Sirens wailed and drew closer; ultimately drawing Brant and Osiris from their shock-induced states. Police? Who called the police?
“We have to go, Victor,” Brant insisted.
He walked toward me quickly, drew a knife from his pocket and cut me free from my bonds—I was so dazed myself that I never noticed when Artemis fell from my lap and hit the floor. And I could not recall later—because I thought about that night many nights after—if I ever looked back at her as Brant dragged me from the room and out of the house, still naked.
I sped away in my car, following Brant down the back roads, and almost crashed into a tree because all I could look at, the only thing that existed in my world at that moment, was Artemis’s blood on my hands, both literally and symbolically. I was white-knuckling the steering wheel; her blood covered the tops of my fingers, and every crevice in my mind. It was all that I could see, her blood.
Present day…
“And Osiris?” Apollo asks.
“I never heard from him again,” I answer, still somewhat lost in my thoughts. “It is not customary to keep contact with a client after a job has been fulfilled.”
Apollo is standing by my cell now; I am sitting on the floor.
“That’s not what I meant,” he says.
I erase the images completely from my mind, and I look up at him through the bars.
“How did you feel about Osiris,” he clarifies, “after he made you kill the woman you loved?”
“He did not make me do anything,” I answer without flinching.
“So then you wanted to kill my sister?” He cocks his head to one side. “Is that what you’re saying, Victor? Because if that’s true”—he shakes his head, clenches his fists—“if that’s true then we have a very different problem, you and I.” His solid gaze seethes with anger.
“There is nothing more to tell,” I say, and look down at the stones around my bare feet.
An eerie silence chokes the room all around us.
Then Apollo says, “Oh, but there is, Faust,” and a proud grin deepens in his face. “There is so much more to tell. Only…”—he glances behind him toward the exit, then looks back at me—“…you won’t be the one telling it.”
I hear voices funneling down the hallway just beyond the door; shadows move against the floor beneath it. I am afraid; absolute fear grips my chest. What has become of Izabel? All that I can think of is Hestia’s threat years ago, and I try to mentally prepare myself to see Izabel, wheeled into the room because she can no longer walk; bloodied by the blade of Hestia’s knife; skinned alive and put on display. For me. For long-overdue revenge.
Dull light from the hallway spills in as the door opens. I cannot breathe; my heart is beating so fast I feel it in my head, hear it pounding against my eardrums. Slowly I rise into a stand, and I do not tear my eyes away from the figures moving through the darkest shadows; my hands are on the bars of my cage again, gripping, squeezing, pulling; all of the moisture has evaporated from my mouth.
And then I see her, Izabel, alive and seemingly unharmed, and I let my breath out in one deep sigh of relief; my legs feel weak beneath me, and for a moment I feel that hope is not lost, after all.
But then I see another face—Artemis Stone.
And what strength I had left in my legs, betrays me.
Izabel
I’ve never seen a look like that on Victor’s face before. He appears…traumatized; that calm, impassive disposition he always carries, replaced by something more…fragile.
And he’s not even looking at me.
“Artemis…” Victor says in a sort of gasp.
I gasp too, stunned, and I turn my head to see the woman behind me, the same woman who dressed me and fixed my hair and did my makeup. The same woman who told me that she was someone else. And then, as if a dam has been opened, the answers to everything rushes into my head like a raging river. Ah, so that’s what that traumatized look is on Victor’s face. Now I know exactly how I must appear to him.
I feel a hand on the center of my back, and my body is pushed forward. With my wrists tied behind me, I fall, skinning my knees on the floor; my shoulder hits next, and then my face. Oomph! A sharp stab darts through my head and spreads throughout my jaw, neck, and back, and my only consolation is knowing it was from the fall, and not the cattle prod this time. I don’t know how much more of the electric shock my heart can take.
Artemis walks past me as if I’m not even here, and steps closer to Victor and the cage.
I’m lifted from the floor by unseen hands, and am shoved onto the chair I sat on before I was whisked away to this crazy bitch’s beauty salon. “Don’t move,” I hear Apollo say behind me.
Suddenly I feel the pull of Victor’s gaze; he isn’t looking at me, but I feel like he wants to—or that he’s trying not to.