Page 120 of The Villains of Winter

Her voice cried out. “At least grant me the mercy to live to serve you. Bless me with my antivenin. I will make amends for how I’ve offended you. He will be honored, I swear to you.”

Perseus was wordless. For the life of him, he could not understand the aberration that unraveled before him. He did not grasp nor comprehend the abomination of a relationship between them that he witnessed.

Professor Ilaria scrambled, her ankles stumbling, her legs collapsing under herself as she grasped for the antivenin in her locked drawers. She scoured her desks for the keys, screeching like a banshee with strained vocal chords in frustration. She begged with fragile hands towards Perseus. “Help me.”

Perseus staggered forward.

“Don’t you dare,” James threatened. “Your saliva is on the wine, the cutlery, the cloths, you will be an accomplice of mine. I swear I will end your life after her, if you assist her.”

James did not even mention the tea cup locked in her glass-frosted cabinetry. The footage with the time, the date, and the dinner recorded. The evidence Perseus had been there with him.

Exactly as Perseus had been there right after James torched Lucien.

Perseus sized him briefly, realizing they were exactly the same height and build, and that James was prepared to die. He would end his own life for the cause of avenging his dead friend.

“What the hell do your friends mean to you that you would murder on their behalf?” Perseus whispered in slight apprehension of him. “Do you realize what you’ve done? This isn’t a student anymore, this is a mentor. A well-connected mentor whose parents were high leaders.”

“Was.” James exhaled hard. She had collapsed. Her movement had stopped. It was merely a matter of time. “She was a mentor.”

“There is something severely wrong with you.”

“She murdered my best friend. The first friend I’ve ever had in my life. I behaved in kind to murder her with her own snakes at her own feast.” James only had a small window of time to make it appear incidental. As if due to her lapse of memory, she had mishandled her snakes on more than one occasion, once in July, and once more in August. James began to rearrange the crime scene. He returned the cutlery to their place. He repositioned the trampled flora. “Wulfram said it himself–let there be nothing that stands between you and retribution with an enemy. Not friendship. Not even blood.”

It dawned on Perseus. “You left for Montana to premeditate the murder then?”

James shook his head. “I left months before Finch was killed. None of it was planned until she declared war. Árēs commanded me in the dark of the moonset to end her life. He called upon me as his child.” James evened his breath. Perseus retreated a step backward at his annihilative tone and James realized he’d said the last part out loud. He realized no one on earth would understand him. What did he mean that a primordial god spoke to him?

What did he mean that he thought of the ancient god as his father?

After a handful of minutes, the body began to tremble in postmortem rigor mortis, and Perseus refused to restructure her body to make it appear as though she mishandled her own snake. He couldn’t risk complicity in another homicide. Wilde’s bloodlust had escalated from a student to a mentor. What would be next, the escalation from a mentor to an archon? James reminded him, “You are the one who said you wanted to improve the mentorship of the cabal. Did you mean it?”

“I meant us. That we would become better mentors than they ever were.” Perseus’s voice was constricted with hot anger. “This is the second time you included me in a murder without my permission.” Perseus didn’t know if James would turn the blade on him, therefore, he began to remove the evidence of the feast. “I falsely assumed you cared about consent.”

James struck him down with a dark stare. “You sabotaged the votes. Further than that, you delivered the votes to Claude Montclair to redirect attention from yourself. Be grateful this isn’t you slain instead.”

Perseus swore beneath his breath as he plated the scallops, trashing them into the plastic bags. “I suppose you found out after Callum survived. He told you?”

“I came upon the aftermath.” Elliott could’ve been hurt. James could not forgive that. He very nearly turned the blade on Perseus then.

Perseus exhaled. “I had to protect the two of us–or the two of them. I chose us.” Perseus clenched his teeth. “I regret my inclusion of you.”

“There is no ‘us’ and ‘them.’” James hated the fact that Callum had chosen a side as well. He recalled the moment Callum seethed at him that he was Julius Caesar. “However, if there is an ‘us’ and ‘them’–Callum chose them.”

“Callum chose Elliott?” Perseus was shocked. Callum had allied himself with a labor class student? If he had any sense, he would’ve convinced Claude there had been a random killer in the woods. Calculatedly, Callum should’ve paid the reporters that captured the footage of the winter ritual to doctor evidence to corroborate his narrative. “What have Callum and Elliott uncovered?”

The urge to protect Elliott rose within James. It surged irrepressibly. Even if he knew, he wouldn’t have said. “Nothing else. They’re merely concerned that they’ll be blamed for Lucien’s death. That’s all.”

James needed to keep their secret, if there was a secret. Perseus wasn’t Claude Montclair. Perseus would not simply wake Elliott and Callum in the middle of the night. He would deftly slit their jugular veins with their own unconscious hand, shower, then return to his education.

Perseus would obtain the polemarch’s approval for their executions first.

Then, he would attend their funerals as though he had no part in it.

Perseus would shake hands with their loved ones and he’d offer his condolences with a rueful smile.

Throughout the antechamber, James glanced across the overturned drams of wine, the streaks of blood striated all over the floor, and the squandered sea cuisine. “I trust you will remain silent about this?”

Perseus frowned at him. “We are entirely even. We will not bear ill will any further. I mean it.”