Stone Heart (Dark Olympus 2.50)

Her phone dings. “Oh, thank you. You’re the best.” She lowers her voice. “Do you want to see what I’m wearing right now? Or, rather, what I’m not?” A beat. “Oh.” She sounds almost normal. “Well, have a good night.”

The mistress hangs up the phone. “Fuck.” Gone is the sugary sweet tone and the playful words. Something slams in the kitchen. “That bastard. That fucking bastard.”

I tense. Surely she doesn’t know. How could she? She must just think he’s getting tired of her. No one in their right mind would take a minor rejection as a sign that their lover intends to kill them.

She rustles around the kitchen, but it’s impossible to guess what she’s doing. There is a clink of bottle against glass, and I have to swallow down a relieved exhale. I doubt she’ll make it through the rest of the bottle before the pills kick in, but that’s fine. She’ll go to sleep and never wake up again. It will be peaceful.

Cold comfort, that. A peaceful death is still a life snuffed out too soon.

She curses again and moves back down the hallway toward what must be her bedroom. A few minutes later, soft musical sounds slink down the hall to my ears. The smart thing to do is to wait here for a reasonable amount of time and then strike, but curiosity sinks its teeth into me and won’t let go. I know better than letting myself humanize her, but I can’t seem to help it.

What is that sound? I don’t know instruments any more than I know wine. It shouldn’t matter. She could have a whole band in her bedroom and it wouldn’t make a difference, but I suddenly need to know.

I ease out of my hiding place and pad into the kitchen to check the bottle. Half of what was in it is gone. That’s good enough, assuming she drinks it all.

Again, I tell myself to wait here.

Again, I ignore my own instincts, drawn closer by the soft music that seems to wrap around my head and leave my thoughts foggy.

The hallway is as nice as the rest of the place, though I note a distinct lack of photos. Instead, she has surprisingly moody art pieces. Not that I know much about art, but when I pause in front of one, it makes my chest feel funny. It feels…lonely.

Overactive imagination.

I shake my head and continue to where the bedroom door has been left partially open, allowing a sliver of warm, golden light to spill down the hall. I avoid it, angling myself to get a look in the room. There’s no reason to do it. Honestly, it’s better if I don’t see her, but that feels like doing her a disservice.

Athena would shake her head if she knew the direction of my thoughts. She compartmentalizes better than anyone I’ve ever met, and that’s the first lesson she strives to teach her people when she takes them on. ‘One does not last long as a member of Olympus’s special forces without getting one’s hands dirty.’

I catch sight of the mistress sitting next to a giant harp, her fingers plucking at the strings and creating that haunting music that feels like a hand wrapped around my heart. My thoughts tumble over each other like a train derailing the tracks.

She’s beautiful.

Oh, I had known she must be, but she’s absolutely devastating. She’s got long dark curly hair and pale skin and curves. The kind of decadent body that isn’t fashionable right now, but makes my palms sweat. I can only see her profile from here, can only trace the line of her strong nose with my sight, attention snagging on full lips that are currently pulled down in a frown.

She’s also currently wearing a sheer robe and nothing else.

She half turns toward the door, her fingers still moving and gaze distant, and I get a look at her full breasts peaked with rosy pink nipples and her soft round stomach before I jerk my eyes to the floor. Bad enough that I’m here to—Well. I shouldn’t be ogling her like this. It’s wrong.

The thought almost makes me laugh in a horrible kind of way. Wrong is such a strange concept in this situation.

The music trails off slowly and she presses her forehead to the curve of the harp. “I am so fucked.” She shoves to her feet and paces back and forth, appearing and disappearing from the sliver of the room revealed by the open door.

The full wine glass is in her hand.

The urge to stride in there, to knock it out of her grasp, to tell her to run from this place and never look back, nearly overwhelms me. Only cold, hard reality keeps my feet planted. There’s nowhere to run to. The boundary around Olympus can only be passed through by a select few, and they’re choosy about who they allow to leave the city boundaries. The mistress of Odysseus, a woman marked for death by both Athena and Zeus? Poseidon and his people would turn her over without hesitation.