“Paris,” I whispered. “You're alive.”
He didn't understand. I put my hand over his heart. “Paris. Your heart is beating. You're alive.”
His gaze jumped from mine over to Hector. Hector pressed his fingers against his neck.
There was this beautiful moment. A smile began at the corners of his lips, lifting them in the widest grin I'd ever seen on his face.
I glanced at Paris to catch him watching his brother. With that smile, the guilt and pain from Paris's past mistakes melted away, and for the first time since knowing him, his eyes were clear.
Hector reached across the bed. Grabbing the back of Paris's neck, he yanked him forward. I only stayed in place with Paris's arm around my waist.
Forehead to forehead, the brothers processed a miracle.
“A second chance,” Hector whispered.
“A real chance,” Paris replied. “We make our own mistakes and only have ourselves to blame for them.“ He smiled. “We have each other, and that's all we need.”
“Sounds pretty bloody amazing,” Achilles called out.
“I think I'm hungry,” Orestes said. “Really hungry. Starving.”
Pollux pressed his thumbs to his temples. “And I have a headache.”
It was such a human thing to say, but that's what we all were now. We were mortals, living a mortal life. We didn't have forever. There was going to be hurt and heartache and loss in our future, but like Paris said, we had a real chance now.
The shadow of the gods was no longer hanging over our heads. Our future was unwritten and entirely our own.
Leo
Epilogue: 10 Years Later
The tiny hand wrapped around my finger tightened as I bounced from side to side. With one hand on my daughter's chest, I called out to my class, “Any questions?”
I glanced over my shoulder at the picture I projected onto the screen. It was me, about a billion months pregnant, with Achilles, Hector, Paris, Orestes, and Pollux. They each held one of the shards of the seal while standing in front of the British Museum. The photo, taken almost nine years ago after my position at Oxford was reinstated, and the upper echelons of my department had been cleared out, never failed to be popular.
A dozen hands went up, and I laughed. “About the class. Not the men in the photo.”
All but one hand went down. I stared at the fuzzy-headed man in the first row. Dr. St. John had been my biggest advocate when I returned from Corfu but had long ago retired. Still, he never failed to appear at least once a week in my classes.
I owed the man a lot. While I was racing from England to Greece, thinking everyone in academia had written me off, emptied out my office, and locked down all my research, he'd been working behind the scenes.
The old man had a loud voice and a powerful one. With Athena's death, the power she'd wielded over my career had disappeared. All those claims she’d made—of stealing research, of lying—had disappeared with her. I guessed technology was only as good as the goddess using it.
Dr. St. John had two glorious years as the head of the Classics Department before he retired and handpicked his successor, an honest and reliable middle-aged woman with a specialty in ancient funerary traditions.
“Dr. Ophidia.” Dr. St. John smiled, and I braced myself for a question that would tax my sleep-deprived brain. This was one of my more advanced courses, Relative and Absolute Dating Methods in Archaeology, and at one point, I'd lectured for about five minutes using the wordcarbonite, instead ofradiocarbon dating.
I might have gone on if one of my graduate students hadn't asked, “Dr. Ophidia, wasn't Han Solo frozen in carbonite?”
Dr. St. John had gotten a good laugh out of that one.
“Yes?” I asked when he continued to smile at me.
“I don't understand why you refuse me to let me hold my goddaughter while you lecture. You dropped the remote at least seven times that I counted and shushed me twice.”
I gazed down at the red curls adorning my daughter's head. Unable to help myself, I dropped another kiss there. The door to the lecture hall opened, and Achilles backed in. Water dripped from the ends of his brown hair onto the shoulders of his jacket. He pulled the pram in, pausing when he heard the muffled laughter of the students.
“Shit. I'm early. Sorry, Leo.”