by Staci Hart
“Don’t talk shit. I split them up, didn’t I?”
“Yeah, and Kat made a real shitshow of it,” Phobos said. “We’ve been fucking with those two forever. I seriously don’t know why Dita chose her. Seems pretty dumb, if you ask me.”
Ares turned and looked at him squarely. “Your mother is smart, and she’s got an advantage. Kat and Dillon are perfect for each other; that’s the whole fucking point. And when she picks a match, they’re almost unstoppable. We’re all fools for even thinking we can compete.”
The twins wore equally cowed expressions, only looking back to the screen when he sat back in his seat.
His sons blew up a barricade, and he smiled. As much as Eros was Dita’s, Phobos and Deimos were his own.
On the day they were born, Ares had held her hand while she labored, beside himself with helplessness at her pain. He was a doer, but there was nothing to be done but be idle and watch, two things he’d never excelled at. Her hair had been plastered to her face, legs split open as she panted and pushed and cried and screamed. And then a smaller cry rang out over hers, and Phobos was born.
The moment Ares had held him the first time — the tiny, squirming thing with thick, dark hair, red little mouth in an O as he cried — he couldn’t comprehend, couldn’t understand the magic that had made this child of his blood and hers. And then a second cry, a push, and Artemis had held another in her hands. Deimos.
But the moment he cherished above all was Aphrodite’s face, full of wonder and tears as they’d lain in her bed together, their babies between them, watching them as they greeted the world.
The boys had been raised by Hera, as neither he nor Dita had the disposition required to raise children. Hera had gladly accepted, though Ares had known Dita wasn’t pleased at the prospect. But she also knew the boys were more Ares than her, and although Persephone had raised Eros, Dita didn’t think laying a set of mischievous twins on her best friend was a responsibility she was willing to give.
Hera had undoubtedly spoiled the boys, shaping them to be more like Ares than they might have been otherwise.
Eris entered the room, breaking him from his thoughts. She nibbled on red licorice, one hand stuffed in her hoodie pouch as she walked around the couch to sit on the floor, back against the couch, stretching her striped legs in front of her, boots crossed.
“Hey, Eris,” Ares said absently as he mashed buttons on his controller.
“Strife.”
“I’m not calling you that.”
“Is that any way to thank me for my influence on your players? They’re a couple of my favorite bickerers.” She took a bite of licorice. “I’ve had men challenging Kat since she was in a training bra. Although she used to be more fun to needle than she is now.”
Ares snorted. “Of course that was you.”
She shrugged. “Not like it was hard. The guys she races are real assholes, most of them.” She picked at her chipped black nail polish. “I even got one to call her a nickname she hates. It makes her crazy. It’s made her stronger though. The last few years, she’s learned to let shit roll off her back. Good for her. Sucks for me.”
Ares kept his eyes on the TV. “Too bad it’s all for naught. As much as I’d love to win, the odds aren’t really in my favor even though all of us have influence on them. She’s just too good. So she’ll probably cream me.”
“Yeah, she will. If she hasn’t already,” Deimos said.
Ares ignored them, hitting the X button wildly with his thumb, and they all cheered when he blew up the encampment.
“And that,” Ares said as he stood and tossed the controller in his place, “is how you do it.” He stuck his finger in the twins’ faces. “Don’t let me catch you losers playing that stupid game again — or else.” As he walked out of the room, he said over his shoulder, not at all joking, “And if I catch you talking shit about your mom again, I’ll kick your fucking teeth in.”
The sheepskin rug was springy and soft on Dita’s feet as she stepped out of the shower and reached for a fluffy white towel, solemn and unsmiling as she dried her arms, legs, hair before dropping the towel to the ground.
Everything felt wrong.
She walked naked into her closet, sorting through her thoughts one by one in the hopes that it would help her make sense of them. Kat and Dillon had come together and burst apart like shrapnel. The high from last night had come down with a crash. Another fight, a fight that would be harder to overcome than before.
