Athena
Imeet Mia at our usual coffee shop for lunch. Also, as usual, she’s bought me a coffee and a slice of the lemon poppyseed cake that I like, which I always tell her not to do, but she does anyway. I don’t have any money of my own these days, so it’s not like I could get it myself.
“You really need to tell those boys to give you an allowance,” Mia says, grinning. “I mean, you’re not putting out for me. Not that you’re putting it all out for them, either, but you know what I mean—”
“Actually,” I interrupt, feeling my heart beat a little faster at the admission I’m about to make. “I am.”
“What?” Mia’s eyes go round, and she almost drops her coffee. “Which one? When? Holy shit, Athena, tell me everything, tell me what it’s like, oh my god—”
“Well, for one, I imagine it would be better with someone you actually like,” I say darkly, sitting down across from her. “So I’d hold out for that, honestly, if I were you. But it was Dean.”
The admission drops between us, said bluntly, and Mia stares at me. “Really? I thought—”
“I tried to pick Jaxon.” I breathe in, a stab of pain in my chest reminding me that I’m more hurt by it all than I’d thought. “He turned me down.”
“What? Why—”
I explain everything to her, then. The game, the town, the fact that Jaxon wants no part of it, and that’s clearly why he rejected me. The fact that I hadn’t known, and that if I had, I wouldn’t have gone to Dean. I give her a few details about that first night—not too many of the gory ones, I don’t want to scare her, seeing as how she hasn’t done it yet, and she might actually get a shot at losing it to a decent guy—but enough to satisfy her curiosity. “He wasn’t gentle,” I say wryly. “That night, or any of them since.”
And then, with Mia listening raptly, I fill her in on my plan and how it’s going so far.
“I don’t know,” she says hesitantly, once I’m done. “That sounds dangerous, Athena. This isn’t just you and the three guys anymore, you know. Now it’s their families, too. Their fathers. This is serious shit that you’ve gotten yourself mixed up in. And it could come back to hurt you if you try to get involved in it.”
“More than I already am, you mean?”
“What about those pictures?” Mia frowns, her pale forehead wrinkling delicately. “Those girls. Do you think they were part of the game? If so, why don’t we ever seen any of them?”
“I mean, it’s not like we’d recognize them now. Half of them were all twisted up in some pornographic pose, and they’d be older now, anyway. They were our age in those photos. Now they’d be forty, fifty, sixty years old. They’d look way different.”
“You’ve got a point.” Mia frowns. “We could have passed them anytime and not known it. Shit, that’s crazy.”
“What’s crazy is this situation I’m in,” I say sharply, trying to guide her back to the most pressing topic. “I gave this whole town back to the Blackmoor family, and I didn’t even fucking know what I was doing. I might have screwed all of them. Who knows what Dean might do? He certainly thinks he deserves it. He’s going to lord over this place like…well, like a fucking Lord. He likes to remind us of that stupid title.”
“And if he keeps it—” Mia bites her lower lip. “What happens to you?”
I shrug. “He fucks me for a while and then makes me work as a housekeeper or some shit once he’s bored with me. Nothing that bad, really, but it’s not what I want. And I’m not about to let myself be responsible for something that I didn’t even know was happening. I’m going to fix this. I’m going to set them at each other and let them keep fighting it out, until I figure out what else to do.”
“Is there anything else you can do?”
“I don’t know,” I admit. “But I’m going to try to come up with something.” I poke at the piece of cake, digging a swirl of cream cheese icing off of it and sucking it off of the tip of my finger. “I can’t let them win. I’m not going to be their stupid fucking sacrifice.”
“Maybe you should just leave,” Mia suggests hesitantly. “Get your mom, convince her somehow if you don’t want to tell her what’s been happening, and you both just get out of town. Surely they won’t chase you guys down forever. Just run.” She looks at me sadly. “I’d miss you. But it’d be better than you getting brutalized by those assholes constantly. Even if you, um—sort of like it.”
Mia is the only person I think I could have ever told about my confused feelings and not been judged for it. Instead, she seems to think it’s kind of interesting that I get off on my tormentors’ treatment of me. As if I’m a particularly interesting species of a bug to dissect or a passage in a book that she can’t quite understand.
In other words, she’s the best friend I could possibly ever ask for.
But I can’t take her advice. Not now. Not when I’ve already set things in motion.
I shake my head, taking a hungry bite out of the cake. I already spent way too much energy this morning for someone who didn’t even eat breakfast. “I’m not backing down now,” I say firmly. “These fucking men have been running things for way too long. My mother was brave after my father was killed after our house was burned down. She found a way to keep going, to not let them beat her, and I’m going to do the same thing. I’m going to be tough, too, just the way she raised me.” I push the plate aside, looking firmly at Mia.
“I’m going to make these men regret ever fucking with me.”
* * *
Since my planpretty much rests on getting Cayde to break with the rules and keep playing the game for me, the next step is to do something to get his attention that I wouldn’t normally do, something that will catch him off guard—which honestly, the opportunity to see Cayde St. Vincent caught off guard is worth the annoyance of what I’m about to do.
I’m going to go to his rugby practice.