Death's Finest Hour

Chapter Fifty-Nine

They were onto the final stretch of the fight.

Kyra had calmed the dragons. Raya was dead, Dionysus were dead—hundreds upon hundreds of others were dead. And now Fallon marched down the field with a bone in hand.

All these years of self-loathing boiled down to this.

She remembered the burning. All the people she'd killed. All the terrible things she'd done in his name. The things she'd done for him. Done because he said he loved her.

Bastard doesn't know the meaning of love.

But Fallon did. She had a pure love. A life for herself with a man who loved her more than life itself. A man who'd been willing to make sacrifices to be with her. A man who doesn't take no for an answer.

Fallon would finish this today. She'd put Dimitri down and get her happy ever after. She and Seth could piss off somewhere. No more judgement Gods. No cleaning up the Other World. Just the two of them.

They made eye contact. Fallon and Dimitri.

Fallon felt the buzz of that God's magic. She felt it probing at her mind, seeking entrance—but things weren't the same as before.

Fallon was fucking hardcore.

She'd won out against dark magic time and time again. Hell, she'd been wired into a machine for hours and still stood the test against its magic, reliving terrible memory after terrible memory to keep the real information at bay.

And now here she was, face to face with a terrible memory.

"Look at you. My beautiful, alluring Amazon."

Fallon had often worried that some of what she remembered had been true—that the feelings she'd once felt for this man came from within and not from his dark magic.

Looking at him now—free of his curse—she knew the truth.

Fallon had never loved this man. She hadn't even liked him. She'd merely been weak and vulnerable, snatched into the hands of a bad man.

"Dimitri."

"Fallon." He gestured about himself, waiting for more. Waiting for something Fallon had no intention of giving him. "Is that all you have to say? After how things ended between us, I was sure there'd be more."

"Enough."

The sooner she got this encounter over with, the better. Her allies needed her.

"You struck out like a rabid animal and killed me."

She didn't remember it well. It was all a blur of blood, ash and fire. But killing him was the only part she was proud of.

All the memories were a blur. Right up to the moment she'd come to in the temple of the judgement Gods.

"And I'll do it again calmly." This time, she wouldn't need to blackout to kill him. Fallon would drive this bone stake through his heart in a sober mind. "Your time's over. Give up. It's time to go back to where you belong."

The deepest, darkest pits of hell.

"Won't you go there with me?" Nothing about him appealed to her. She saw now that he was smarmy and vile. "For old time's sake. We had a good run, didn't we? Sex and war. You gave me quite the taste for it."

"I've spent hundreds of years scrubbing you from my body. Tonight, I'll wash away your blood."

And she'd enjoy it. Every last second of it.

She'd wear his blood like warpaint.

"I like me a dangerous woman."

"You're disgusting." She flipped his bone in her hand menacingly. Amazons didn't tend to carry weapons—but that didn't stop them from being deadly with them. "Does it please you to see the weak and dying?"