CHAPTER 54: THE FIRST GODDESS NAME
HAZEL'S POV
"Start talking," I said.
Selene looked at me for a long moment. Then she looked at the statue — at the one eye that had repaired itself and was looking directly at me with the patient certainty of something that had been waiting several thousand years for this exact conversation. Something moved across her face that I couldn't name and didn't try to. Then she exhaled, slow and long, the exhale of someone setting down something very heavy in a room they had not planned to set it down in.
She talked.
I won't say everything she said because some of it was the kind of information that needed sitting with rather than immediate retelling — the shape of a divine betrayal laid out in plain language, the full architecture of what Helene had already told me confirmed and expanded and made more specific. The throne. The arranged match. The theft dressed up as inheritance. I listened and I kept my face still and I let it land.
