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Thanatos remained sitting on the ground, blood running from his cheek and mouth. “Li? You wanna tell this douchebag he’s full of shit?”

“That would make me a colostomy bag, moron,” Pestilence chimed in, reminding her so much of Reseph that her eyes stung.

But yes, she did want to tell her brothers that Pestilence was full of shit. The compulsion to lie was so strong that the evil side of her scales dipped low. She slid her gaze to Arik, who was looking at her as if he fully expected her to explain this all away as a big misunderstanding. He moved toward her, but she stepped back, unable to take comfort from him, not when she didn’t deserve it.

“Limos?” This time, Than’s voice was clipped, threaded with fear. “Say he’s lying.”

“Can’t,” she rasped.

Ares let out a nasty snarl. “Who forced you? What were you threatened with?”

“You think she was coerced?” Pestilence laughed. “Of course you would. Limos would never betray us like that on her own.” He cocked a blond brow at her. “Go ahead. Explain, little sister. Queen of the Underworld.”

“Shut the fuck up.” Again, Arik went for Pestilence, and this time, it was she e, bag, moronwho prevented him from doing something he might not live to regret. When she grabbed his arm, he settled down, though he angled his body so that any move Pestilence made against her would catch him first.

God, she did not deserve him.

“Limos,” Ares said quietly. “Explain.” The word was no less of a command for the soft tone, and she gulped some air like it was made of courage.

“I was raised to be a demon,” she began in a shaky voice. “You know that. But what you don’t know is that I was treated like a princess. I… we… were all part of a plan. From the very beginning, maybe from our conception, Lilith and Satan planned to use us to bring destruction upon the human race.” Her muscles twitched as she forced out the next bit of information. “So when the time was right, I was sent aboveground to study you. To find your weaknesses.”

“You spied on us?” Ares asked.

She nodded. “For a year. You never saw me, never knew I was there.”

A dark shadow passed over Ares’s face, turning his expression to stone. “And what, exactly, did you learn?”

“That your weakness was your loved ones and your arrogance in thinking you could protect them. Than, yours was your peace-loving nature. Reseph, yours was your inability to focus on anything.”

Ares had gone steel-rod taut, and she knew he’d arrived at the end of her story before she’d even gotten through the middle. “Go on.” His voice was dead. And to him, she probably was too. But he and Than had said they loved her no matter what, and she had to cling to his words. “What did you do after you learned what you needed to?”

“I went back to Sheoul, and it was decided that it was time to bring you into our fold.”

“Jesus.” Thanatos jammed his hands through his hair. “What did you do?”

Her throat closed up. The rest of her story only got worse from here.

“She sent demons to attack us.” Pestilence filled in the blanks, his voice so thick with loathing that she knew Reseph was in there somewhere, hating her for what she’d done to him. “She sent the demons to wreak havoc on humans. And then, when things were at their worst, she made herself known to us. She pretended she’d escaped from a hellish existence to find us and tell us the truth about what we were.”

Ares’s eyes became black lasers that lit on her the way they fixed on his enemies. “The demons that tortured and killed my wife… you sent them.” It wasn’t a question. Ares knew. He just wanted her to say it.

She wanted to throw up. “Listen to me, Ares—”

“Answer me, damn you.”

Every instinct screamed for her to lie, but if there was any hope of salvaging a relationship with her brothers, she had to make them understand why she’d done what she’d done. To make them realize that if she could take it back, she wit v>

“My job was to encourage you to war against the demons, to bring humans into it in order to destroy them.” Hysteria had started to lace her voice, and she fought to