She wondered if it was possible for things to get easier or if this was just a pattern they’d find themselves in over and over again.
It was a pattern she understood intimately.
Not seeing much of anything, she reached into a drawer, retrieving an oversize gray sweater that she tugged on, though it hung off one shoulder. A cold droplet of water slid slowly down her neck, speeding up as it rolled down the length of her spine, sending a shiver through her.
Adonis was on her mind, as he so often was, the loss still fresh and raw and painful, her hope that he’d come around dwindling with every day. She only wanted it to be over.
She just didn’t know if it would ever end.
Dita stepped through the threshold and to the keypad, punching a series of numbers, and when the room on the other side whirred, she watched and waited. Room after room flew past like a flip book, ages of clothes and jewelry and keepsakes from eras long past and forgotten, the force of the motion sending goosebumps across her skin and stirring her hair, heavy with water.
When it stopped, her sadness deepened and took root.
She stepped into the soft spring grass that carpeted the room to every corner, every wall lined with shelves inset in stone with myrtle trees growing between each, always in bloom, caught in a perpetual spring. The domed ceiling seemed to go on forever, colored in the golden hues of sunset.
It was Adonis’s room.
The shelves held so many memories, so much history. Black clay pots painted with the story of their doomed love. Scrolls and books told the story in words and song, spoke of their unending love. Paintings in gilded frames hung above the shelves, more propped on the floor, all of her and her mortal lover. She stopped in front of her favorite, Waterhouse’s The Awakening of Adonis. She bent down to peer at it, her heart tight at the sight of the two figures, forever anticipating a kiss.
It had always hit a little close to home.
Then, there were her own keepsakes. His spear, dagger, and swords were on display. She ran the pad of her finger along the edge of the blade. His leather belt and sandals lay on the grass, as if he would be back for them at any moment. Flowers he’d once given her on a summer afternoon she’d never forget bloomed eternally in a vase.
She picked up a little wooden dove he’d carved for her out of cypress and closed her hands around it, turning her back to those memories in search of another.
In the center of the room was her pride — a statue carved of marble, milky white and lit from above, anemone flowers dotting the grass at his feet. He looked down at her, his hand extended, love in his eyes, beckoning her to join him. It was his exact likeness, so shockingly real that she felt him inside, could almost hear him breathing. But it was only stone, cold to the touch.
She knew, for she’d touched it often, believing she might find it warm and real.
Centuries before, during the Renaissance, she had approached Michelangelo just after he completed the statue of David. The artist was Apollo’s star, and as much as she’d hated Apollo at the time, she’d found the artist to be brilliant, as all the gods did.
Inspiration went all ways.
She’d commissioned the piece from him, paying him handsomely for his secrecy, though he’d tried to refuse. He had not been a man for fame or fortune, but a slave to his work and vision. But she’d insisted — she could be quite convincing — and he had ultimately acquiesced.
For hours, she’d sat with him as he sketched, recounting every detail of Adonis’s face and body, the line
s of which she knew better than even her own. And, four years later, he had been delivered to her, a glory even the artist himself said in his letter was beyond his knowing or understanding.
She placed her hand on the cheek of the cold stone, tracing the crease of his lips with her thumb as a tear rolled down her face.
Her hand fell away, and she sat in the grass, hooking her elbows around bent knees, her face turned up to his as he looked down at hers, reaching for her.
But the truth touched her heart, as cold as the stone of his figure before her.
She had never had him at all. He couldn’t give himself to her because he only cared for himself.
Never had he sacrificed. Never had he taken her counsel.
He cared for her as he cared for a thing owed to him, a comfort he sought by right. He’d been given all he wanted and wished for the moment it left his lips, never denied. And when it had come time for him to make a stand, he’d refused. He had not fought for her when Persephone kept him locked in the underworld, though she had journeyed through Hades to get him back. And even then, he would not choose.
