“Oh, please, Diana,” the mother-in-law sneered. “You know it’s true. Chloe has been panting after Mark for years! Didn’t even care when Clara got engaged to him.”
“What is all this shouting about?” Aunt Marlene demanded, arriving with the Pomeranian clutched to her chest. “You’re upsetting Dee Dee!”
The mother-in-law turned her considerable wrath on Marlene. “You! Get that ridiculous rat out of here! This is a wedding, not a circus!”
Aunt Marlene shrieked in righteous indignation. “He is a registered emotional support animal! How dare you?”
The argument fractured into a multi-front war. It was no longer about a perceived slight. It was about years of simmering resentments, class snobbery, and a deep-seated hatred for a small, yapping dog. The groom, bless his heart, made one last, desperate attempt to regain control. He grabbed his new wife by the arm, trying to pull her away from the screaming knot of women.
“Clara, that’s enough! We’re leaving!”
“Don’t you touch me!” she screamed, twisting out of his grip. She shoved him, and he stumbled backward. For a horrifying, slow-motion moment, I saw his trajectory. He was falling toward the cake. The towering masterpiece of buttercream and raspberry that had taken a team of four pastry chefs two days to construct.
Mark hit the cake with a soft, sickening thud. Almost instantly, a tidal wave of white sponge and pink goo erupted across the pristine lawn. Raspberry filling splattered onto designer dresses and rented tuxedos.
The screaming stopped, replaced by a collective, horrified gasp. The disaster I had been anticipating all day had finally arrived.And it was stickier, and somehow more pathetic, than I could have ever imagined.
The silence of the cake-tastrophe lasted for a single, surreal heartbeat. Then the groom’s mother pointed a buttercream-splattered finger at the bride.
“You see! You see what you’ve done! You’ve ruined everything, you hysterical little brat!”
Apparently, she’d forgotten about Chloe entirely. It made no sense, but what did, in my life?
On the other side of the meadow, the men had started a brawl. The groom’s uncle said something I couldn’t hear, and the bride’s father lunged toward him. “I’ll teach you to talk to my daughter that way!” he roared, his face turning a shade of alarming purple.
A groomsman tried to intervene, spinning the uncle out of the way. The father stumbled and fell face-first into the wreckage of the cake. He came up sputtering, his face a mask of white frosting and raspberry jam. He looked like a casualty from a clown war.
I had to do something. This was my event, my responsibility. My professional identity was being systematically dismantled and smeared with buttercream. The chaos was a vortex, a living thing that was actively hostile to order. My mind was already racing, trying to formulate a plan. Call security? Announce the bar is closed? Set off a fire alarm?
In front of me, the guests continued to fight. I took a step back, feeling suffocated by their sheer violence. The retreat was a mistake. Somehow, I managed to stumble straight into a sticky part of the cake wreckage.
My heel caught and slipped. And then I was falling backward. The last thing I saw was the perfect, beautiful, lying blue sky. Then the world fractured.
The shouting, the screaming, the yapping of a small, three-headed dog—it all dissolved into a thick, buzzing silence.
Darkness, absolute and final, swallowed me whole.
9
Hera’s Curse
Alexander
Zeus should have killed me.
As I walked into the heart of House Hestia, the bitter taste of terror and failure filled my mouth. Here, there were no harsh lights, no sterile chemical smells, just a gentle ambient glow from panels woven into the walls by Hephaestus artisans. It was a place of profound peace, and every serene particle felt like an accusing glance.
Andie was somewhere inside this building, possibly fighting for her life. All because of me.
“They’re in the private waiting chamber,” Nikos said, his voice low and grounding at my side. He was the only solid thing in aworld that had become a blur of terror. Behind us, Argos moved in silence. I didn’t know why he’d decided to join us, but I couldn’t be bothered to care.
Nikos led us to a set of frosted glass doors. They slid open with a whisper, and the fragile quiet within fractured under the weight of our arrival.
The scene was a tableau of grief. Helena stood staring at a wall, her legendary composure frozen into an empty stillness. On a low couch sat two men, one with his face buried in his hands, the other rubbing his partner’s back. Andromeda’s fathers.
The man being comforted—Dr. Robert Cross—looked up. His eyes, red-rimmed and hollowed out by grief, found mine. Recognition dawned, and then his sorrow curdled into a raw, undiluted hatred.
“You,” he spat, surging to his feet. His gaze shot to Helena. “What in the hell ishedoing here? Helena, you told me you would handle this!”