“I still love you, Victor,” I tell him, not caring that Apollo has a knife against my throat; he doesn’t cover my mouth with his hand this time. “No matter what you’ve done, or what you will do, I’ll always love you.” The words are as true as they ever were, but this time they taste strange and final in my mouth.
But I need Victor to understand that I understand him. I need Victor to know that I’m more like him than he realizes, and that I’ve almost always been…
“Sarai, baby,” my mother whispered to me; her body odor, mixed with strong perfume and cigarettes, choked me as she laid next to me on the soiled bed. “You forgive me, don’t you? I never meant for any of this to happen. I just…wasn’t thinking straight.” I saw the whites of her eyes briefly in the darkness as the heroin began to swim through her bloodstream. She smiled euphorically as if she’d touched the Face of God. I set the needle down on the tray at the foot of the bed.
“It’s OK, Mom,” I whispered back, and loosened the tourniquet from her wiry arm. “I forgive you…”
Victor looks at me, but he doesn’t respond. Not verbally, anyway. His eyes tell a different story. Unfortunately, I have no idea what it is.
Artemis’s laughter rings in my ears.
“After all this,” she says to me from inside the cell, “you still have love for this…barbarian?”
“Yes,” I answer without hesitation.
She shakes her head. “Such a dumb, love-struck girl.”
“You loved him,” I counter. “You knew he killed Marina, and you knew, in a roundabout way, why, yet you still loved him.” I round my chin, defying the cold blade pressed to my throat. “And you still love him now. He slit your throat and left you for dead, and he admitted that he still would’ve killed you if you were carrying his baby, yet you’re still in love with him—dumb and love-struck doesn’t even begin to explain you.”
Artemis scowls, and Apollo wrenches my head backward vigorously in reaction to it.
She steps away from Victor and approaches the cage exit; the guards shuffle backward carefully to make way for her. I watch Victor in my peripheral vision, and see him start to follow, but he stops when Apollo’s hand makes a threatening movement against me.
Artemis exits the cage without incident, and stands in the opened doorway. She motions a hand toward us. “Bring her now,” she orders, and I’m violently extracted from the chair and brought to my feet; all the way to the cell, Apollo’s knife blade is kissing my jugular. Artemis moves out of the way of the door, and then I’m kissing the stone floor when Apollo shoves me through the opening.
Victor’s hands are behind me before I can even raise my head, and he’s lifting me into his arms. “I am so sorry, love,” he says, and presses his lips to the top of my head; his arms encircle me.
“I remember when he used to call me that,” Artemis says, whimsically. She closes the cage, twists the key in the lock afterward, and then pockets it.
She walks around in front of us, then she reaches out her hand to her brother. Already knowing what she wants, Apollo places the knife he had been holding to my throat, into her palm, her long, slender fingers collapsing around it. Stepping up closer, she leans over and slips the knife through the bars, setting it on the floor inside the cell.
“If it looks familiar,” she says to Victor, “that’s because it is.”
Straightening her back, she turns and walks away, taking her twin brother with her.
“I’ll give you something that we never had,” Artemis says, stops, and turns to see us once more. “A moment alone together before you kill her.”
My heart stops.
“I will not kill her,” Victor says calmly…uncertainly?
The blood in my veins turns to ice; his arms tighten around me.
Looking back, Artemis smiles and says with eerie confidence, “Yes you will. I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.”
She and Apollo exit the room, leaving us with the armed guards.
Trying to ignore the feeling in my gut, I turn to Victor quickly, my wrists still bound behind my back. “We have to get out of here,” I say, frantic. “Cut me loose.” I turn around, putting my back to him, and my wrists into his view. “Hurry, Victor!” I don’t care that the guards are watching. I don’t give two fucks that they’ll surely stop us when we manage to use the knife to pick the lock of the cell door. I don’t care! We have to do something—
“No.” Victor’s voice stuns me, the stillness of it, the irrevocable finality of the word.
I turn again to face him, my eyes wide, my mouth parted.
“W-What do you mean?” I ask. But I already know; still I don’t want to believe it.
“I mean no, Izabel.” He looks right at me, and the tranquil, yet intense look in his gaze frightens me. “This time it is over. There is no getting out of this one—it is over.”
I start to throw my hands up in the air until I realize that I can’t, and that pisses me off even more.
“So you’re just giving up?” I can’t even believe I’m saying this. “You’re just going to accept this and give up? What the hell is wrong with you?” I push myself into his space, glaring at him.
He remains as calm as ever. And I want to slap him for it.
“Victor—”