I’m seconds away from making my escape from the German vacation castle when it occurs to me—

There shouldn’t be a fucking soundtrack.

Definitely not one that sounds like meditation music.

Who the hell is playing meditation music at this hour of the morning? And why is it vaguely familiar? I don’t listen to music like that when it’s not dawn.

I ease the ancient hardwood door shut as quietly as I can, adjust my duffel bag, and recommit to sneaking through the side courtyard to the car that’s waiting for me. Woke the driver up in the middle of the night. Advance notice, etc. This place is in a low mountain range in Bavaria, which means there are old, winding roads everywhere, all of them tilted on an angle. From the castle, the roads curve into the mountains and through the woods like a fairy tale.

“Hello,” sings Apollo’s friend and think-tank CEO Delphi from directly fucking behind me. “The sun rises on a brand-new day, only to watch you creeping away…”

I should’ve known she was out here. I should’ve known someone was out here from the meditation music. My heart stops anyway, and I have to heave in a big gasp of cool early-as-hell morning air to get it to start again. The too-tight, skin-crawling sensation I’ve had most of the night intensifies.

“I wasn’t creeping. Jesus, Delphi, it’s not even five.”

“Nope,” she sings, still picking out her meditation tune. It’s light and thoughtful and kind of intriguing, if you’re into that kind of thing at fucking dawn-o’clock in the morning. “Yet the fates look upon us with kind eyes, even—”

“Why are you out here?”

“Anyone can be on a porch.” She strums her guitar as punctuation. Delphi’s in a padded lawn chair with a padded footrest, one foot propped on it, her other crossed at the ankle. She switches tunes. “—if you leave without saying goodbye.”

I don’t break eye contact.

Neither does she.

Delphi has big brown eyes that look ridiculously earnest, even when she’s making up songs about shit that’s none of her business. Between that and her dark, curly hair, pulled up on top of her head in this comfortable messy bun, and her oversized crew-neck and leggings, she just looks…

Soft.

She keeps playing that tune.

I think I know it from somewhere, but it’s also fucking dawn, so I can’t be totally sure.

“I didn’t want to wake anyone up,” I say, after a long interval of meditation music. “You don’t have to sing about how fucking polite I am.”

“Apollo’s already awake,” she sings. “He and Artemis left an hour ago.”

Okay.

I did not know that.

I thought, when I stopped outside the door of the bedroom they’ve been sharing since Apollo almost died last month, that they’d both still be asleep. Not like normal people. I don’t think there are any normal people in this family. But like people who don’t have to hustle for a living.

“To go where?”

“The grounds.” Delphi tips her head toward the extensive grounds, which are part of the castle. The estate. Whatever. “To hunt.”

“To hunt for what?” There are probably deer out there. Pheasants. Whatever people who own castles—a group that now includes my extended family—hunt for sport.

“Each other.”

My chest hurts. 

Then it hurts more. 

Then it goes warm and confused.

Maybe I’m having a heart attack. Maybe I’ve been having a heart attack since childhood.

That would explain a lot.

Delphi plays her mysterious-ass tune and hums along with it while she watches me have a heart attack.

When I don’t die from the heart attack, I try to focus.

Artemis and Apollo waking up early to do weird shit in the woods is normal. I don’t know what Delphi means about hunting each other, but my guess is that they made up some capture-the-flag type game when they were younger and still play it.

That is what’s giving me a heart attack, I guess.

And by that, I mean everything, from childhood to now.

I mean Apollo flying to fucking Mociar in the middle of the night to turn himself over to rogue Mociaran soldiers in exchange for about a hundred hostages, mostly women and girls, who were being held for future use as leverage to facilitate a military coup.

Apollo is the one who owns a think tank. Apollo is the one who does backchannel negotiations for the U.S. government. Apollo should have known better than to turn himself over to rogue fucking soldiers who were under the orders of Paul, the man who once kept us hostage, along with our mother, in the brothel he owned.

But Apollo didn’t know better.

Apollo thought his life was worth giving up.

Because Apollo had just come to understand that everything that happened to him—everything that happened to us—was real.

All the way across the Atlantic, I kept telling myself he had to have known. He had to have known, deep down, that our childhood wasn’t the bad dream our mother tried to frame it as. He had to have known that sometimes you lie to children to get them through the night.

But then our entire family—sans Artemis, who had come to Mociar with Apollo—landed in Germany and found Apollo choking on blood while he fought with nurses and burned with a fever and hallucinated.

So—

He hadn’t known.

He hadn’t known on any level that would be enough to save him.

That’s my fault.

It’ll always be my fault.

