“I’ll consider answering.”
That’s fair. I swallow hard. “Why do you do it? All the stuff your mom demands? This isn’t the first time she’s called for someone’s head.”
“Heart.”
I blink. “What?”
“She didn’t call for your head. She called for your heart.” He takes another bite of food without looking at me.
Somehow, I know he’s not speaking figuratively. The thought almost makes me laugh, but I manage to keep the hysterical sound inside. “Your mother is such a bitch.”
“Glass houses, Psyche.”
I start to argue, but the truth is that Demeter is just as scheming and ambitious as Aphrodite is. I have no doubts that Aphrodite would leave half of Olympus to starve if given the right motivation, and my mother is responsible for several individuals disappearing mysteriously. There might be no bodies and no murder investigations, but I’m certain she’s behind them. Demeter just takes more care to ensure her sins can’t be as easily traced back to her than Aphrodite does. I lift my wineglass. “Fair enough. But that’s not an answer.”
He shrugs. “It started out easily enough. She wanted me to ruin the last Apollo. I think I was seventeen at the time.”
Shock nearly has me dropping my glass. “That was you?”
“Yeah.” He says it without any boastfulness or pride. Just a statement of fact. “I didn’t set it up, exactly, but I went to school with Daphne.” His eyes go dark. “She was in a bad situation, and she knew no one would believe her word against Apollo unless there was proof.”
I wasn’t in Olympus then, but I know the story well enough. The old Apollo pissed off Aphrodite for some reason, and the next thing anyone knew, pictures of him and an underage girl—Daphne—were released anonymously to all the gossip sites. With this new knowledge, I can see how carefully those photos were chosen. Just explicit enough that no one could argue what was going on, but Daphne was wearing lingerie. “Did those photos exist before that point?” Or did two teenagers conspire to stage them?
“Yeah.” He doesn’t look at me. “She got them off Apollo’s phone once we decided on a course of action. It wasn’t ideal, but it got him away from her and it made my mother happy to see Apollo punished.”
Olympus has few lines, especially for the Thirteen, but Daphne is Artemis’s cousin, and that prompted a firestorm the likes of which Olympus had never seen. She demanded his head, and when the old Zeus wasn’t willing to go that far, Artemis stirred up Athena, Hephaestus, Poseidon, and, no surprise, Aphrodite. Against those five, even Zeus had to do something. He didn’t kill Apollo, but he came together with the rest of the Thirteen and stripped Apollo of his title.
Two weeks later, his body was found in the River Styx. Common opinion is that Artemis is responsible, but any proof washed away in the water and his killer was never found. Not that anyone looked too hard for answers.
I stare at Eros. “You’re the one who came up with the idea to release those photos?” At seventeen?
Another of those shrugs that means everything and nothing. “Like I said, it was the only way.”
The only way to serve Aphrodite’s punishment.
The only way to help Daphne escape her situation.
“But…”
He sighs. “But what?”
“How did you go from helping people like Daphne to killing them?”
“The same way you boil a frog.” I blink, and he clarifies. “A little bit at a time. The first person I killed was a man threatening my mother.” He stares at his fork like it holds all the mysteries of the universe. “In hindsight, he really was a threat. I think he was a past lover, but he ended up stalking her and it was escalating to the point where she was legitimately afraid. She and Ares don’t get along, so he wouldn’t provide security. So I stepped in.”
I don’t point out that Aphrodite is more than capable of hiring her own security. Eros is smart. He knows that. “How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
My heart aches for him, both now and the boy he used to be. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He shrugs, but it’s too stiff to be convincing. “By the time I realized the people threatening my mother weren’t actually threats, my soul was stained too much to go back. The only path was forward.” I don’t know what my face is doing, but he shakes his head. “Don’t pity me, Psyche. I haven’t lost a single bit of sleep over the things I’ve done, to innocent people or not. I am as much a monster as she is.”
I know that. Truly, I do. But I can’t help hating her even more for grooming her son to be her personal fixer. He says it started at seventeen, but I know better. To get him to the point where he was willing to step in on her behalf, she would have started much younger. “You are her child. It’s still wrong to use you like this.”