"Did you see Akira? Marcus said she's in the compound," Kay asked Perseus, who intently watched Cat teach some young werewolves how to defend themselves against an adult, and it wasn't because he had any interest in the lesson.

Her words instantly brought his attention to her, and his expression made her uneasy.

"She's with Zeus," he said, a worried frown tugging at his brow and dark shadows in his eyes.

"Didn't Thane forbid us to go in there?" she asked.

Since they brought in Thane's eldest living son two days earlier, the compound has been abuzz; although she had not seen him for herself, she heard the stories.

Of all those they rescued, only Zeus refused to believe that Thane was not responsible for what happened to his wife and seven children. Whatever Azera did to him, he was almost feral, and after several attempts to reason with him, Thane gave up.

Her father was not a man to give up easily, but whatever he encountered in Zeus left him without an answer, and he stopped even trying.

"The days when my little sister blindly obeyed our father is long past," Perseus said, returning his glace to Cat, but his attention wasn't on the vampire. "I suggest you wait until she emerges. Why are you looking for her?"

"She wanted to talk to me about something."

"Kay?" he turned his head and looked her straight in the eye. "Don't go in there."

"Yes, I've got it."

Something about the sadness in his eyes got to her, and she nodded.

***

"Princess?" Rosha called out, and she stopped walking. "Queen Akira said she'd talk to you later, but she forgot her communicator in the cell, and I don't want to go in there."

For a second, she only stared at one of the most fearless vampires she ever met, and the unease in his eyes as he avoided her gaze stirred her curiosity.

"Thane forbade entry without permission," she reminded.

"If he gets that communicator, he can short out the lock, and he'd be loose in the compound. If Perseus, Atlas, Athena, and Darius were not there when we rescued him, he would have killed us all. Only you and Prince Perseus are currently in the compound."

She phoned Akira, but the phone went straight to voicemail. What was she afraid of? Squaring her shoulders, she motioned with her head, and Rochas led the way.

"Make sure no one knows of this," she warned, and he nodded, looking like a jackrabbit caught in headlights.

***

The door opened, and a hollow feeling settled in her abdomen. What was with this childish fear? She faced Azera; how could Zeus be worse than that woman?

Despite her curiosity, she resolved not to even glance at him and spotted the communicator. The upturned table told her he already tried to get at it, but instead, it fell out of his reach, and the screen broke.

"The little vampire-crossbreed-bitch that my father whored out to the vampire prince after leaving at Azera's mercy for more than a decade," he hissed, and she almost glanced at him. Turning back, she never lifted her gaze to the cell. "You must be a spineless little thing to realize how they used you and still do their bidding like a lapdog."

She just had to reach the door without letting him get to her.

"Did he tell you that he actually fucked your mother and that she wasn't artificially inseminated?"

That almost made her look at him. It was a cheap shot in the dark, nearly breaking through her defenses. How would he have learned anything about her?

"Avery Dunkirk, 326 Michelin Avenue."

She froze with her hand on the door as her heart started to pump in her chest.

"All the others had numbers and no names. But you had a file, Daniella Connor. Did you ever notice that your parents were married less than seven months before you were born?"

Zeus realized he had her attention, and all she had to do was turn the knob, but she didn't.

"Azera loved to tell me all about my so-called father. She showed me pictures of the blond woman who caught a man as old as time's lecherous intentions because of her bloodline. He could just have ensured that she was sneakily inseminated during an exam as they often do, but no, he went out of his way to meet a twenty-five-year-old woman. Avery had to be slightly bent or suffer from daddy issues to fall for his charm, but she did. He knocked her up and walked away, leaving her to marry her high-school sweetheart."

"Shut up," she bit out, finally looking at him, and if she wondered what Thane looked like as a young man, this was it. Down to the color of his eyes, except they glinted with such hatred and dislike that she wanted to back away from him.

"The truth not to your liking? You are not a seedling, you are as much Thane's daughter as any of us, and even Akira didn't know. She messed with your DNA during the turning, but she didn't need to. You were always destined to be powerful, and one day, you will be even more of a force of nature than any of us. None of your brothers and sisters possess such powerful bloodlines. Do you really think that now that you have served your purpose, he would let you live to equal him? With Azera already controlling the dark?"

"I am leaving," she said, shaking as she turned the knob.

"Thane didn't save you; he used you. If not for Akira, you would have died as you were intended to do. No one was ever supposed to find out you were really his daughter in the truest sense of the word, nor were we supposed to be alive. You and Akira forced his hand, but I warn you now, Father's only biding his time."

"Zeus? He may have fathered me in the traditional way, but that changes little. Thane only had to allow Akira and me to drown, but he did not. Father nearly died saving me; if not for Marcus, he would be dead, and so would I.

"He had plenty of chances to rid the world of me and did not. Did it ever occur to you that your paranoid shit may just be in your head because it is far easier to hate the world and everyone in it than to deal with the loss of your family? Why don't you just accept that your brothers and sisters live, they finally made new lives, and unlike you, they've moved on? Azera killed your family; she admitted it in her journals, and we now possess them all. She was even friendly enough to digitize them. How did she word it?" Kay hesitated momentarily, but then she squared her shoulders; he would show her no mercy.

"Keysha pleaded for her children, offering me anything I wanted if they may just live. I laughed, licked the salty tears from her face, and made her watch as I slit their throats one by one with their grandfather's spear, starting with the youngest. Such small children should not see so much blood before they die."

The color leached from his face. He staggered backward against the wall and slowly slid down it until he sat flat on the ground, his eyes blazing like blue fire.

"I left her for last..." She didn't say the rest; it was too horrible to recount.

"That is what Azera claimed that father did..." he said as she opened the door and glanced at him again.

"Father attended a banquet in Rome in honor of his old friend, Sestus' sixtieth birthday. A landmark occasion for the humans of that time, and he was more than six hundred miles from your home. I know this because Father said so, and her diary corroborates it. Akira checked the facts because she knew you would not believe her word, but it seems you would not even give her a chance to speak. Were you too busy ripping her a new one as well?" he glanced at her, looking suddenly older and haggard.

"She said father violated my wife before killing her. Would you forgive such a thing?" he asked, wiping his face as if to scrub the image from his mind.

"According to Azera, she was... violated, but at her order by—" She didn't want to say the words, but he kept staring with those eyes, "the men of her guard."

The roar that escaped him sounded animal, and even as she moved through the door and shut it, shaking, she had to wonder how much a man loved a woman to react like that after two thousand years.

His yells of rage followed her as she rushed to the main building, but something made her raise her eyes from the polished marble floor when she got to the security station, and she was met with Thane's fierce gaze.

"There had to be a better way to tell Zeus about his wife than that," he said almost icily, and her back stiffened. 

Did she not feel bad enough that she had allowed her brother to goad her into speaking against her better judgment? But her father was not there, and she should never have entered that room, but then the truth would have remained hidden. Zeus believed what he said, and this once, Azera spoke the truth.

What did that mean?

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