There, twenty feet across the room, bent over a huge stack of scrolls on his massive marble desk, is Zeus. My great-grandfather.

My heart feels like it wants to pound right out of my rib cage, up my throat, out my mouth, and onto the marble floor at my feet. I can’t breathe. For at least thirty seconds, I stand there utterly still, my pulse throbbing in my ears, and not even daring to take a breath.

Part of it is the fear of getting caught, sure. I mean, here I am in the office of the king of the gods and he is sitting right there! Getting caught could mean more than a simple banishment. Troy would have to search the four corners of the earth to find all the pieces.

But the other part—probably the bigger part at this point—is seeing my great-grandfather. I haven’t seen or heard from him since the day we were sent from Olympus. It was like he disowned me when they banished us.

That hurt. It took me a long time to come to grips with that.

Even if your great-grandpa is an Olympic god with hundreds, if not thousands, of grandchildren—don’t even get me started on the great-grandchildren—you still want him to bounce you on his knee. You still want him to teach you how to climb a tree or to help you do your homework.

The official punishment, being banned from Olympus, having my parents banished and Griffin’s smoted, was bad enough. But the emotional punishment was almost worst. The little girl inside me wants to run across the room, climb onto his lap, and have him hug me and tell me everything will be okay.

Ha, as if that would ever happen. The little girl would be forcibly removed from the palace and probably chained to a rock or sentenced to a stretch in the hottest, driest desert they could find.

Movement behind the desk catches my eye.

A flutter of wings. The golden eagle sits on a golden perch—shocking—right behind Zeus’s shoulder. The bird preens a bit, rubbing a wing over its beak. When it straightens upright, I swear it looks right at me.

From the seemingly vast space across the room, I hold my breath, waiting for the eagle to squawk and draw my great-grandfather’s attention to the intruder standing frozen in the doorway. Just my luck, too, being caught by something as stupid as a bird.

But the squawk never comes. Zeus stays bent over the papers on his desk, scribbling on some, sliding them into piles, and shuffling them around. I can hear the scratch of his quill on parchment, scrape, scrape, scraping like the sound of steel dragging on concrete.