Lore’s body tightened to the point of pain.
“It doesn’t matter. He was the one who gave the order,” Lore said. “He was the head of his bloodline, and then became their god. They are all responsible, every last man, woman, and child who kneels before him, but only he had the power to put it all into motion.”
And his bloodline had obeyed his command, murdering her parents and two little sisters so savagely that it had taken the Kadmides weeks to clean the apartment enough to hide the evidence. In the end, they’d still had to purify it with flames. According to the New York City Police Department, the family had set the fire themselves after a rent dispute and left town, never to be heard from again.
No one in the House of Kadmos had ever claimed responsibility for the murders, or ever would. The hunters had taken a blood oath centuries ago to never intentionally kill a hunter of another bloodline between the cycles of the Agon. It had been the only way to ensure peace between them.
Her family had been murdered the morning after the Agon’s completion, when that oath should have protected them. The Kadmides had broken a sacred vow, but no other house was powerful enough to challenge them, and no gods had ever listened to her prayers.
“Why did you . . . not avenge them?” Athena panted. “These many years . . . you have done nothing. . . . You . . . do not recognize your . . . moira. . . . You never sought . . . poiné . . . only fell . . . to . . . the worst aidos. . . .”
Lore sank to the floor, her legs folding beneath her. She braced her hands beside them, fighting the familiar pressure expanding in her chest. Her moira—her lot in life, her destiny.
“Those words mean nothing to me now,” she said hoarsely. But hearing them felt like scars being cut open.
Poiné. Vengeance.
Aidos. Shame.
A life without the excellence of areté and the earned possessions of timé. Of never attaining kleos.
“I was just a little girl,” Lore said, barely hearing her own words. “They would have killed me, too. I wasn’t strong enough to fight them all. And I knew I could never get to him, not after he ascended.”
In the years since, she’d killed to keep from being killed. She traveled by foot, by boat, by air, only to arrive back at the city that had raised her. She’d escaped the labyrinth of oaths that had been designed to trap her until the day came when the Agon called for her to sacrifice her last heartbeat.
But Lore had done nothing to avenge her family.
Athena’s lip curled. “Excuses . . . These lies you tell yourself . . . You were never . . . a mere . . . little girl. I heard . . . what the others whispered about you . . . that you were the best of your generation . . . that it was a shame . . . you had been born to a different bloodline. . . .”
“You’re lying,” Lore whispered, unable to stop the involuntary shiver that moved through her. Years ago, those words would have meant everything to her—she’d craved recognition from the very people who had refused to give it to her.
“The Spartan . . . they called you,” Athena breathed. “Little Gorgon . . . I searched for you . . . chose you . . . knowing that skill . . . knowing that you are no longer one of the hunters. . . . But you have . . . never been weak . . . never powerless. . . . So I ask . . . why did you do nothing . . . to avenge your family?”
Lore drew her arms close to her chest, throwing out Gil’s words like a shield. But there was no protection against the truth. “It’s not— You wouldn’t understand. The only real thing in this world is what you can do for others. How you can take care of them.”
The goddess snorted with derision.
“All you know,” Lore continued, hating the thickness in her voice, “all you have ever cared about is power. You don’t know how to want anything else, and because of it, you won’t believe me when I tell you that I don’t want to claim his power, either. I don’t want any part of this sick game.”
“Then what is it . . . that you desire?” Athena asked.
The words burst from Lore, wild and pained. “To be free.”
“No,” Athena said, her voice labored. “That is not it. What do you . . . deny yourself?”
A vision bloomed in her mind, blazing and pure, but Lore shook her head.
“Lie to . . . yourself . . . but not to me,” Athena said. “You know . . . you shall never be . . . free while the shades of your family . . . suffer and wander. . . . Never at rest while he lives.”
Lore pressed her fists to her eyes, trying to find the words to protest.
“You deny your heritage. . . . You deny honor. . . . You deny your ancestors, and your gods. . . . But this, you cannot deny,” Athena said. “This, you know to be true. Tell me . . . what you desire.”
The truth finally escaped its cage. “I want to kill him.”
Lore had denied it for years—forced the truth down deep inside her. All in the name of being good, of deserving the new life she’d been given. She wasn’t ashamed of how badly she wanted it, or how often she dreamed of his death, but of how ungrateful it made her feel for the second chance working for Gil had given her.
“But I can’t,” Lore continued, her throat aching. “Even if I could get close enough to try, killing Aristos would mean taking his power. I don’t want to be a god. I just want to live. I want to know my family is . . . at peace.”
“Then I will kill him for you.”
Lore looked down at the goddess in disbelief.
“I will kill the false Ares in your name,” Athena said, struggling for breath. “If you swear . . . you will aid me . . . if you vow . . . to bind your fate to mine until . . . this hunt ends . . . at sunrise . . . on the eighth day.”
Lore’s heart began to race again, galloping in her chest.
This was something. It wouldn’t just destroy Aristos Kadmou, either. A god could not take another god’s power. Athena would be effectively removing Ares’s dangerous power from the Agon—and the mortal world—entirely.
“Bind your fate to mine,” the goddess said again, offering her bloodied hand. “Your heart . . . it aches for it. . . .”
Gil’s face, his usual toothy grin, drifted through Lore’s mind.
I’m sorry, she thought, agonized.
Then she nodded.
Athena’s teeth were stained with blood as she bared them. “You know what it means, do you not? What the oath entails?”
“I do.”
Her own many times great-grandfather had been a cautionary tale, having foolishly bound his fate to the original Dionysus. The old god had needed protection from the descendants of Kadmos. Though he himself had been born into that bloodline through his mortal mother, Dionysus had cursed his kin—and Kadmos himself—when they refused to believe he had been fathered by Zeus.
The instant the old god died, cornered and slaughtered like a boar, Lore’s ancestor’s heart had stopped dead in his chest.
The strongest of his generation, gone in the time it took to blink, remembered forever by his kin as a blade traitor—and, as her own father believed, the true cause of the centuries-old animosity between the Houses of Perseus and Kadmos.
Lore would be agreeing to protect Athena with her life, to shelter her, and to bank on the hope that the goddess didn’t die from this wound or any other. It was a risk she would have to take. An oath was, after all, a curse you placed on yourself—she would be damned if she failed, and damned if she succeeded. But she would never have an opportunity like this again.