“The Matriarch’s daughter! She’s gone!”
The shout came from somewhere behind me, carrying across the terraced gardens with shocking clarity. More voices joined the first, shouting Greek words I didn’t understand but whose meaning was crystal clear. They’d discovered my escape.
Panic seized my chest like a fist. There was no time to search for boats. No time to find another way off this cursed island. The priestesses knew these grounds intimately and could cut off every path before I made it fifty yards.
The water was my only option.
I lunged into the Aegean without thinking. My feet slipped on rocks slick with algae, and then the sandy bottom dropped away beneath me.
I pushed forward into deeper water, kicking hard against the current that immediately tried to drag me parallel to the shore. Something sharp dug into my heel, and I tasted copper as I bit through my lip to keep from crying out.
Keep swimming. Don’t stop. They can’t follow if you’re far enough out.
The shore behind me erupted with lights, torches or flashlights illuminating the beach. My arms burned as I forced them through the water, each stroke fighting the current that wanted to pull me sideways. Salt water splashed into my mouth, my nose, my eyes. The silk slip wrapped tighter around my thighs with every kick.
House Hera’s ancestor was the wife of the first House Poseidon Alpha. Penelope and Odysseus. Maybe it will help me. Maybe the sea will recognize her bloodline and show mercy.
But the Aegean felt nothing like merciful. It felt ancient and utterly indifferent to my terror. The current strengthened as I swam farther from shore, pulling harder now, threatening to drag me out into open water.
I’d drown in darkness here without anyone knowing where I’d gone. My fathers would never find my body. They’d never know what happened to me.
I kept swimming anyway, refusing to stop, refusing to let Helena’s priestesses drag me back. And then, my outstretched hands hit something solid in the empty water.
Pain exploded through my palms and up my wrists, radiating into my shoulders. I gasped, choking on seawater. Instinctively, I tried to press on. But there was no way to move forward. I’d just run into an invisible surface, smooth, cold and absolutely immovable.
No. This can’t be happening.
I ran my hands along the barrier, searching desperately for a gap, a weakness, anything. But the shield remained perfectly consistent, transparent enough that I could still see the horizon beyond but solid as reinforced steel.
It was a House Athena ward. Their strategic barriers could contain entire battlefields, imprison armies, withstand siege weapons and divine powers alike. They were the Olympians’ ultimate defense, completely unbreachable by anyone without Athena blood.
Helena had caged the entire cove. Probably the whole damn island. She’d commissioned a ward that turned Samos into an inescapable prison.
Why this? Why now?
But I knew why. Because I’d always run. Always fought. Always refused to accept the chains they tried to wrap around me. So she’d called in House Athena to build a cage I couldn’t escape, no matter how desperately I tried.
The fight drained out of me all at once. My arms stopped moving. My legs stopped kicking. The current pulled at my exhausted body, and I let it, sinking beneath the surface into cold darkness.
What was the point? Helena would just drag me back. Cassandra would apply more healing fire. The priestesses would watch me more carefully. I’d accomplished nothing except proving I was exactly as out of control as they claimed.
Something bumped against my side.
I jerked in the water, instinct overriding resignation. Another bump, this one more insistent, pushed me upward toward the surface. I broke the surface gasping, arms flailing for purchase that didn’t exist.
A sleek gray form surfaced beside me, blowing air through its blowhole with a distinctive whistle-click. A dolphin. Another appeared on my other side, and their bodies kept me afloat without any effort on my part.
The dolphins clicked and whistled to each other, the sounds carrying both above and below the water. Their skin felt smooth and warm against my chilled body, so different from the cold Aegean but somehow familiar. Like the horses I’d tended with Elias and Robert, with their soft noses and gentle eyes.
My throat closed on something that might’ve been a sob. I pressed my face against the nearest dolphin’s flank and let them guide me back toward the shore I’d tried so desperately to escape.
The beach materialized through my blurred vision, torches blazing along the sand. Helena stood at the water’s edge, her pristine white robe abandoned for something darker and more practical. She waded in as the dolphins brought me closer, her face twisted with panic.
“Dear Hera, what were you thinking?” Her hands caught my arms, pulling me from the dolphins with shaking urgency. “If not for Orion’s dolphins… You could be dead.”
Orion’s dolphins.
The name cut through my exhaustion like a blade. Orion Maris. The head of House Poseidon who’d hosted that disastrous party on his yacht, who’d caught me stumbling drunk in the corridor and offered quiet concern. Who’d said he hoped to speak with me again in ‘less intoxicating circumstances’.