But Delphi isn’t singing about Colonel Paul leading a new group of rebels. She hasn’t said the government in Mociar collapsed. I would stay for those things. I would stay if the rest of my family went home.

“—in part,” Delphi sings. The melody’s a little different. Shifting at about the same speed that the sun’s coming up. “You’ll always be looking through the dark until you know it’s not a mirror but a—”

Right. The porch. The German vacation castle. That we’ve all been staying at—our whole family, plus Delphi—for weeks while Apollo recovered and our adoptive father, Zeus, quietly lost his mind some five separate times and his brothers picked up the pieces, and our adoptive mother, Brigit, got swooped up into the arms of her sisters-in-law, and there were plenty of hugs and sincere conversations to go around.

“—rover on a red sand sea,” Delphi continues, then hums a few bars, then switches back to the meditation tune.

Now I really am having a heart attack. Because there’s no reason Delphi should be singing about rovers. 

I probably missed some of the lyrics. 

Her song wouldn’t make sense even if I did hear all the lyrics.

Delphi has her head tipped back against the cushion and her eyes closed, so she can’t see me staring at her.

Either she’s making shit up off the top of her head that’s uncannily relevant to my secret fucking life, or she’s…

Not making shit up off the top of her head.

I don’t know which is worse.

She keeps her eyes closed.

I make a show of taking my phone out of my pocket and swiping through apps. A bird calls across the courtyard, a high, clear song that blends in with Delphi’s mysterious tune. God—it’s so familiar. Where the fuck have I heard it before?

“My car’s here,” I announce. “I’m sure I’ll see you back home.”

“If you’re not busy,” she sings. “Then you might see me.”

“Are you always like this?”

“Like what?” sings Delphi.

“Singing.”

“Stop wond’ring, stop wond’ring, and know it’s true, true.”

“Okay. Well. Have a good flight.”

I go down the three porch steps. Across the courtyard and past at least one waist-high stone wall, sun glints off the top of the black car that’s waiting for me.

“Cufflinks called you home because he really misses you,” Delphi sings, slightly louder.

My toe catches on the edge of a paving stone.

Instead of falling on my face, I whip around and stare at Delphi again. “The fuck did you just say?”

“You heard me,” she sings, face tipped toward the sky.

“He’s not—”

I snap my mouth shut before anything else can come out. The best thing to do in any situation like this is shut the fuck up. Don’t say anything else. Don’t give them more than you have to. Just shut up.

Delphi is the second person to mention cufflinks.

That doesn’t sound like anything. I know that. That sounds like the ravings of a man who’s about to have a nervous breakdown.

I might be about to have a nervous breakdown, but it’s not just the cufflinks.

It’s that Hercules, our adoptive brother, mentioned a guy wearing cufflinks at Orion and Calliope’s birthday party on the aircraft carrier Intrepid right before Apollo lost it and came to Mociar without telling anyone.

It’s that Hercules, that asshole, also mentioned that the cufflinks were an homage to Spirit and Opportunity, the fucking Mars rovers.

And the reason he was saying all that shit—right there on the deck of the aircraft carrier, while Apollo sweated and did deep breathing exercises and tried to pretend it was chill that he had just announced his secret engagement to our adoptive, non-biological sister Artemis out of fucking nowhere—was because—

Was because the party had a celestial theme.

Was because I had half-assedly come as Mars.

Was because Hercules had convinced himself that I brought a date, and that date was a man wearing Mars-rover cufflinks to match with me.

But I didn’t bring a date.

I wouldn’t bring a date, because the only person I’m interested in seeing in any capacity but mainly a power exchange capacity is a man I’ve never laid eyes on.

I don’t know his name.

I don’t want to know his name.

That’s all beside the point.

Delphi could have heard about the cufflinks from Hercules, who would gladly tell her about them and probably has told her.

What Delphi can’t know is that someone did order me home in the middle of the night, and not because he misses me.

But whoever Delphi is singing about—Cufflinks—can’t be the same person who called. There’s just no way.

My bottom lip stings. I’ve been biting it to keep shutting the fuck up, I guess, so I lift my teeth out of my own lip and take a breath of the fresh air.

Delphi is still playing that tune.

She cracks one eye open and peeks at me.

I narrow my eyes at her. “Your song sucks.”

Delphi laughs and keeps playing while I turn my back on her and stride across the courtyard, heading toward the car. Everybody else leaves this evening so they can fly at night instead. That’ll give me some time to collect myself once I land.

That’ll give Pav time to collect me.

I get to the car. Climb in. Exchange polite greetings with the driver. The castle is a few stone peaks in the rearview mirror when my phone vibrates.

Pav: Tell me when you get on the plane.