He would never fight for her unless the end benefited him. Because he’d never loved her, not in the way she loved him. Not in the way that meant she could stay.
Her tears touched the grass, rolling down the blades and into the soil, birthing anemones, small and fragile and fleeting and final.
No, he didn’t love her. And he never would.
And she could no longer tell herself otherwise.
Day 8
Sweat poured down Dillon’s body as he ran through the streets near the East River, the cold biting his wet skin.
He hadn’t heard from Kat and didn’t know if he would. But he’d thought about her. He couldn’t stop.
More than a few times, he’d picked up his phone, thinking maybe if he called her, maybe she’d answer. Maybe she’d apologize. Maybe he would too. Maybe there was a way back, some way to fix things.
It was hard to imagine fixing something when you didn’t know how it had broken in the first place.
But for the time being, he was too wounded, too hurt, too busy licking his wounds. Too busy trying to make himself stop thinking about her. Stop thinking about that night when everything had been right and good.
But that night was gone, taking the hope of anything more with it.
His arms pumped faster as he took off down a hill, the river at the bottom, the city beyond. He hated what he was, who he was, hated that he was so full of pride and pain. He wondered just how much of that was genetic and how much was from getting boxed in the ears for eight years after his mother died. Before he took Owen from that place so they could start fresh together, safe for the first time since they’d been left alone with the devil himself.
Moira had protected them. She had been the only thing that could. And when she died, someone had to fill her place. It was Dillon or Owen. And if it had been Owen, Owen would be dead.
If Jimmy’d had his way, that would have been the first and last choice. But Dillon wouldn’t let that happen.
It had been simple, really. All Dillon had to do was learn which button to press, which note to sing, and the attention would be on him and off his brother. Owen was too young and gentle-natured to fight. But Dillon had his father in him. That was certain.
Eight years of pain. Eight years of survival. Eight years until it was finally over.
It was two weeks before his eighteenth birthday, two weeks until he could finally get a place of his own and get Owen away, the culmination of years of wishing and hoping and saving.
They’d be free of Jimmy.
Dillon pulled into the driveway of the sad, sinking home where he’d lived his life and stepped out of his car. He’d been working two jobs all summer to save enough to move out. He would have had more, but it had taken him a year to save up enough to buy a car and another six months to fix up the vintage GTO enough so it was drivable. In the end, he regretted being so selfish as to do that before saving to move, but he couldn’t get an apartment until he was eighteen, so he’d mapped out the time and put in the work, and they were almost there.
Soon enough, Jimmy would be a distant memory. They’d survived for eight years. A few more months would be nothing.
He tromped up the cracked drive and walkway lined with weeds, pulling open the screen door, stepping inside. But the second he crossed the threshold, he knew.
He couldn’t say how he knew. Maybe it was years of anticipating the shift in the air that signaled a fight. It could have been that his ears listened for the moments when the sounds folded in on itself and disappeared, sucking the noise from a room. But in any case, the hairs rose on his neck, his nostrils flaring, adrenaline pumping at the trigger he didn’t recognize but knew so fully, so wholly.
He charged through the house, calling his brother’s name.
“In here,” Owen called from the bathroom.
When Dillon stepped into the doorframe and saw Owen, it took everything he had not to roar, to smash the mirror, to find his father and separate his head from his body.
Owen was gangly at thirteen, dabbing at his bleeding face with a towel. His nose had been popped, his lips and chin covered in gore, his cheek and eye purple and heading for black, swollen nearly closed. There were bruises on his arms too, and Dillon was willing to bet that his ribs and back had them too.
“What the fuck did he do to you?” It was a low and rumbling growl, his hands tingling, his composure slipping.
He ducked his head, angling to hide part of his face. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.” The words were muffled, the word fine coming out closer to fide.
But Dillon stepped into him and grabbed his face, turning it to inspect. His nose was broken, the blood on the bottom half of his face the darkest of reds. Dillon’s vision dimmed in the same shade.
