“Isn’t it obvious?” he asked quietly. “I wanted to be worthy of you.”

“Worthy of me?” she began. Her words often came out too quick, too clumsy, too sharp, and she didn’t want that. Not this time. “Cas.”

“Lore.” He kept that same soft tone. “I was born knowing how to do three things—how to breathe, how to dream, and how to love you.”

Lore began to tremble. Her breath turned shallow, as quick and light as her pulse as it caught fire in her veins.

How did she say this? How did anyone say this? It was like untying her armor, setting aside her blade, and exposing every soft part of herself to the world. Yet the moment he’d said it, Lore had recognized that sense of inevitability that had woven through all their moments together, old and new. How she’d been stumbling toward him, even as she pulled back against the tether between them.

Tears dripped down her face, curling over her cheek. She had always been that girl, her feelings unbearable, her hair wind-matted as she ran through the city. But then, Castor had always been that boy who ran alongside her.

“Did you hear the one about the turtle on Broadway?” he said softly, touching a finger to one of the tears.

Lore gave up on words and kissed him.

Castor drew in a sharp breath as her lips touched his, uncertain at first. Lore pulled back, holding his face in her hands as she studied him and his bright, burning eyes; she wondered if it would be her last kiss, or if any of that mattered when this was now, and they were here, and the growing wind was singing through their city’s streets.

Castor wrapped an arm around her waist, carefully drawing her into the heat of his body. He ducked his head and found her mouth again, brushing her lips with his smiling ones, like a challenge.

When had she ever refused a challenge?

Lore kissed him again, meeting him there, pace for pace, touch for touch, until she became lost in it, rising and falling with the push and pull, the advance and retreat. She’d acted on instinct in the park, giving in to the pull of him, but this—this was intention.

Lore had kissed others before. Almost always drunk and in the dark, letting alcohol become the barrier between her and the emotions she hadn’t wanted to feel, and the things she wanted to forget. What had happened that night in the Odysseides’ home was like a phantom tide that swept in and out of her mind, etching deeper into the sand with each return. Sometimes she could go weeks without thinking about it, sometimes days, sometimes only hours. But then it would come again: disconnection from the body she fought so hard to strengthen, the suffocating feeling of powerlessness.

Maybe it would always be part of her, but she was learning how to move through it and reclaim herself with choice. Right now, with Castor, she didn’t feel powerless. She felt triumphant. Like everything in her body had suddenly connected and electrified.

His lips were soft as they brushed against hers, capturing the last of her tears, but grew insistent, harder, at her urging. It wasn’t enough. She wanted to touch him everywhere, to melt into the warmth pooling low in her body that was desire, and the tender ache in her heart that was love.

A peal of thunder finally broke them apart. Lore started to drift back, but Castor held on a moment longer, running his hands down her arms, absorbing the feeling of her skin against his.

She pressed her face to the warm curve of his shoulder, breathing in the scent of him. Her hand trailed along his chest to the place where he’d been shot.

“What’s going to happen to you when the Agon ends?” she whispered.

Lore felt him smile against her skin. “You gonna miss me, Golden?”

“Maybe I like having you around,” she said. “You’re easy on the eyes.”

She was tempted to stay there forever, listening to the storm, imagining a different life. But as thunder broke over the sky again, Lore made a decision.

“I’m going to the Phoenician,” she said. “Will you come with me?”

His eyebrows rose. “The old Kadmides place? Why?”

“Because,” Lore said. “I left something there, and it’s finally time to go pick it up.”

“CAN’T SAY THEY DIDN’T improve the place . . .”

Lore glanced at Castor, allowing herself a little laugh. “I got a big hit of nostalgia being up here again.”

A day after the ill-fated meeting between her father and the Kadmides, Lore had brought Castor into the Murray Hill neighborhood to spy on the Phoenician with her. They’d climbed the fire escape of the building across the street, the exact way they had that evening. Back then, Lore hadn’t told Castor the truth of how she’d found the location—she just said that they were on their own kind of hunt.

After the Kadmides sold the property, it looked like it had become a fitness boutique, which also closed. In the months between then and now, rats had invaded, it had been bombed out with pesticide, and now a pita restaurant was being put in. A true New York City circle of life.

Lore looked over to Castor’s face, his striking profile outlined by the night-stained clouds. The air had taken on a warm, drowsy quality as humidity settled back over the city. If it hadn’t been for the reek of stale water and rot, she might have felt like she was dreaming.

The floodwaters had been slow to recede after Tidebringer’s death. To Lore’s eye, everything was starting to look as if it had been painted with watercolors; edges were softened and colors stained darker.

Lore pushed up from where she’d been flat on her stomach at the roof’s edge and scanned the nearby buildings one last time. It was just shy of midnight and the start of the Agon’s fifth day, but there were no New Yorkers out and about—or, it seemed, hunters.

Castor straightened as well, letting out a soft hum of thought. His hair was curling and glossy in the damp air.

He really was beautiful. Lore had wondered, from the moment she’d found out what he’d become, how much of the old Castor was left—as if their years apart hadn’t dismantled and remade her, too. She had asked her father once if inheriting a god’s power meant absorbing their beliefs, their personalities, and their looks.

Power does not transform you, he’d said. It only reveals you.

From what she had seen, immortality turned back the clock on the older hunters who claimed it, returning them to their physical prime and imbuing them with more power, more beauty, and more strength. But it couldn’t fix what was broken or missing inside them.

The same was true for Castor, but power had only strengthened the good in his heart. Each time she met his gaze, she saw all those things she’d lost when he left her life. Things she never thought she’d have again.

Things that would be taken from her once more at the end of the Agon.

It was too painful to think about, so she didn’t.

“I have to admit,” Castor said, “I’m a little sad it’s gone.”

For a moment, Lore wasn’t sure what he was talking about.

“The last time we were here, I imagined us older, sneaking inside the bar under all of the Kadmides’ noses and ordering a drink,” he said. “Do you remember the serpent mask they hung in the window?”

“The one that supposedly belonged to Damen Kadmou?” Lore asked. The first new Dionysus. “Yeah, why?”