Page 125 of For the Gods' Sake

Persy would be proud, really. I always leaned slightly more towards revenge than my sister did, her beliefs firmly cemented in the redemption first category. I wouldn’t be the one to disagree with her. I’d seen what her work at Prometheus could do first hand.

Daphne leaned forward, shaking Antonio lightly, who snapped up like he’d been woken from a slumber by a screeching alarm. He blinked at Daphne in shock. “Lady Athena?” he asked, before sputtering and correcting, “Lady Poseidon, I mean.”

And then Antonio realized that Lukas and I were sitting there and almost passed out again. All the color drained from his face. “What…what am I doing here? What day is it? For the love of Jupiter,what time is it?Ihave to be at work.”

I rolled my lips together to keep from laughing at his desperation. Daphne smiled kindly at him. “Everything is okay, Antonio. You fainted, so we wanted to make sure you were alright.”

All the blood rushed back into his face, an embarrassed, splotchy color rising. “I passed out in front of you?”

The fact that he was more concerned about fainting in front of a goddess than anything was as good a sign as I could hope for. I allowed myself to take just one relieved breath. Daphne nodded. “Can you tell me the last thing you remember?”

Antonio’s stare went unfocused, searching his brain for his last memory. “I was…well, I was at work doing a perimeter patrol when…I think someone was coming to visit Miss Romulus. I didn’t recognize him when he arrived.”

It was one of my spies.

Something clicked in Antonio’s mind, enough to turn him frantic again. He looked straight at me like I was at risk of releasing a lightning bolt into his chest. “I didn’t mean anything untoward, Lord Jupiter, Iswear. Miss Romulus isn’t—she doesn’t—you are the only—”

I cut him off with a wave of my hand. “I understand, Antonio.”

Another bit of relief ebbed into my veins, but not fully gone. My instincts were still rising like there was a threat right behind me. Lukas stood, coming over to me and clapping a hand onto my shoulder to speak just between us. “You happy?”

Not yet. “It worked,” I said, Daphne’s voice echoing around us while she continued questioning Antoniocalmly.

Lukas scoffed. “Of course, it did. My wife’s fucking brilliant.”

I matched his scoff, refocusing on Daphne’s careful questioning. I’d asked her to work on an antidote that would erase all memories associated with the tattoo. I wanted this private and I wanted this over.

There would be no knocking down doors and there wouldcertainlybe no rounding up my people, most of whom had probably made a mistake throwing their weight behind the wrong god. Once we had a functioning antidote, the only thing we needed was to tweak it to attach to all the other tattoos out there.

Daphne was of the opinion Sebastian had one. She’d sworn that she hadn’t ever seen him with rolled-up sleeves or in a t-shirt.

I half agreed with that. But I also had the feeling that a lot of higher-ups didn’t need a tattoo to signify their allegiance or solidify their cooperation. Once their footmen were no longer helpful, walking around blissfully ignorant of their former allegiance to them, they would be easier to weed out. Their floundering would stand out like a sore thumb.

Orwhen—not if, that wasn’t an option—Sebastian surrendered, they’d follow suit, setting aside their zealousness when their leader was either dead or sitting in Prometheus. I hadn’t consulted Persy on that one, but it was happening.

Outside of killing him, there was no other option. He hurt the woman I was going to marry. The woman I—

The point was that he deserved to suffer.

Daphne’s voice shook me out of my thoughts, now standing in front of me. “He doesn’t rememberanything. He can recount pretty much every detail of the last two weeks, within reason. But when I press him on where he was that Sunday, he just says that he was shopping.”

“Any scar?” I asked, peeking over her shoulder.

“No,” she said, shaking her head while she rubbed her hands together. “It worked. I think.”

“It did,” Lukas said confidently, pulling her in and placing a kiss on her temple.

Daphne smiled kindly, though still looking slightly unsure. “Sabina said it would work. I don’t know why I didn’t believe her when she tested it. I needed to see it in person, I guess.”

“How’d she take the news?” I asked. I’d been meaning to check in since I gave her the okay to involve the Roman goddess of wisdom, the one who’d survived the battle between the two sides after Daphne’s marriage to Lukas.

Daphne laughed. “Called him a few creative names. But she’s disappointed. We all are.”

I nodded, a trickle of said disappointment trying to fight through the rage. Sebastian had grown up as a friend. Not best, sure, but a friend regardless. And to havethisbe the outcome…

“I feel fine,” Antonio piped up from behind Daphne. “And I really should be getting back to Miss Romulus. I don’t even remember coming down here. Where is she?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but then was cut off by my intuition the second the door to Daphne’s office slammed open.

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