Sometimes I also wondered what I was doing with her, getting involved in a real relationship, because it wasn’t exactly fair to her. A handful of months ago, I would’ve laughed my ass off at the prospect of something like this, but here I was, in a relationship with Apollo’s daughter.

And besides all that terrible shit I’d done in my past and the shit with the aether that I was still struggling with, I literally had no future.

None.

Eventually, once the Titan situation was handled and I survived that, I would be going back to doing the gods’ bitch work, dealing out Remediations. In other words, hunting down and destroying those who had sided with Ares against the Olympian core. And then after that? Whenever I did die, my soul belonged to Hades. There was no promise of tomorrow and no paradise waiting for me.

So doing this with Josie was selfish. Unfair. The odds were stacked against me, against us, and just like I knew Apollo was eventually going to appear at the most inopportune time, she was going to end up hurt by all of this.

But, like I said, I was selfish.

I couldn’t walk away from Josie. I had tried to ignore what I was feeling for her. I had tried to leave her the day that I’d brought her here, to the University, as I’d been ordered to do, and I hadn’t been able to do it. I wouldn’t be able to do it.

I just hoped she didn’t end up paying for it in spades later.

Despite where my head had gone, Josie smiled up at me. “I’m hungry.”

A slight grin tugged at my lips. “Of course.”

Josie smacked my arm. “Jerk.”

Pushing the darker thoughts away, I draped my arm over her shoulders. “Come on. Let’s head to the cafeteria.”

“Can we grab some food and take it back to my room?”

“Sure.” Considering the cafeteria was becoming more of a warzone between the halfs and pures than a place to eat, I didn’t have a problem with that.

Since the very first birth of the half-blood—the child of a pure-blood and a mortal—the half-blood race was subjugated by those with pure bloodlines. It was a fucked-up caste system, reminiscent of ancient Greek times, where destinies were fated based on whether or not the blood was considered pure.