To Die for... Honor

EIGHTEEN-2

“Following you,” he said, hooking an elbow over the back of the bench. “Less you than One.”

“You know Byron?”

“I knew Three would lead me where I wanted to go.”

It was all so confusing. “How did you know where Three was?”

“I was watching the desert when Albany brought you in,” he said. “Real coup when Hades and Ares showed up the next day. Thanks for that.”

“Why didn’t you show yourself? You were watching Garrick and the guys… Why didn’t you join them? He’s tracing everyone.”

“Using Zone, I figure,” Styx said, showing another flash of a smile. “I knew that project would f**k us all in the ass.”

Damn. Questions crowded her head. She didn’t care about being late for dinner but did worry what would happen if Styx decided to get up and walk away.

“Why did you hide?”

“I have a mission,” he said. “I don’t go back to base until it’s complete.”

“A mission? What mission?”

“I’ve answered your questions, Lady Pandora, now you answer mine.” She couldn’t remember a question, so waited for him to repeat it or come up with one. “What is the deal with you, my brother, and that trailer?” It was difficult not to react. Just trying not to, holding her expression still like stone, Tess feared she’d revealed too much. Damn her inability to bluff. “You trust him or you don’t? You go there. Seek him out… But you’re in there for a helluva long time… Ares doesn’t talk to civilians unless it’s part of a mission and there’s no way he’s screwing you, so what is it? What do you say to him? You’ve gotta be feeding him information, no other reason for the letters either.”

“I didn’t say I was writing to him.”

“You’re writing to someone. It’s him or H. Helen is dead… isn’t she?”

With her lips sealed, she nodded. Confirming her mother’s death wasn’t revealing any big secret. The Olympus factions on both sides of the Atlantic knew that fact.

“What does he have on you?” Styx asked, peering closer. “What game has he got you playing?”

“I won’t ask Z out,” she said, diverting the conversation. “Not just because the idea of spending any time alone with him is repulsive.”

“You’ve gotta be less particular in this game,” he said. “It’s a conversation over a meal. He won’t lay a hand on you. He’ll be dead before you get back to the apartment. We could do it before the meal, but he’ll be suspicious walking into the park with you before the wine… and the conversation. By the end of the night, he’s lubed, figuring out how he’ll maneuver you onto your back when you get inside.”

“Harry would love that,” she murmured.

“H,” he said, catching her eye. “You’ve gotta be careful in the field. You think it’s by anything other than design that I haven’t used real names out here?” She wasn’t a super-agent but should know better. “H’s feelings on the subject are just another reason Z will go for it.”

She shook her head. “You’re not listening. I won’t do it.”

“You don’t have to be afraid,” he said. “H would have my balls if anything happened to you. I’m at your back, you’ll be fine. Even my brother would tell you that.”

Maybe. Yet, the two men spoke about killing each other like it was one day inevitable.

“I’m not afraid,” she said.

“You’ve got a better plan, lay it on me,” he said. “I can get upstairs but prefer to work without witnesses… Collateral damage doesn’t bother me, but only an i***t would murder One and think it would go unnoticed.”

Yeah, the death of a former president, in suspicious circumstances, surrounded by other dead bodies, that would be international news. Styx could be exposed, sure, but so could Olympus.

“You can’t kill him.”

“I know,” Styx said. “I just said that. We can’t wait for intelligence that he’s moving on, that could be months of waiting.”

“No,” she said with a shake of her head. “Not Byron. Z. You can’t kill Z.”

His frown was quick. The anger behind was tinged with confusion and maybe more than a little frustration too. “s**t. He turned you already? You been working with him all along? No way my brother—”

“I’m not on Z’s side. I don’t want you to spare him because he’s my boss or I care about him.”

“Then why?”

Styx may have decided to trust her. Tess wasn’t sure if she could trust him. His plan was to murder Zeus, which worked for her on a selfish level. Except she’d promised to help Daire get his home back.

Her lips dried as she said the word, “Olympus.”

As his expression relaxed, he sank back against the arm of the bench. “Damn, you’re a conformist…” Styx frowned again. “How the hell did that happen?”

