PROLOGUE
ATHENA
Ican’t ever forget the day that my childhood home burned down.
We’d buried my father two days before. If I’d been older, I might have known something like this was coming. At sixteen, all I felt was the piercing loss of him, the ache of his betrayal, the resentment that he’d left us. My mother had said things likehe didn’t have a choice,but I didn’t believe that shit.
Everyone has a choice.
All I’d been able to register through the fog of my grief was that my mother was acting strangely, double-checking locks, jumping when the phone rang, pulling the curtains closed before it even got dark. She was fidgety and constantly on edge, and at first I didn’t realize the reason why.
Killing my father for ratting hadn’t been enough for the gang that he’d once called his brothers. They were going to finish us off, too.
My mother didn’t explain any of that to me, though, until the house was already on fire, the frame blackening and smoke curling up into the air, pretty much everything we owned burning up along with it. She’d been trying to protect me, I know that now, but at the time all I’d felt was a deep anger that she’d kept something like that from me. For two whole days, our lives had been in danger, and she hadn’t even bothered to tell me.
I’d felt like there was nothing left in me but grief and anger. Like there never would be again.
The house had already been on fire when I came back from school. We’d seen the smoke from the bus, and I’d felt a sinking in the pit of my stomach well before my house came into view, as if I’d already known somehow. When I ran down the street, my backpack sliding off of one shoulder, a crowd had started to gather. Two of our neighbors were holding my mother back as she screamed, trying to keep her from running into the blaze.
“Our pictures—” I heard her scream as I ran, her voice broken and clogged with tears. “His clothes! It’s all I have left of him, our wedding pictures—”
“It’s not worth it,” one of the neighbors holding her back had said, and she’d finally sagged backwards, sinking into the arms of the elderly lady who lived across the street from us. The lady—Mrs. Roseworth, I think her name was, had stroked my mother’s hair like she was a child as the small crowd watched my childhood home turn to ashes.
My mother hadn’t even seen me at first. I’d skidded to a stop, tripping and falling on the asphalt and scraping my hands and knees. It had taken a moment for what was happening to sink in, and I remember crying, pulling myself into a kneeling ball on the asphalt, not caring if someone ran me over.
I’d been brought home to that house as a baby. I’d grown up in it. I’d never known any other home. Everything I had—my clothes, my stuffed animals that I swore I’d outgrown but still kept in my closet, my pictures, my drawings, my books, the cards my dad had drawn me for Christmas every year, all the things he’d ever given me and every tangible memory of him that I had were going up in smoke, charred and crumbling like the exterior of our house.
Why? Why?I hadn’t realized that I was screaming it until my mother finally tore herself loose from Mrs. Roseworth’s arms and ran to me, kneeling down on the street to pull me into her arms.
“I’m so sorry, baby,” she’d whispered, cradling me close. “I’m so sorry. We’re not safe here anymore.”
“Where?” I’d only managed the one word, but she’d known what I meant. She was my mother, after all.
“I don’t know,” she’d whispered into my hair, and I’d felt real, true fear for the first time. I hadn’t been afraid when my father died, just sad and resentful. I hadn’t known there was somethingtofear. But now, hearing my mother say that she didn’t know how to keep us safe, I learned what it felt like to really, truly be afraid.
If the only adult left who was supposed to protect me couldn’t, who on Earth could?
I knew then and there that it was up to me to keep myself safe, and maybe even her. I couldn’t rely on others. My father hadn’t been able to keep us safe, or even himself, and now my mother was failing too. Maybe I’d also fail, but I knew I had to stop relying on those around me to protect me.
There was the tentative sound of someone clearing their throat above me, and my mother and I both looked up at the same time. Mrs. Roseworth was standing there, her wrinkled face curving in a kind, sympathetic smile. “If you need someone to make sure nothing else happens,” she said quietly, as if imparting a secret, “I know Philip St. Vincent and his family quite well. And after all, with what his family and yours share—”
Her voice had trailed off, and I’d felt my mother stiffen. I’d forgotten about that sentence for a long time, too long, maybe. It hadn’t had any meaning to me until a long time from then. But on that day, that offer from Mrs. Roseworth changed everything.
What would have happened, if she hadn’t offered to convince Philip St. Vincent to give my mother a job, and take us in? Protect us from the Devil’s Sons, and everything they wanted to do to my mother and I in revenge for my father’s disloyalty?
Would we have left town that day, with nothing but the clothes on our backs, running for our lives? Would we have ended up on the other side of the country somewhere, maybe in the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, or the sunny beaches of California, or the hot deserts of Texas, and lived a completely different life? A life that only belonged to us, and not the men who have always been responsible for every terrible thing that’s ever befallen us?
I wouldn’t have gone to Blackmoor Academy, that’s for sure. I wouldn’t have run into Cayde and Dean and Jaxon on those steps, or ended up drunk in a library, pissing off the heir to the St. Vincent family.
I might not have ended up waking in their manor house on the university campus, with no memory of how I got there.
So many things might have been different.
Do I wish that Mrs. Roseworth had never offered that to my mother, that we’d run away and that I’d had a different life?
Sometimes, yes. And then other times, when I’m in between Cayde and Dean, lost in pleasure, or when I’m curled up in their arms in bed, or like just now, when Jaxon had me up against his bedroom door—I don’t wish it. I’m glad we stayed. I’m glad that I wound up their captive, so that they could set a part of me free that I never knew existed.
Some days, I’m glad I’m here, so that I can try to put an end to everyone who ever hurt us. So I can burn their patriarchal bullshit to the ground, just like they did my home.