. Nothing I say will convince her that he won’t care.
I read the entries on the page again. Zeus almost never mentions his sister in the present day, other than to plan for her next attack. I thought they’d always been sworn enemies. But here he is on the page, trying to convince her of something. Would an enemy do that?
I flip forward a few months, to the summer.
She’s a terror with blueberries now, in addition to whatever she’s been doing in the greenhouse. I found her with a basket of them in the barn conducting a science experiment on Hades. How many blueberries will kill a person with an allergy? She hissed like a cat and scratched at me when I took the basket. He was still unconscious when I sat him up and scraped the blueberries out of his mouth. Lucky us.
There’s something here, something close. She’s a terror now. That means she wasn’t always, doesn’t it? I can’t tell how long I’ve been reading, but the clock is ticking. Any minute now he’s going to wake up and come looking for me, and I need to be upstairs when that happens.
Another journal.
Hid Demeter in a closet today when Cronos found the missing food. He was so pissed I think he believed me.
Hid her.
How old was he?
Not that old.
My heart is beating too fast by the time I go for the very last journal in the row. The oldest, most battered one. It has a dingy cream cover and yellowed pages and it cracks when I open it. On the inside, the ink has started to fade, but it’s still unmistakably Zeus’s writing. This one isn’t so much a journal but a collection of lists.