Ares: Not on the plane yet

Ares: But I will

Pav: Good.

It doesn’t matter that he didn’t write good boy. It doesn’t matter that he never says that in text messages. 

It’s implied.

The implication alone is enough to make me rock hard at five in the fucking morning when I’m halfway around the world.

I want to write something back. Send a sickening emoji, like a heart or some shit. A star. Maybe the one that represents an explosion.

He’d know what I meant.

Or he’d think I meant something insane like I’m in love with you and it doesn’t matter that I’ve never seen your face. 

I don’t send anything.

Takes forty-five minutes to get to the airport. Another ten, and I’m boarding the plane. I bought both seats in my row in first class so I can close my eyes and not lose my shit on the flight, and I settle in next to the window.

The sun’s up now. It’ll be another long summer day in Bavaria. It’ll be a long-ass flight for me.

All I have to do is get through it, and then I’ll get what I need.

Ares: I’m on the plane

Pav: You’ll come straight here when you land.

Ares: Yes

Pav: Good.

Under the white-noise of the plane’s air filtration system, Delphi’s tune plays in my head on a loop.

A red-headed flight attendant is demonstrating how to buckle our seatbelts, looking as chipper as the afternoon, when the tune latches itself onto a memory.

College, I think. Somebody’s playlist. New songs with old ones that made people laugh and dance and sing along.

Delphi wasn’t playing a new song. She wasn’t even playing a made-up song. The meditation music wasn’t meditation at all.

It was Telephone by Lady Gaga.

Having the row to myself doesn’t make the flight relaxing.

My skin gets tighter with every passing mile over the Atlantic. My muscles ache from how bad I want to be on the ground, then in a fucking car, then in Bethesda.

There’s nowhere to work off that energy on the plane, which is why I make my second mistake. I made the first one in the Bavarian castle my Uncle Hades owns now.

The first mistake was booking a commercial flight that lands at Dulles.

I’m first off the fucking plane, and I still walk out into morning rush-hour bullshit. The airport’s full of people who all want to be in my way. That’s probably why I’m on the sidewalk at the pickup area before I remember I didn’t book a driver to meet me here.

So I rent a car, which takes another twenty minutes despite my Enterprise Extra Plus membership or whatever it is, and immediately hit morning rush-hour traffic.

I want to speed over the shoulder. I want to get out of the car and move the other vehicles with my bare hands. I want to instigate a fight just for the hell of it.

I don’t.

I settle for speeding, and a few reckless lane changes.

With the traffic, it’s forty minutes to the gated community where I meet Pav. Does he live there? I don’t know. Does he just own a luxury townhouse for kicks? I don’t fucking care. I abandon the rental car by the clubhouse and walk the rest of the way.

For some fucking reason, I bring my duffel bag with me like I might stay overnight.

I’m not going to stay overnight.

Pav’s townhouse—or the townhouse where we meet—is four stories and has an elevator and a rooftop terrace. The most important thing about it is that there’s a private entrance next to the garage, blocked from view by a row of tall hedges. 

There’s a keypad on the door. 

There’s a code.

The lock clicks open when I press the last number of the code. It clicks again when I shut the door behind me.

I don’t think about how many other people have the code.

I don’t think about whether Pav had this room purpose-built for…other people.

Right now, I don’t fucking care.

All I care about is that I can breathe.

Because everything in this entryway—this mudroom—whatever the fuck it’s called—is the same as always.

The coat hooks. The cupboards set into the wall. The carved shoe rack.

The bench.

The blindfold.

The collar.

I stop thinking completely, hang my bag on one of the hooks, and get to work on my clothes. Shirt. Undershirt. Jeans. Socks. Everything but my briefs goes in a folded pile on the bench. My hands are shaking when it’s time for the blindfold. I miss the buckle on the collar three times before I get it on.

I’m not nervous about what’s going to happen. I just didn’t think I’d make it.

Through either of the flights. Through the month in Germany. Through the hospital with Apollo. 

Through anything.

But I did, and I’m here, and that shit is none of my business anymore.

What is my business is going to my knees on the doormat by the inner door. It’s thick. Soft.

It feels good.

It can’t be longer than thirty seconds before the door in front of me opens.

Doesn’t matter that I can’t see. I feel everything. The subtlest shifts in the air make the hairs on the backs of my arms stand. With the door open, the pressure equalizes between the mudroom and the parts of the house I can’t see.

It equalizes between the desperate feeling I’ve been fighting off and the promise of calm, if not closure.

Pav smells like leather shoes and clean clothes and cologne so light I could have imagined it. The tip of his shoe touches the tip of my knee.

“Hello, pet,” he says above me, his voice wry and even. “You’re late.”