“I’m not a conformist,” she said. “And I’m not afraid. Damn, you like to throw around labels, don’t you? You don’t know the first thing about me.”

That raised his brows. “I know more about you than you do.”

“You weren’t at Olympus when I was.”

“No,” he said, not showing any hint he was surprised she knew about her imprisonment at the beta site. “I know you were born on my brother’s birthday. I know six months later H went AWOL. At six years old, Ares was ready to commit his first murder… you.” Daire’s hatred of her was no newsflash. “I know when you were sixteen you started running away. Want to know how many times I was the one tracking you? s**t, Pandora, you about cost all of us our lives.”

Daire hadn’t told her anything about that. “H told me…” Confusion changed the direction of her thoughts. “You knew they were writing to each other.”

Daire didn’t know it, so how could Styx?

“Not exactly,” he said. “Though it doesn’t surprise me.”

“What do you mean ‘not exactly’? You knew they were writing or you didn’t.”

“Then I didn’t,” he said. “Knew they were screwing though.”

No chance of even thinking about a poker face when shock impacted her. “What?”

His head bobbed. “Went on for a few years.” As the questions cascaded through her mind, he shook his head and straightened up. “We don’t have time to talk about this now. I’ve gotta get out of the country.”

“No,” she said, shoving closer to the middle of the bench to grab his forearm. “You don’t have to go.”

“If you’re in Z’s pocket, I need to regroup and come up with another strategy,” he said, meeting her eye. “But when you’re telling him this story, make sure you tell him loathing death doesn’t save him from it.”

“I won’t tell him,” she whispered, determined not to lose an ally. “I won’t breathe a word of this… if you stay.”

“My mission is to take him out,” he said. “Patience is the greatest asset of an operative… Took me a long time to learn that.”

“Then isn’t it best to stay? What if I change my mind? I can get to him, I’m close to him.”

“If you’re protecting him, you’re my enemy.”

“I’m your sister,” she said.

It didn’t sound weird to acknowledge they were family. The reason why hit her quick. If Tess married Styx’s brother, then she would be his sister… in-law.

“You want my protection?” he said. “That includes eliminating threats. I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but my target is a threat to you.”

Quickly shaking her head, she needed to get his agreement soon. “Z wants to put Olympus back together. H didn’t know that Three was bringing me here. The night we got here, Z put in a call to P and H… Ares was there too. Z wants them to figure it out. To put everything back to how it was.”

“He thinks he can trust H again?”

Tess licked her lips. “I don’t know. I thought the same thing, but what’s the alternative? Ares said it to H, if they take Z down, H won’t be far behind. That’s why he refused Operation Zulu three months before it was offered to H.”

“Damnit,” he mumbled, his attention snapping forward. “They offered it to him first.”

You know, for all the love the three men had for each other, they didn’t communicate very well. Daire had told her in bed that he and his father didn’t talk. Turned out the brothers had their secrets as well.

“Why would H loop you in and keep Ares in the dark?”

“Ares is Olympus born and bred,” he murmured. “It birthed him. It’s his mother.” And his connection to his biological mom who was an Olympus agent too. “It’s him, isn’t it? You want Olympus to have a chance because Ares wants it.” Digging her teeth into her lip, she didn’t reply. The way he exhaled betrayed her lack of words was answer enough. “Ares can get just about anyone to do just about anything. Charm, persuasion, violence, he has a lot of tools at his disposal. H taught him well, taught me well too. If you’re putting yourself on the line for them, I’ve gotta tell you there’s a chance whatever you think is going on isn’t real. There will be a larger play.”

Like Daire pretending to be someone he wasn’t in order to get close to her?

“It doesn’t matter why I’m doing this. You have to think about you. Olympus rises again, you’ll have your home back too. You’ll be with H and Ares again.”

“Even if Olympus rises, I’ll still kill Z.”

Astounded, she asked, “Why?”

“It’s my mission. Until he stops breathing, I haven’t accomplished it.”

“Maybe H wants to do it himself.”

