Page 110 of Queen of Tempests and Sin

A hot, furious clarity took over as my bruises screamed, but my limbs answered with a speed that felt borrowed. I moved with a terrible grace, and each blow I delivered was a sentence: a punch to his jaw, a knee into his balls, a thumb jab to the soft space beneath his eye. He staggered, and for a beat I saw the man beneath the traitor—fear and greed and something like regret—flash and then bruise over.

He reached for the pistol again, but I didn’t give him the chance. I disarmed him with a twist and a sickening pop—his shoulder protested—and shoved him into the iron bars. The stiletto found his forearm, a shallow cut, neat and burning. He screamed, a raw animal sound, and dropped the weapon.

He lunged with one last desperate grab, and I ducked, spun, and drove my foot into his chest. The impact sent him crashing into the wall; stone cracked, and the breath tore out of him in a single, rattling gasp.

He slid down and went still.

Good. Maybe I’d killed him.

I didn’t have time to check—not with Si out there, not with the dragon’s teeth, not with Ixion’s shadow still crawling through the mortal plane.

I catalogued what I needed in one furious sweep: the ring he’d been flaunting—I snatched it off his finger (because information is leverage), grabbed the pistol, and bolted.

The corridors were a maze of damp stone and dripping arches, the air tasting of iron and old promises. I moved fast, breath tight in my chest, every shadow potentially an Ixion soldier or worse. Around the next bend, I heard it: the metallic percussion of combat—the crack of weapons, yells cut short, Zeus’s lightning tearing through the air, Hades’ voice low and dangerous.

Relief crashed over me so hard my knees nearly buckled. If they were fighting, Poseidon would be there too. If Si was there, then he’d found me. He was close. My storm; my anchor, but I didn’t dare let myself drown in the feeling, not yet. I was still in Ixion’s nest, still hunted, still one wrong turn away from being dragged back in chains. Overjoyed would have to wait; survival came first.

I pressed myself into a narrow side passage and listened. The sounds were closer now: the sharp command of gods, the thud of bodies, the high keening of someone hurt. I head-ducked through a half-blocked tunnel and the world opened into a network of shafts leading upward—towards the man I loved.

My lungs burned; my legs trembled, but the ache in my chest was for him—Si—more than for me. He’d promised. He’d said things he hadn’t said before. I had to get to him; I had to warn him. If I couldn’t stand with him, I’d at least make sure he knew what was coming.

I ran, breath tearing at my throat, the tunnels alive with the sound of footsteps closing in. Ahead, the noise of the fight swelled into a roar; the drums of war, the cries of gods and monsters, pulled me forward.

I wanted to slow down, to taste the victory of escaping, filthy and sharp as it was, but survival and love are practical things, so I kept moving.

The tunnels spat me out into the pale underside of a desolated city, and as I broke into the open air above, I heard it clear as a bell—the sound that would never leave me: Poseidon’s voice—roaring and raw, carried on a tide of battle.

The thunder of brothers, united at last, answering a summons older than blood.

CHAPTER 36

POSEIDON

If they had hurt her, no force in the universe could save the motherfuckers from my fury.

The words tasted like salt and tempests in my mouth.

Theseus and Guinn were the ones who pieced it together. The name slipped from Drakos’s venomous tongue. From there it unravelled: Cadmus, Thebes, the birthplace of the Spartoi. A desolate citadel left to ruin, its belly carved into a labyrinth of tunnels older than memory.

That was where Ixion’s stench led us; that was where they had taken her.

We hit them like a tidal wall.

The ruined city exploded into motion—steel and shadow and raw, pissed-off divinity. Hundreds of Ixion’s soldiers flooded us, armed to the teeth, faces masked and hungry for a spectacle. They met more than gods; they met brothers.

Zeus fell into them as a thunderstorm incarnate, lightning tearing the air in jagged, beautiful screams. Whole ranks folded beneath his bolts, struck down by falling suns.

Hades moved in a dark tide, shadows becoming claws that ripped men from bone and folded them into nothing. Thanatos was a scythe—cold, inexorable—cutting through ranks with a whisper of death that left no fear, only the polite forgetting of life.

Erebus unleashed wolves made of night; they leapt and shredded, eyes like hot coals. Perseus was a blade of furious theatre, moving with an animal grace, blades carving a symphony of ruin through flesh.

Jason—gunmetal and muscle—sprayed controlled, brutal geometry into the press. Bronte’s magic floored them as they stood, and Persephone wielded shadows with the wrath of a pissed-off goddess.

I dry-drowned them—saltless, suffocating pressure that folded men inward; air turned traitor to their lungs. My hands were the sea’s law; where I swept, men found themselves flung to the stone as if tossed by waves that had learned to break bone. The air reeked of ozone and hot fear and the metallic tang of old bargains being paid in full.

We took the enemy. We took them together.

When the last of the soldiers pitched and stilled, a ringing silence settled, the kind that happens after thunder and before you remember to breathe. I moved through the hush like a storm walking home, heart thudding so hard I could hear it in my teeth… and then I saw her.