Page 52 of Inked Athena

I snatch the phone before he can change his mind and blow him a kiss. “You’re a doll.”

“And a sucker,” he mutters as he gets up and wanders away into the nearby meadow.

The moment I have it, my hands start shaking. I know he’s listening—he’d be stupid not to—but I don’t care. All thatmatters is the number I’m punching in with trembling fingers, each digit bringing me closer to home.

The ring echoes in my ear like a funeral bell.

Then she answers, and I almost collapse to my knees in relief.

“Hello?”

“Grams!” I choke out, the single word a wobbly, shaky mess.

“Oh my God—Nova?”

“Shhh,” I whisper, glancing at Myles’s turned back. My pulse thunders in my ears as I lower my voice. “I’m not calling you. This never happened, okay?”

A beat of silence stretches between us before she catches on. “What never happened?”

That puts a smile on my face, though the tears remain stubbornly where they are. “You have no idea how good it is to hear your voice, Grams. I’ve missed you.”

“And I’ve been worried sick.” The strain in her voice makes me fist the blanket harder. “Samuil has been giving me regular updates. He insists you’re safe, you’re doing well, but I don’t think I really believed him until just now when I heard your voice.”

Despite how angry I am with him right now, I can’t help but agree. “Iamsafe, and Iamdoing well.”

“Well, thank God for that.”

I stare out over the water as afternoon clouds roll in, trying to decide where to start. So much has happened—not that I can talkabout most of it. So I settle on the thing I can talk about. The last thing I want to bring up.

“How are you, Grams? After everything… Are you okay?”

I’ve been wanting to talk to her about my dad and brothers since the second it happened, but I never actually planned what to say. I don’t even know how I feel about it, let alone how she might feel.

Her silence takes on a heavy edge. When I hear her sniffle, my arms ache to pull her into a hug. “I never thought I’d outlive my son. Certainly not Tommy and Mike.”

Funny, neither did I. Mostly because they each took their turns threatening me within an inch of a life. If anything, my reigning thought has always been thatone of these days, they’ll kill me.

“It’s hard to make sense of any of it. I keep thinking I should feel... different about it. More something.” I watch raindrops dapple the flat mirror of the lake. “They were not good people. But it’s okay to be sad.”

They were worse than that. But the less Grams knows about what her son and grandsons did, the better off she is. Enough of us are tangled up in my father’s dirty dealings as it is. She’s too innocent to get dragged into the mud.

Let her think of them as angels. She deserves that much.

But that doesn’t keep me from being angry. I’m angry at them for existing at all and then for abandoning us in such a cruel fashion. I’m angry that it’s all such a fucking mess. That we can’t just mourn the loss of our family like normal people. That even this most basic human experience has to be uniquely complicated.

“Are you telling me or yourself, honey?” she asks softly.

I swipe at the tears leaking down my cheeks. “I don’t know. Both, I guess. I just… Ever since I found out, I haven’t known what to think. I don’t miss them. I won’t. I’ll never, for a single second, wish they were alive and I could call them up and tell them about my life.”

My throat closes around the words as memories flash through my mind—bruises hidden under long sleeves, nights spent crying into my pillow, the constant edge of fear. “But part of me wishes that I would. I think I’m mourning the fact that I can’t mourn them, if that even makes sense.”

She releases a shaky breath. “I wish you could’ve gone to the funeral with me. I think it would’ve helped you.”

“You went to their funerals?” I don’t know why, but I didn’t even think about a funeral. The mayor was probably there. I’m sure flags were draped over their coffins. Bullshit honors were probably bestowed on them for serving the city, and stone-faced men probably said too-kind things about them that they didn’t come close to earning.

I would’ve hated every second of that funeral.

“I did,” she admits. “Myles escorted me.”

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