Styx inhaled. “If he did, he wouldn’t have given it to me. Killing is my thing… if it’s with my bare hands, all the better.” Probably registering her horror, he shrugged. “Death’s a part of life. I got a taste for it young.”

Yeah, by killing his own father.

“In Vegas, you were close, right there. Why didn’t you reach out to Ares?”

“I don’t know where his head’s at. The sparring is one thing, we trained every day, all day, for hours, days, weeks at a time. We’ve taken each other to the brink of death, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose.”

“On purpose?”

“Boys will be boys.”

If Daire said that, she’d smack him and tell him not to be glib about his brother’s life. Doing the same thing to a man who’d just admitted his favorite hobby was committing murder wouldn’t be a great idea.

“You didn’t approach him because you thought he wouldn’t keep your secret or because you thought you might try to kill him?”

“With the way it went down… what he thinks or assumes… if I approach him and he wants to kill me…”

Hanging in the air with her mouth open, she waited for him to finish, but got to the end of her patience. “If he wants to kill you, what?”

“I’ll let him.”

A shot of something went through her stomach. Alarm? Fear? Sorrow? She didn’t know, it was just such a raw truth.

“You’d let him kill you?”

He nodded. “He deserves to, for the way things went down, the Exodus… We left him vulnerable, we’re not supposed to do that.”

“Out there on his own, you mean? He’s capable.”

“More than capable,” Styx said. “He was always better at the mission crap, the patience, figuring things out, strategy, tactics… I was kill now, ask questions later. I can be unpredictable, volatile. Put him on edge… Guess hanging with me taught him how to process and put up with it on post, but he didn’t like it in the field… He put up with a lot of crap from me, took more than one beating for me, a bullet or two, a blade here and there… But politicking wasn’t us. We saw how it was at the top, what H put up with. We were each other’s backbone. No secrets, not within our ranks…”

The wistful quality to his words drew her in. He was sorry, maybe even hurting, over the way the Exodus happened. Harry had trusted Styx with Zulu, with what the Six were planning, he’d given him the mission. Daire had been in the dark. His father and brother knew what was going on, maybe even anticipated it going wrong. In fact, H, at least, definitely anticipated it going wrong. He wouldn’t have stashed the Scepter if he hadn’t.

“He forgave H,” she said, giving his forearm a squeeze, snapping him out of his daze.

Styx shook his head. “It’s not the same… We expect H to screw us over every once in a while. Keeps us thinking, on our toes, always ready… You’ve gotta learn how to take deceit, process it and shrug it off.”

“He’s got some odd teaching techniques.”

On an exhale of a laugh, he pushed to the edge of the bench. “You’re telling me.”

“I want to meet again,” she said. “Please.”

He considered her for more than a few seconds. “Guess I don’t have anything to rush home for. Tomorrow… go to your coffee place at eleven. Order takeout.” As she did every day. “I’ll be walking out in front of you. Follow me, don’t make it obvious. Don’t approach me or talk to me. Just follow and do what I do. If I disappear, it means you’ve got a tail. Abort and come back to your bench.”

Thinking about being followed made her uneasy. But if Styx could do it without her noticing, there was no reason Zeus couldn’t hire someone else to do the same thing.

“I’ll be there.”

“One more thing,” he said. “You want to be on my team? You tell no one.”

She frowned. “No one? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t breathe a word about me, don’t even hint that we met or talked or did whatever we did. If I think you’ve opened your mouth, I’ll be gone. No goodbye. Just gone. Understand me?” She nodded. “Not to Z, the Six, P, H, Ares, no one.”

Lying to Daire wouldn’t be her default. In fact, it would be damn near impossible. Still, complying meant an ally, refusing meant isolation.

“No one,” she said.

“Good. Now go to dinner, don’t be late… and don’t look back… don’t ever look back, Pandora. Your focus is what’s straight ahead.”

He gave a slight shallow nod, so she copied to show her understanding. Loathed to leave when there was still so much to say, she only got up to do as he said to prove herself trustworthy. Not looking back was hard, she wanted to check if he was still there or if he’d vanished already. But he’d told her not to look back, so she kept on going, eyes front, to return to the apartment.