AURORA
“Let me out!” I screamed, grasping on the thick divine chains bound to my neck. “Nyx!”
Nyx walked down the stone palace steps to the dungeon filled with rotting corpses, rats, and an overwhelming stench of blood. Hella stood at the edge of my cell, one hand on her hip and her white eyes fixed on Nyx.
“Will Nyx do it?” she asked Erebus, Nyx’s brother.
Erebus pushed Nyx toward my cell. “If she wants me to let her roam free one day.”
When Nyx reached my cell doors, my heart stopped beating. I sat in the cell with my energy quickly depleting and my eyes desperate to close. I didn’t know how long I had been here. Days, weeks maybe.
All I knew was that I wouldn’t stop struggling until I got to see Ares again.
“Nyx! Let me out, please!” I shouted. “They’re going to torture me down here.”
She was my only hope, but I knew how this would end from Helios’s letter.
Erebus pushed Nyx into the cell with me and shut the door behind her. “Tear her to pieces. I want your lover to hurt. I want him to hate you. I want him to try to come down here and kill you, so you can kill his ass because you’re mine, Nyx.”
“No, Nyx! Please, don’t listen to him,” I pleaded with her, tears streaming down my face. “You can’t kill immortals. You can’t …” I whispered, but I knew differently. “Just let me go. Please, let me go.”
Hella laughed right in my face. “Darling, you shouldn’t have touched Ares, a man who wasn’t yours. You are going to get everything you deserve.” Hella turned to Nyx. “Make it hurt oh-so good.”
“Ares has never been yours!” I screamed and then turned to Nyx. “You can try to kill me, Nyx … but you won’t be able to. No god has died—ever.”
“Not true,” Erebus said, lips curled into a smirk. “Nyx killed one just last year. She’s the only goddess able to tear another divine to pieces. All those rumors those earthly gods have been whispering about are true. You should’ve believed them.”
Nyx turned to me, her nails lengthening into talons.
“It’s not true, Nyx,” I begged. “I know you. You’re not bad. You’re good …”
“It’s true,” Nyx said.
She stepped toward me and mouthed the words, This is for Helios. He won’t leave earth because you live there. He’s obsessed with you, and I want him for myself.
“Please, don’t do this,” I begged. “Please. I need to see Ares again.”
I needed to see him. One last time.
Before I could react, she swiped her talons across my throat and killed me.
I shot up in the bed, gasping for air and clasping my hand over my neck. “Ares!”
Unlike my nightmare, blood wasn’t pouring from my throat, yet I still held my hand tightly against the flesh, afraid that it would if I didn’t. My heart thrashed against my rib cage, worries racing through my mind.
That was what had happened.
Hella had wanted to have Ares for herself, Nyx had wanted Helios for herself, and both of those men had wanted to be with me for some ungodly reason. I completely understood Ares’s reasoning for wanting to spend eternity with me, but Helios?
How did he fit in?
“Ares!” I shouted again, slowly peeling my hand from my throat.
When the bedroom door slammed open, Ares bolted into the room from the connected bathroom with his eyes opened wide and his hair ruffled from tossing and turning all night in bed. He scooped me up into his strong arms and held me to his taut chest.
“What’s wrong, Kitten?”
Tears streamed down my face, and I grasped him tightly. “You’re here.”
“Of course I’m here. What’s wrong?”
“I just had a nightmare,” I whispered, feeling so weak.
Ares had nightmares every night, but he didn’t wake up with tears pouring down his face.
“About what?” he asked, sitting and leaning against the headboard.
“Dawn’s death,” I whispered. “It felt like I was her, and she was me. It felt so real …”
Suddenly, another bedroom door slammed closed in the house. I jumped in Ares’s arms, my heart pounding even harder, and scurried out of his arms, not wanting to detail my nightmare further and mention Helios.
“That sounded like Charolette,” I said, tugging him to the kitchen and hoping he wouldn’t pry. It was self-centered and hypocritical because I always wanted him to talk to me about what he was going through, but I just didn’t want to make anything worse with him.
Strands of silver hair in his face, Marcel sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal in front of him and a talk to me and I’ll kill you expression on his chiseled face. I slid onto the chair next to him, poured myself a bowl of cereal, and listened to Mr. Barrett and Charolette mumble about something in Charolette’s room.
Ares snatched the cereal box from me and poured himself a big bowl until there was none left. “What happened?” he asked Marcel.
Marcel growled at him, refusing to make eye contact, and stuffed a spoonful of cereal between his lips. Ares sat across from me and didn’t push the matter. Dark circles lay under his dulling eyes, and I wouldn’t be surprised if I looked even worse.
I had been awake all night, worrying about his nightmares, and then I’d fucking had one.
