Maybe there should have been some more discussion.
Poseidon laughs when he’s at sea. He laughs and he laughs and he laughs, like the crazy motherfucker that he is. I’m certain it won’t extend to the land. I know it.
“I didn’t think I’d find you out here.” Persephone comes out on the balcony, one of my coats around her shoulders. Good girl. She’s phrased it so carefully. Three nights ago she learned an important lesson about pity and scolding. Sadly, I don’t think she learned it well enough. She gets too much pleasure out of pain. “The sun is still up.” Conor nudges my leg like he agrees. The two of them are apparently co-conspirators now.
“It’s setting.” I curl a hand around her shoulders and push it beneath the coat, finding her nipples already peaked. What has this filthy thing been thinking about? She was probably wondering just how much she could ask me without earning herself another punishment. And then, because all this business with Zeus has made her a hundred times more desperate for me and a hundred times more ashamed about it, she thought about how she could tempt me to come inside and shut the door on the world with her. I pinch one of her nipples, hard, and she makes a little noise at the back of her throat that’s essentially a call for me to shut down the entire mountain and spend the rest of my life in bed with her. “You’ve been so good, Persephone. Don’t fuck it up.”
She presses herself against me at the warning, which—fuck. I’m not even going to be able to watch Poseidon’s ship come in if she keeps this up.
The ship is still a shadow out on the sea, getting closer with every second. Persephone shades her eyes to look for it. “He’s bringing everything, right?”
“Fresh produce. Meat. Medicine. Everything.”
I can feel her uncertainty in the way she stands. “That’s a good thing. Isn’t it?”
“You don’t know my brother.”
“I didn’t know you had another brother,” she says, shivering. The wind off the sea is a cutting cold. “But I know you.”
“Knowing me doesn’t tell you anything about him.” I don’t want it to tell her anything about Poseidon. I hate him as much as I’ve ever hated Zeus and Demeter. Maybe more. He’s the wild card, the literal fucking pirate with too much money and not enough to lose. Zeus calculates the odds. Poseidon takes being outnumbered as a delightful challenge. “I don’t want him on the mountain. I only want what he’s bringing.”
It’s for this reason that the dock—of course I own a fucking dock, I’m not stupid enough to cut myself off completely from the water—is built with plenty of space between it and the mountain. It’ll be a long, frigid walk before Poseidon can get inside.
I keep my face angled away from the sun as much as I can, but it’s too much without Demeter’s pills. Still. I want to see this. I want to know exactly when that ship makes landfall, which it does about ten minutes later. It is not, as I suspected, an oil tanker. He’s moved to a smaller ship. It’s still fucking enormous, probably some ex-military castoff. Or, knowing Poseidon, not even a castoff. He either stole it or he paid for it on some illicit seafaring black market.
I should feel better when it pulls in at the dock and stops. It means we’ll have food. It means my workers won’t starve. But it also means that Poseidon will be here. Those are part of the terms. He can stay while we’re under our agreement.
And there are things I haven’t told Persephone.
“Let’s go in.” Her teeth chatter now, loud enough to hear. “I’m freezing.”
The moment slips away and I don’t get it back.
It’s almost an hour later when Poseidon meets us in what’s meant to look like a den on the main floor of the mountain. It’s nowhere near my private rooms, it just looks like it is. While I’m standing here with Persephone, waiting to play host, Oliver’s got people in every corridor, making sure nobody from Poseidon’s ship gets any brilliant ideas. Conor sticks tight to my feet, standing so close I had to move him off my shoes several minutes ago. I can’t think of another time something of this scale happened on the mountain while Conor was with me. I don’t think it ever has. It’s a tectonic shift, something on the scale of the earth’s layers, and I can tell he feels uneasy about it. Don’t we fucking all. I test out my knee and the bruise at my ribs out of a new habit. I fucking hate new habits. I should be able to discard them soon enough. But I won’t ever be able to discard Persephone, or this simmering tension with Zeus. That will have to be ended through violence or a contract of some kind to replace the old one.
But before we can do any of that, we have to stop bodies from piling up in my corridors from a lack of food. The people in the mines told Persephone they were fine, they can make it weeks and weeks on what they have, but fights will break out before then, and we’ll lose more people that way.
I hear him coming before he reaches the door. Persephone does, too. “I think I should go upstairs,” she whispers.
“You can’t provoke me now.” I put my hands in my pockets and force myself into an easy stance. “You’ll greet our guest with me.”
“But what if he thinks—”
She never finishes the question because Poseidon bursts in with a fist to the door, hitting it with enough force to splinter the wood. It holds, because I built this place, but any other door would be off its hinges.
Compared to Zeus, Poseidon is a giant. He’s all muscle and suit and glittering eyes. Oliver comes in behind him and a knot of tension in my gut releases. Poseidon looks me up and down, his eyes narrowing when he looks at Persephone. “I brought all that for you, and you didn’t bring me any women?”
“If you want women, you should ask Zeus.”
Poseidon rolls his eyes. “Can’t very well do that. It wouldn’t be honorable.”
“Nothing you’ve ever done has been honorable.”
He laughs, but I can’t relax at all and I don’t fucking want to. Zeus isn’t the only one I fought with in that house. Poseidon is slower, but he’s also bigger, and sometimes he gets a blank look on his face that better translates to run. Now he looks mildly suspicious, eyes traveling slowly over everything in the room. There’s nothing particularly threatening here. A collection of furniture made to look like wood but reinforced with steel so they’re harder to break. A bar, tucked into one end of the room, fully stocked. I had the glass bottles replaced with some that are made to shatter into dull edges. If Persephone knew all that, she would ask me why I would take such measures in a den that we barely use. Persephone never met my father.
Poseidon considers all this. There’s no way for him to know about anything I’ve done here, but perhaps he senses it. In his younger days he would have torn a place like this apart just to test the theory.
I wait it out.
That is a skill learned in my father’s house, though it was only successful part of the time. One thing I will never admit out loud—not to anyone—is that the man has caught me in a permanent trap, even after we sent him to the underworld. He’s made us all inadequate in one way or another. I don’t want to see Zeus or Demeter or Poseidon. I’d prefer to forget their faces and everything that came with it. Such twisted games we play. I idly wonder if it bothers them to see me. Demeter, definitely, though she’s managed to keep her distance all this time. She has, after all, broken our contract. And she knows what I do to people who break contracts.