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Would she feel differently? I don’t know. The kinds of negotiations I facilitate aren’t a guaranteed success. Everyone who does enough government business knows that things go wrong more often than they go right. That’s half the reason countries send various representatives to hammer things out behind closed doors. If the general public knew how frequently the wheels came off in even the simplest discussions, there’d be widespread panic.
Artemis and I have discussed this in plenty of depth. She wouldn’t panic if she learned that I tried something and it didn’t turn out as planned.
But if she did feel differently, and she did want to leave…
If all she wanted was to never see me again…
That’s not a choice, is it? For us, it’s not a choice.
And that would be the end.
There would be nothing left.
“Have a nice flight, Apollo.”
I end the call, shove the phone in my pocket, and get an arrow notched in the same heartbeat. Something shifts in the wind, barely a sound, and I turn my head just in time to see the arrow.
The only choice is to drop mine and bat Artemis’s arrow out of the air. It lands with a wet, muffled smack.
The phone call—the blackmail—is a lead anchor to my past, dragging my future under too. She shoots me right into the present, where I don’t have time to think or do anything but register the second arrow. Artemis is mostly a shadow at the edge of the clearing—dark clothes, hints of gold in her hair, bright eyes—but the arrow is a break in the air, hurtling at me.
It brushes by with a slice of pain, like a paper cut or a paring knife across my biceps.
We’ve never.
She’s never.
Her eyes are locked on mine just like they were on Christmas Eve, just like they’ve always been, and I’m nothing but startled heat.
Artemis did that on purpose.
She cut me on purpose.
The bright line across my biceps throbs, cooled by the night air coming through gash in my shirt. Both of us are wearing custom clothes from the same company. They’re made to stand up to hunting each other through the woods, and Artemis just?—
My heart has replaced all my other organs. I’ve never been this full of adrenaline in my life. There’s so much of it that I don’t know I’m stalking across the clearing until I’ve taken several steps.
“You’ll pay for that.” The words come out of me in this shocked, almost gleeful tone that I don’t recognize.
“Oh?” Artemis answers. “Will I?”
I’ve heard challenges in her voice before, but this one gives me the jolting sensation that I might have been wrong about her. That I might not have known her at all.
Or—
Have I not wanted to know?
She notches a third arrow just as I reach her, and the hell with falling back. The hell with letting her shoot at me a third time. I abandon my bow, get inside her guard, and knock her bow out of her hands.
And kiss her like I’m capturing her. Like I’m not going to let go.
11
ARTEMIS
Maybe I shot him because he was on the phone.
Maybe I shot him because he knew that being on the phone would give him away, and he answered that call regardless.