The screen door closed with a slap, and Owen’s undamaged eye went wide.
Dillon spun around and blew into the kitchen where Jimmy stood, setting a bottle of liquor on the counter.
He glanced over his shoulder with one brow up, his tone taunting and cruel. “Don’t look so angry, Dillon.”
“Fuck you, Da.”
Jimmy turned, head cocked and smile savage. “Poor wee Owen got a little taste, and you think you’ll be the one to do something about it, hmm?” His smile twisted. “Every time you stick up for that bastard, it makes me sick. He’s not even your true brother.”
Dillon’s teeth were clenched so tight, he could barely speak. “He’s more my brother than you ever were my father.”
He stalked to his son, shoulders square. “You don’t know shite, Dillon. You think you know how the world works, but you don’t know shite.” His lips pulled back, his nose inches from Dillon’s. “Your ma didn’t either.”
Dillon didn’t fall over the edge. He jumped with all his strength, nostrils flaring, aching through heart and hand as the room dimmed, curling around the edges of his vision.
All he could see was Jimmy’s weathered face. The face of the man who had murdered his mother. The man who had stolen his life.
A swing and a pop — Jimmy’s nose crunched under his fist, blood spilling down his shirt. Jimmy was unfazed, jaw set and fist swinging. But Dillon ducked easily, rebounding with a shot to Jimmy’s ribs.
Her face in his mind — he cracked Jimmy in the jaw. Her blood on his hands — he connected with his father’s eye. Owen, small and gentle, rejected by the only father he’d ever known — Jimmy hit the ground.
And Dillon descended.
He’d never know what had happened during the time he lost, though he reached for it, sought it in the depths of his mind. But there was nothing, only the blank space between that moment and the second he heard his brother’s voice.
It was his name, his name through a fog, small hands on his shoulders, pulling him out of the dark.
Dillon looked down at his hands, turning them over, trying to make sense of the crimson blood glazing them lik
e gloves, wondering for a moment if it was his blood or someone else’s. He realized he was sitting on his father’s chest and looked into the man’s inhuman face, what was left of it, as he floated somewhere else, separate and detached. And then he turned to his brother, whose face was wrenched in horror.
Jimmy coughed weakly beneath him, and Dillon stood, stumbling as he backed away.
Owen dragged his brother to the sink and washed his hands as Dillon watched from somewhere very far away, thinking that this was the spot his father had washed his mother’s blood down the drain. And then he was shepherded into their room where Owen sat him on his bed, the same bed the brothers had shared that night, so many nights, afraid and alone and unsure they’d live to see another sunrise.
“Dillon,” he said firmly as he tossed clothes into a duffel bag, “we need to pack. We can’t wait. Do you understand? Do you have a place where we can go?”
Go? Leave. They had to leave. He fumbled around in his thoughts, Brian’s face surfacing through the murky madness of his mind. Brian was older and had an apartment already; they’d known each other a long time, and he knew about Jimmy. He’d put them up.
“Brian.” The word was sawdust against his tongue.
Owen nodded and kept shoving things into that bag — a picture of their mother, clothes, not much else. They’d never had much. But Dillon couldn’t move, and Owen quit trying, packing a bag for his brother too.
It was minutes or hours — he wasn’t sure — but by the time they’d gotten him out of his bloody clothes and packed his car, he found himself. Only a piece of himself, but it was enough.
Before they walked out of that house for the last time, Dillon stopped in the kitchen and stood over his father, watching the slow, wheezing breaths of the broken man on the kitchen floor.
Dillon swallowed, his voice raw and cracked and absolutely deadly. “If you come after us, I’ll kill you.”
Jimmy turned his head toward the sound, the movement so slight, it was almost imperceptible.
“Do you understand me?” he asked with calm summoned from somewhere unknown as he knelt down. “Because if you don’t, I’ll kill you now and save us both the trouble.”
