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back.”
    “I’m looking for Sloane,” I answered
honestly. I chose to ignore everything else. It wasn’t anything I
didn’t already know.
    Thalia snorted her disgust. I had never heard
her make a sound like that. In fact, the longer I stood there, I
realized that although she looked impeccable from a distance, up
close there were signs that led me to believe she might not be
doing so well.
    Dark smudges circled her blood shot eyes and
her lips were dried out, almost cracked. Her clothes and hair were
still nicely styled, but she looked alarmingly frail. She was too
skinny, sickly skinny.
    “ Now you want to know where she is?”
she hissed at me. “Well, I don’t know what to tell you, Ivy. I
don’t know where she is. I haven’t known where she is since you
took off and left the rest of us to pay for your sins.”
    “What are you saying?” Desperation laced my
tone, so raw and obvious that her expression softened just a
bit.
    She waved a hand in front of her face, “He
took her. He took my Sloane and Exie and your mother months ago. I
haven’t heard a word from them.”
    “Where?”
    “ I don’t know !” she shouted. “He cut
me loose! That’s my punishment. I’m cut off completely. I don’t get
to hear from Sloane or know what’s going on or if she’s all right.
He told me I would never see her again. I don’t even know if she’s
still alive.”
    I watched her dissolve in front of me. Her
hands flew to her face to cover hiccupping sobs and her thin
shoulders shook from the force of her sorrow.
    Empathy and my own concern rippled through
me, but I couldn’t bring myself to comfort Thalia Clayton. She
brought this on herself by letting her family get so wrapped up in
Nix’s ugly world. Her children should never have been within that
monster’s reach. It was her job as their mother to protect them,
not throw them to the wolves.
    “I know you blame me,” she sniffled. She was
not wrong. “But not all of us can be as brave as you, Ivy. Not all
of us know how to get out. I didn’t know what else to do! I didn’t
know how else to protect them than to teach them to stay in line.
That was the best I could do for them!” She wrapped her arms around
her middle and let her tears stream freely. “If I had known… if I
had…”
    “Where’s Echo?” I asked in an effort to move
on.
    Thalia shrugged. “She probably killed
herself.”
    “What?”
    She turned back to look at me. “I don’t know
that for sure. I haven’t been able to reach her. Nobody has seen
her. I wouldn’t blame her though.”
    The conviction in her voice surprised me. I
had so many questions and I was quickly realizing Hermes was right.
I couldn’t avoid this any longer. Not if my friends were involved
too.
    And because of me.
    “Have you heard from Nix? Do you know where
he is?”
    “Last I heard he went back to Greece. He has
men looking for you, you know. He led the search himself for a
while, but when he couldn’t find you he came back and got the
girls. He thought that might be some incentive for you to reappear.
But you never did.”
    Frustration fissured through me, creating
deep craters that would leave scars on my bones. “I didn’t hear,” I
swore to her. “When I left, I never intended to come back. I… I
didn’t check in because I didn’t want to get anyone in
trouble.”
    She made another derisive sound, “Thanks for
that.”
    I had officially lost my patience. “Thalia, I
asked Sloane and Exie to come with me. I begged them to! We had
planned for years to escape together. That was always the
plan. But in the end, they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t leave. They had
been conditioned to believe we couldn’t make it and so they didn’t
even try!”
    “And why do you think they thought that?
Could it have something to do with their sisters dying?”
    “I know it was that! But that’s why it was so
important that we tried. We would have made it. I made
it.”
    I thought she would yell right back at me.