There is a moment before everything goes wrong. Before disaster and apocalypse. Before the blood sinks into Bella’s lace. Just a moment, full of quiet panting.

[b]”What a dangerous little knife you are,”[/b] the Nemean says with the voice of someone who appreciates the artistry of a knife, hoisting her up easily off of the queen with one hand. [b]”Good! Your princess will need all the protection she can get. She’s going to the end of the stars. I may have been there, once. Or perhaps that was simply another dream.”[/b]

Her lips are crushing, hungry, on the servitor’s own. She tilts her head down, holds Bella well off the floor. Then she bites down on a vulnerable lip, and laughs deep in her throat. The kind of laugh that suggests she may just pull that frilly lace off right here, if she’s welcomed.[1]

She is every inch her father’s daughter, after all. And Zeus cannot resist beauty.

What a tragedy, then, that there is no time and no opportunity for them.

***

[1]: in the Quantum Tomb, there is a sharp hiss of conceptual breath, as if from the lips of a dreamer who has seen something both dreaded and desired in her sleep. Insofar as anything can be said to happen in that place.