POV: Eros
He can save them all. But the cost is her freedom.
I stand at the boundary between the between-space and the physical world and I watch her understand that I'm here.
The moment she felt the awareness of me shifting from background-presence to something more direct was the moment I'd been timing since before the fire last night, since before the parley, since before the bond detonated in the throne room. The timing matters with Aphrodite in a way that timing doesn't always matter with mortals — she processes things in a specific sequence and the sequence has to be respected or the thing being processed gets filed as threat rather than information, and I need what I'm about to do to be received as information.
She's sitting at the parley ground with the plan's unsolved variable in front of her and the King watching and her mates around her and the morning light carrying the honest quality of the King's territory after partial breaking, and she knows I'm here.
