Fuck me.
Brontes doesn’t lead us to the office, and I’ve only been in there once, so it takes me three tries to find the right one. All the while, that fucking terrible feeling at the back of my neck gets worse.
I can barely look at Adonis as I drop into the chair behind the desk that will never be mine. “You happy now?”
He sighs. “We have a lot of work to do.”
* * *
That evening, I slam the door hard enough to shake the house and stalk down the hallway into the living room. It’s empty except for Pandora, and as much as part of me is relieved to see her here and safe, I can’t forget her lipstick on my wife’s jaw and her perfume coating Aphrodite’s skin. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Pandora sets down her e-reader with exaggerated slowness. Her sunny smile is nowhere in evidence. “If you want an actual answer, I’m going to need you to check your tone and try that again.”
I have to muscle down the urge to roar out all my frustration and anger at her. It’s not her fault I had a shitty day in a long string of shitty days, but I thought she was in my corner and now I’m not so sure. I succeed in moderating my tone. Barely. “You fucked my wife.”
She doesn’t tend to blush, but I don’t need to see it when she’s shifting on the couch like someone poured itching powder into her leggings. “I wouldn’t call it ‘fucking.’”
“Don’t play semantics with me, Pandora.”
Her dark brows crash down. “Why are you really mad?” She waves a hand before I can respond. “Oh, I know you’d be pissed about that little indiscretion no matter what, but not this mad.”
Damn her for knowing me so well. I move into the living room and drop down next to her on the couch. “Adonis and I went to my office today.”
“Adonis,” she says slowly. “As in Aphrodite’s ex, Adonis? Someone’s a hypocrite.”
“That’s not what I’m talking about right now.”
She turns to face me on the couch, curling her legs in a position that makes me wince in sympathy for her joints. Her expression is all feigned calm, but her eyes are just as angry as I feel. “By all means, Theseus, let’s not talk about anything you don’t want to talk about right now.”
She’s pissed and she probably has a right to be, but I’m so fucking frustrated, I can barely focus. “I should have killed literally anyone else. I’m not cut out for this fucking job. All the people who answer to Hephaestus—”
“You’re Hephaestus now.”
I ignore that. “Every single one of them is a fucking snooty asshole who graduated with some obscure college degree that I’ve never heard of. Even with Adonis there, they all played innocent while they updated me on shit that doesn’t even make sense. They made me wait four hours for a bunch of reports I can’t even read. I know they’re written in English, but they might as well be Latin for all I understood it. And, those fuckers, they know it.” I am smart enough when it comes to the things I care about, but I never did well in school and college wasn’t even on the agenda.
Minos didn’t pick me because I can talk fancy and invent shit.
He picked me because he looked at me and saw a capacity for violence that he could hone into a weapon. I made my peace with that a long time ago. I don’t try to be anything but what I am.
Except now my very role in life is something that I’m not.
“Oh, Theseus.” Pandora squeezes my arm. “We’re basically invaders. Of course they weren’t going to welcome you with open arms.”
I know that. Of course I fucking know that. “It would have been better if I’d become Ares. Or even Athena or Artemis.” Unlike the Minotaur, I wouldn’t have fucked up that kill. At least then I’d be in charge of a realm that made sense to me.
“It will get better.”
I give her the look that deserves. It’s not going to get better. Minos hasn’t shared the details of his plans going forward, not now that I’ve served my role, but if he gets his way, I doubt Olympus will be standing by the end of this. That should be comforting. I am Hephaestus, but who knows what that will mean in six months, or a year. I should be happy.
Instead, it’s hard not to feel like I’ve sacrificed so much for shit-all.
“It won’t get better for them,” I snap.
“It doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to act this way.” Pandora shifts and tucks her hair behind her ears. “I know what we were taught, but maybe they aren’t as bad as all that. Really, they’re not that much different from us.”
She’s not wrong. The way the center city lives is still alien to me, but the same could be said of Aeaea before Minos took us in. The orphanage might as well have been on the moon for all our lives there had in common with how we lived in his house. But that doesn’t make a difference. “We came here for a purpose, and we’re going to see it through.”
“What if the purpose is wrong?”
I sink down next to her on the couch. We’ve had variations of this conversation for months. Longer, even. Pandora doesn’t feel beholden to Minos the way I do. She doesn’t understand that I will do anything to keep us from going back to a place without power, helpless to the whims of those around us.
Even if lately I feel more in common with that child in the orphanage than I do with the man I’ve worked so hard to become. “It’s not for us to question the purpose. Minos has a plan.” A plan that seems to require sacrifice from everyone but him.
He hasn’t felt the weight of all the strings that tie me in place.
Or if he does, he hides it significantly better than I do; another lesson he never bothered to teach me.
“You have more faith in him than I do.” Pandora shakes her head, her dark eyes holding things I’m not ready to see. “I wish you would listen to reason, Theseus.”
No matter the shared history we have, Pandora will never look at Minos the way I do. To her, he’s a vicious man who ruthlessly adopted two teenagers to enact a plan fifteen years in the making. And she’s not wrong. But what she fails to acknowledge is where we would’ve ended up if not for Minos. He saved us, whether she wants to admit it or not. Without him, we would’ve been turned out onto the streets the second we turned eighteen.
And the streets of Aeaea would’ve eaten us alive.
I don’t know if I could’ve protected Pandora, not at eighteen, not without the skills that I’ve learned since joining Minos. She doesn’t want to hear that, though. We’ve had this argument more times than I care to count. I know exactly how it will go from here. We will circle round and round until we’re yelling at each other, and then one of us will storm off, only to crawl back and apologize within an hour or two.
Instead I change the subject. “Where is everyone?”
Pandora shrugs as if it doesn’t actually matter. “Icarus is off doing…whatever it is that Icarus does when no one else is around. I saw Ariadne typing away at her computer awhile back, but that’s all she seems to do these days.”
“I wasn’t asking about them.”
She gives me a look filled with censure. “You never ask about them.”
Why would I? They’re soft, coddled creatures. Even with Minos as their father, they haven’t acquired the hard edge that Pandora and I were born with. And the Minotaur? Well, he’s another story altogether. But Ariadne and Icarus have been kept safe and sheltered, and it’s spoiled them to the reality of the world. Ariadne spends all her time online, indulging in the privilege of a digital life and ignoring the blood staining the hands around her.
Icarus doesn’t hide, but his relationship with Minos is complicated. Instead of keeping his head down and obeying, he flounces and makes passive-aggressive comments, dramatic to the bitter end.
“If you’d just—”