Feeling flooded her body again. Lore gasped at the sensation, hearing the hunters around her shouting and struggling upright as his influence lifted.

“I offer you kleos,” Wrath said. “Bend your knee to me, young god. Use your power at my command, and the House of Achilles will not be destroyed. Refuse, and all will die beneath my blade, beginning with you.”

“Idle threats,” Philip hissed, staggering to his feet. “We will match you blow for blow.”

“Will you let the mortal speak for you, young god?” Wrath demanded. “I offer all those willing a place in the world that will come, the one we will create together—a place of power and wealth beyond imagining. The Agon will end, but all those who serve me will be rewarded.”

Lore struggled up from the ground, supporting herself with one of the overturned tables.

Castor gripped the back of the golden throne, his eyes shut again. He forced them open. “The Achillides serve no one.”

“Is that your answer?” Wrath said. “So be it.”

“Shut them off!” Philip shouted. He picked up one of the firepots and threw it at the nearest mirror, smashing it. “Cut the power!”

“Your new god resents you,” Wrath continued, speaking to the hunters now. “He is weak, the weakest of the gods. Unable to manifest a physical form. Unable to tap the depths of his power. I will care for you, and serve you as you serve me. I will revel in your honor, I will share my power and strength. Only I can protect you. Only I can set you free.”

“The House of Achilles will not yield,” Philip said. “You are nothing more than a coward, hiding behind screens. You’ll protect them? You won’t even show the courtesy of returning our dead.”

The hunters stomped their feet in agreement, letting out a ferocious roar of approval.

The screens flickered again, the pulsating crimson replaced with something more horrifying.

A line of severed heads had been left in a trash-strewn gutter, their eyes plucked out and replaced with silver coins. Their jaws had been unhinged, their mouths gaping open in a mockery of the Achillides’ masks.

Philip and several others smashed the remaining mirrors, but it was already too late.

“Come and claim them,” Wrath said, his voice breaking up as the connection was severed. “You will join them soon enough.”

LORE TOOK ADVANTAGE OF the chaos in the aftermath of Wrath’s declaration of war to make her quick escape.

She wove through clusters of Achillides, heading straight for the stairs. She would only have a narrow window of time to slip out before their emergency security measures made that impossible. She had to get back to Athena. She had to find her some other help, from some other place, and tell her what happened.

But Castor . . .

Lore cast a fleeting glance back at the new god, unsurprised to find him surrounded by armed hunters. He looked bone-white as one of them issued low orders and gestured toward the other side of the room.

He could heal her, Lore thought. The conversation earlier had confirmed that he’d inherited that power from Apollo. It would be an easy solution to her most pressing problem.

No. She couldn’t take him with her. Lore knew that, but it didn’t ease the regret that gripped her. Athena would never allow her brother’s killer to live, and there’d be no way to smuggle the new god out of Thetis House without the Achillides coming after them and potentially tracking them back to her home. She couldn’t put any of them—Miles, Castor, or Athena—in more danger than they already were.

Castor would be safer here, with his bloodline. Even with Philip, and even after Wrath’s declaration of war. While Wrath’s message had been dangerous because of the way it portrayed Castor as weak to the Achillides, it had, in a way, also saved the new Apollo. The hunters could always be counted on for their monstrous pride, and none more so than the Achillides. They would never willingly give up their new god, and they would die before subjecting themselves to an outsider’s rule.

Lore stole one last look around, her mind racing.

Don’t let me down, assholes, she thought. Don’t let him die.

Van broke away from where he’d been speaking to Acantha and made for Castor, crossing the room in a few long strides. He passed within inches of Lore, close enough for her to smell the orange and sandalwood of his cologne, and she barely resisted grabbing him.

It had been such a long time since she’d last seen him. They’d been children then, running wild through the city. Where Castor had always been an open book, happy to be read and understood, Van was the journal that remained locked and tucked beneath the mattress, except for the moments he blamed Lore for getting Castor into trouble or leading him into doing something Van deemed dangerous—which, to Van, had been almost everything fun.

And the truth was, Lore’s trust was a rare volume—rarely lent, and never freely. Van’s loyalty to his bloodline would always surpass that of a sort-of-friendship, and Lore would have to find a way out of Thetis House herself, the way she always did.

So up she went, retracing the same path she’d taken down, feeling more unsettled with each passing moment. An unbearable heaviness anchored in the pit of her stomach. Lore fought her way up the last steps, gasping for breath as the bleak panic circled back to her.

Wrath.

His voice—it had echoed in the jagged parts of her, stirring up images of her parents and sisters she had fought for years to suppress.

If the House of Theseus had allied with him, it would add hundreds of bodies between him and Athena; the old god would never get close enough to uphold her end of their oath. The thought scalded her.

It’s actually worse than that, she realized.

If Wrath was working his way through the other gods, old and new, his hunters would come after Athena relentlessly. Aristos Kadmou had never been one for small purposes or quiet aims. He was clearing his enemies from the game board, and whatever he was planning wouldn’t end there.

And Cas . . .

Lore had so few ties to her past life that the thought of finding another one had been a powerful drug, whether she wanted to admit it or not. She had stopped believing in the Fates years ago, but she could see it so clearly in her mind then, the gleam of their blades as they gleefully cut away everyone and everything until she had nothing, and no one.

“Get a grip, you blubbering wine sack,” Lore muttered. She had a good and decent life here in the city, a real home. And she had Miles, who was still waiting for her back at the house with a god who would gladly wear his blood.