Kyra

Chapter Forty-Six

In Ares' chambers, Kyra gathered for a tense meeting with their foursome. They'd brought Angie here directly from the fortress following the dark magic attack. They'd wrapped blankets around her and tried to calm her down. Since getting here, Eros hadn't let anyone near her, nor had he left her side himself.

Kyra placed a glass of water down in front of the human turned Goddess who took it with grateful, trembling fingers.

She backed away after that, choosing not to sit in the open seat beside Ares.

"She's alright now," Ares told a still panicked Eros. "Just shaken."

"This shouldn't have happened," The winged God snapped back.

"All we can do now is make sure it doesn't happen again," Kyra told him. "Angie's being trained to be strong physically. There are exercises the two of you can do to strengthen her mental blocks."

With a stronger mind, Nadine would have a harder time getting in.

"How did you do it?" Eros demanded, glinting eyes set upon her.

"Do what?" Kyra asked.

"Keep her out."

She'd been victim to a similar attack back in the day. A longer one, too. Sure, she hadn't writhed and screamed on the floor—but Nadine had been fucking with her emotions for weeks on end until Ares banished the woman from Kyra's mind.

Since then, Nadine wouldn't have been able to get through no matter how hard she tried.

"I've lived a long life," Kyra said. "I've seen a lot of shit and made a lot of hard decisions. Evangeline is still young. Building strength naturally takes time."

She couldn't be strong if she'd never needed to be. And sure, she'd had an odd life, but none of it had been game changing. The family problems she'd grown up with had shaped her as a person—but she'd carve out her own strength with time. Carving that shit out couldn't be rushed.

"We don't have time," Eros snipped as if Kyra had personally offended him. "That bitch can't mess with her again."

"Nadine said there would be consequences if we didn't drop this," Ares said. "We knew something like this was going to happen."

"She's nomadic and she's desperate," Kyra agreed. "She has nowhere to go and she's running out of options. This was a cheap, lazy shot. Now that she's done it, she's lost her access to Evangeline. We know what to prepare for."

They could stop this from happening again or put measures in place to make it harder at the least. Nadine had showed her hand. A rash move, no doubt. A poorly thought out one too.

"How do I stop this?" Eros hissed. "I don't have centuries to wait for it to stop naturally."

Kyra didn't like his tone. She was trying to be empathetic. Eros wasn't there when the attack happened. That fact alone was killing him. But there was no need to take that aggression out on Kyra. She was only trying to help.

"Vigilance," Ares supplied, shooting his best friend a warning look. "When Nadine did it to Kyra, I banished her from Kyra's mind and broke the link. Training her to use the power inside of her will make her stronger. Infiltrating her with dark magic should be harder."

"The difference being Angie's not one of your ruthless Amazons, Ares."

Kyra rolled her eyes. So he's making it personal. Maybe he blamed Kyra. After all, the attack had happened in her home during the times she'd been watching her. But this could've happened just as easily anywhere else.