Total pages in book: 95
Estimated words: 89331 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 447(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 89331 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 447(@200wpm)___ 357(@250wpm)___ 298(@300wpm)
“There will be no evidence. I can do whatever the fuck I want to you. When they find your body, it will be nothing but ash.”
Chapter
Forty-Six
Heph
I should have seen this coming. When Athena got those pictures, I checked the security system to see if I could find someone sneaking around taking those photos. I thought that if I found out who was taking the pictures, I could clear Paris’s name or know for sure it was him.
There was no one sneaking around on the video, so I thought it was a dead end. It didn’t even occur to me then that the pictures came from the video feed of the security cameras. If I had realized that sooner, maybe I could have stopped all of this from happening. Maybe Athena would be safe, Eros wouldn’t be on the verge of a murder spree, and Perseus wouldn’t look like he is about to pull out all of his hair.
I need to make this right.
Leaving Eros and Perseus to bicker between themselves, I head to the library. It takes a few minutes to politely push a few party goers out of the room, but as soon as I am alone, I open the safe where Freya kept some extra money and the deed. With it, there is a map of the property. This estate is over a hundred acres. It’s a lot to search, since we don’t use most of it. I start looking at all the buildings on the land. There are many that are never used. This estate used to house tenants in old buildings, and host camping and hunting retreats in the 60s.
Maybe Paris and Athena could be in one of them.
That is assuming he has even taken her out of the house and gone somewhere with a building. He could have just taken her to the middle of the woods.
No, Paris would want somewhere quiet. He would want to minimize risk of something going wrong. Paris has always focused on risk vs reward. He stopped us from doing dumb shit growing up because there was too much risk. Assuming he has Athena captive, he would want somewhere quiet, secluded to hold her.
I just need to figure out where, and maybe what his endgame is. If I know what he is doing with Athena, what his plans are, I will be able to have a better guess but… there is no telling what Paris will do.
I thought I knew him, but Paris has been stealing from us for years. He might have killed Freya. He has been lying about his mom. Hell, Eros is in love and monogamous, and Perseus wants me as much as I want him. Clearly, I don’t know shit. Can my intuition even be trusted anymore?
“What are you doing?” Perseus walks in behind me. “She is missing, and you are just okay with it? You rejoin the party?” He is angry, and I don’t blame him. I deserve all the hatred and disappointment in his voice. Part of me wonders if I let this happen. Not intentionally, of course, but maybe subconsciously. I wouldn’t think I could do something like this, but if I don’t know people I consider my brothers, maybe I don’t even know myself as well as I think.
I love Perseus, and yeah, I like Athena. I like hanging with her. I like her fire, and I love the way she rides me, not to mention those sexy little noises she makes when I touch her just right. But it’s not love. Not yet. Perseus loves her. I can see it clearly. Maybe I am jealous?
I don’t know.
He comes around the front of the desk and sees what I am looking at.
“Where could they be, Heph?” The plea in his voice is enough to break me.
“I didn’t see any tracks of an ATV or anything like that around the house, so it has to be somewhere close enough that Paris could walk either fighting Athena or carrying her. I can’t see her going quietly if she is conscious.”
“She wouldn’t. If she was conscious, the staff would have heard or seen something,” Perseus agrees.
“Maybe they did.” Eros is pacing in front of the desk. I didn’t even see him come in. “I am going to go check with them now.”
He runs off before I can say anything, but that’s fine. Maybe he will get lucky. Paris is smart, so I doubt it, but maybe. At this point, I will take anything we can get.
“Where do you think he would take her?”
With a deep breath, I tell him the answers he won’t want to hear.
“Assuming he left the house, and he is on foot, then he has to be at one of these four buildings.” I point to the four closest structures.
One is a stable that is used as storage. A garage that used to be a carriage house, a small home that used to be for the caretakers that is currently empty, and a cabin that is a bit deeper into the woods that used to be a hunting cabin. When we were teenagers, we used to sneak out there and party, invite a few girls, drink some beer and make the girls think we were doing something wrong, when really Freya didn’t give a shit.