“No.”
“You see?” Argos gestured at Nikos with satisfaction. “Sentiment. It will always fail you, Alexander. When you need him most, your pet will balk.”
He was wrong. This wasn’t a failure of loyalty. Nikos wasn’t refusing out of cowardice or disloyalty. He was trying to protect me from myself, from this insanity, from the monster standing in front of us—the man who called himself my father.
But I had no other choice. I turned to face my brother fully. “Nikos.”
“Don’t ask me to do this,” Nikos snarled. “Alexander, don’t you dare ask me to—”
“I don’t have to ask you.” I met his stare, and I let him see everything. The agony, the desperation, the absolute certainty that this was the only path forward. “You know you need to. For me. Forher.”
His jaw tightened, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. A war raged behind his eyes. Loyalty against love, duty against horror. He looked from me to the churning black water, to Argos’s smug face, and back to me.
“There has to be another way.”
“There isn’t.” I stepped closer, lowering my voice so only he could hear. “Nikos, we’ve looked. You know that. She’s dying. Not her body. Her mind, her soul. The curse is eating her alive, and I can’t stop it. This…” I gestured at the lake, at my father, at the ritual that awaited. “This is all I have left.”
“You could die.” There was naked fear in his tone now. “He said it himself.”
“I know.” I gripped his shoulder, feeling the tremor that ran through him. “But the alternative is watching her destroy herself while I stand by, powerless. That’s a death too, Nikos. Just a slower one.”
His hand went back inside his jacket, and this time, it emerged with the knife. “I hate you for this.”
“I know.”
“If you die—”
“You’ll run House Zeus better than I ever could.” I managed to smile. “But I won’t die. I can’t. Not yet.”
Argos clapped his hands together once, the sound sharp in the humid air. “Excellent. Now that we’ve had our touching family moment, let’s begin. Into the water with you, boy. Let’s see if you have the stomach for it.”
The water wasn’t cold. It was unnervingly warm, a slick fluid that coiled around my legs and chest as I waded deeper. The texture was wrong. Thicker than water should be, it clung to my skin like oil. The mud sucked at my boots, trying to pull me down with each step. Above us, the silent lightning continued its relentless barrage.
I stopped when the water reached my shoulders. Argos waded in after me, clearly more comfortable with this than I was. He looked like a man who’d done this before. He probably had.
“The lightning will make you seize. Your muscles will lock. Your lungs will forget how to breathe. You could drown, or bite your own tongue off. I will have to hold you down.” He pursed his lips. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said he looked concerned. “Try not to fight. It will only make it worse.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?” He studied me for a long moment. “This isn’t about understanding, Alexander. This is about surviving.”
And then he unleashed his aura.
It wasn’t a push or a blow. It was a suffocating pressure, a mountain of force crashing down on my own Alpha nature. My instincts screamed, my own power rising to fight back, to resist this utter domination. It was like a candle trying to fight a supernova. He was older, his power more settled, more ruthless. He’d spent decades perfecting this exact application of power.
He wasn’t just restraining my body. He was pinning my very soul to the muddy floor of the lake. My aura collapsed inward, compressed, smothered beneath his overwhelming presence. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe properly. I was no longer an Alpha. I was just a man, trapped in the grip of a god.
“Now, Nikos.”
Through the haze of pressure, I saw Nikos approach. He’d waded in after us, his movements mechanical, his face pale and grim in the strobing light. The stiletto trembled slightly, a sliver of darkness in his hand. He stopped beside me.
For one horrible moment, we just looked at each other.
I saw the apology. The resolve. The shared, terrible burden of our love.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Then he drove the blade into my side.