After we sat in silence for a few more moments, hearing nothing but incoherent chatter from the other room and the birds chirping outside the window, Mr. Barrett walked into the kitchen with glossy, bloodshot eyes. He gave me a weak smile and sat in the only empty chair, slumping down and thrusting his head into his hands, defeated.
Charolette walked into the kitchen and rubbed her hands together. “I … I have to tell you and Aurora something, Ares.”
Ares glanced over at her with his lips pressed together. “What?”
“I’m officially stopping my chemo treatments and starting hospice early next week.”
My heart dropped, and tears welled up in my eyes. I had known that this was coming; she’d warned me yesterday. But it still hurt worse than Nyx’s talons had in my neck during that horrid dream last night.
Without finishing his cereal, Marcel stormed out of the room, shaking his head from side to side. Ares sat across from me, completely still, with dead eyes, and something between a grimace and a frown on his lips.
The words had broken him.
Charolette stared at him with watery eyes. “I’m sorry. I just—”
Before she could finish her sentence, Ares pushed his bowl forward and walked out of the room, slammed the front door closed, and disappeared somewhere in the woods. Charolette stared at the door, where both the guys she loved had walked right out to deal with their pain and anger because they were incapable of showing their emotions.
“I didn’t want this,” Charolette said between sniffles, burying her face into her hands and crying. “I don’t want them to hate me for … for not wanting to suffer anymore. I can’t live like this. Can’t they see that?”
Mr. Barrett gently rubbed her shoulder and grimaced at me with so much pain in his eyes. First his mate had died, then Mars, and now, his daughter would pass on to the afterlife too soon. And when she did, Ares would go off the rails.
“Go,” I whispered to him. “I want to talk to Charolette.”
After giving me a thankful half-smile, he walked out the front door.
I gathered Charolette in my arms and pulled her closer to me. “They’re sad and in pain. They don’t hate you for this decision. They don’t think less of you for wanting to stop treatments. It might take them a bit to come around to the idea of hospice, but … they will. They will want you to have a happy rest of your life. You deserve it.”
She sucked her bottom lip into her mouth. “I … I’m afraid that they’ll both go crazy, hurt so much that something is going to happen, and they won’t think with their brains during this war because of my decisions.”
I pushed some blonde hair out of her face. “I’ll talk to them.”
Moments passed. Tears still ran down her face. She clutched onto me. “I love Marcel so much … I love him so freaking much. Out of everyone here, I don’t want him to hate me for it the most. He’s my mate, Aurora, the only man who loves every part of me.”
“He doesn’t hate you,” I whispered, walking with her to her and Marcel’s bedroom and sitting on her bed with her. Sunlight flooded into the room through the orange curtains. “He loves you too. I can see it on his face every time he looks at you.”
After wiping some tears from her cheeks with the back of her hand, she crawled back into her bed and pulled the blankets over her eyes, shielding herself from the sun and from all this pain. “Please go talk to him. I’ve tried all night.”
Deciding that she had completely locked out the world, I shut her bedroom door behind me and walked down to the front door, determined to chat with Marcel and Ares about this. They were hurting, but so was she. And Charolette was the one going through all this pain every day. She had the right to be upset.
When I opened the front door, Marcel stood on the porch with his arms crossed over his chest and silver strands of hair blowing into his face, staring out into the dense forest. As soon as I stepped out, the angry, annoyed asshole of a man wrapped his arms around me tightly, taking me by surprise.
“I don’t want it to be true,” he whispered, his head buried into the crook of my neck.
My eyes widened, and I hesitantly wrapped my arms around him to hug him. This wasn’t the Marcel I knew … this was the broken Marcel, the loving Marcel, the Marcel who would do anything for the woman he loved.
It was the Marcel who would agree to Hella’s terms.
“I might have a solution,” I said, gently patting his back. “But you can’t tell anyone about it, especially not Charolette because she would never agree to it.”
Marcel tensed and pulled back. “What is it?”
“I don’t know if it would work for sure, but Medusa mentioned that Hella had traded lives before. Someone came to her a long time ago, asking to give his life to spend in the underworld for the person he loved to be healthy for a few more years. Hella accepted his request.” I paused. “I know I’m asking for a lot, but …”
“But it could work,” Marcel finished. His chin quivered, but he nodded as if he didn’t even have to think about giving his life for hers. “If it could work, I’ll try it. Anything to keep her happy, healthy, and alive even if that means that I won’t be there with her, and as long as Charolette never finds out about it. She would hate me.”
“Please, think about it before you agree,” I said, glancing around the forest to make sure nobody was listening in on our conversation. “We need you for this war, but if we can have you under Hella’s rule, you might be able to get insider information for us … or she might try to turn you to the wrong side. We need to be careful.”