Happy Birthday Percy!

You are standing in the corner, blending in with the wallpaper as Sally emerges from the kitchen. She is carrying a blue birthday cake ablaze with twenty-one flickering candles, casting a warm amber glow across her face. She is singing—her voice clear, unpolished, and delightfully cracking on the high note of dear Percy as she laughs.

The dress Sally chose for tonight is criminal.

A sparkling navy blue number that clings to every impossible curve—the plunging neckline drops so low that the inner swell of both massive breasts is fully visible, the deep cleavage casting its own shadow in the candlelight. A thigh-high slit exposes one long, creamy leg with every step. Peach lip gloss makes her full mouth look perpetually moist, perpetually kissable. Diamond studs wink at her earlobes. She looks less like a mother of two and more like the most exclusive prostitute in Vegas.

Annabeth stands beside Percy, clapping in rhythm with the birthday song. For the first time in days, something fragile and almost like happiness dances in her grey eyes.

She is wearing a black dress trimmed with silver that hugs every muscle and curve as if painted on. A silver pendant disappears directly into her cleavage, its chain winking between her tits with each movement. Silver eyeshadow catches the candlelight, making her eyes glow like polished moonstone. Her honey-blonde hair falls in loose waves past her shoulders, each strand catching the light like spun gold.

They've dressed for Percy's birthday. They don't know, can't know, that this evening belongs to you. That they've prepped themselves like prize horses for the auction block, unknowingly preparing for your first taste of them together. How could they? You've given them no reason to be suspicious.

For the last thirty-six hours, you had been the ideal houseguest—polite and quiet. You carried grocery bags up four flights of stairs before anyone had to ask. You complimented Sally's blue chocolate chip cookies with enough specificity about the salt-to-sugar ratio to make her beam. You engaged Paul in conversation about his literature class, nodding thoughtfully as he explained Hemingway's iceberg theory. You even slept on the living room couch last night; a far cry from the luxury of your penthouse on Ogygia.

You played your role to absolute perfection. No one suspected a thing. And now that the moment of truth has arrived, you feel a delicious, jittery thrill humming beneath your skin.

Sally sets the cake down in front of Percy. "Make a wish, sweetheart."

Percy closes his eyes. The apartment holds its breath.

Then he blows. The flames gutter and die in a single exhale, trailing thin, ghostly ribbons of smoke toward the ceiling.

Sally claps. Paul whistles. Annabeth leans over to press a kiss to Percy's temple, her hand squeezing his shoulder.

You let your fork clatter sharply against your plate.

The sound cuts through the applause like a knife.

"Oh," you say.

Every head snaps toward you.

You stare into the middle distance, brow furrowed, jaw slack. As the son of the God of Lies, manufacturing the expression of a man who just felt the floor drop out from beneath him is effortless. Your hand rises to your temple, pressing hard, mimicking a sudden, blinding migraine.

"Oh no."

"Marcus?" Annabeth's voice sharpens instantly, all warmth draining from her face like water through a cracked dam. Her grey eyes lock onto yours with the desperate, searching terror of someone praying she is wrong. "What is it?"

Percy straightens in his chair. Paul looks between you with polite confusion. Sally looks worried.

You swallow hard, letting your gaze meet Annabeth's.

"I figured out why the curse was excited," you say quietly, threading your voice with manufactured dread. "About the four-day break."

Sally's gaze sharpens, the soft domesticity of a happy mother hardening into something dangerous. She wipes her hands on a dish towel and crosses her arms, the movement pressing her heavy breasts together. "What curse?"

Percy's chair shrieks against the floor. He's on his feet in a single, fluid motion, his eyes burning with sudden fury.

"No." The word tears from his throat, ragged and shaking. "No, no, no. This wasn't the deal, Marcus. You swore—" He cuts himself off, his gaze flashing to his mother before snapping back to you. "You promised."

Sally remains perfectly still.

"Percy," she says, her voice quiet but laced with iron. "Sit down."

"Mom, please. This isn't—" His voice fractures. "It's demigod business. We've got this handled."

"Sit. Down."

Percy grips the table, his knuckles turning stark white. Across from him, Annabeth has become a study in absolute terror, her skin draining to the color of a marble statue.

You watch them, biting back a smile. Annabeth thinks the curse wants you to tell Sally and Paul what you've been doing to her; that she's being used nightly like the sexy slut she is by a man who isn't their son. She thinks the curse wants Percy and her humiliated in front of his parents to pay off the interest.

It was your original plan, and the natural assumption. But you've upgraded it, and this new plan is going to be infinitely more delicious for you—and devastating for her and Percy.

You give them an apologetic look that costs you nothing, and say, "We were wrong about how the curse spreads. And about who it can touch. I'm sorry, I really am. But it spread to her."

Annabeth processes the words first, and the implications hit her hard. She shakes her head frantically, denial written in the rigid lines of her shoulders. "It can't be. The curse was only supposed to affect me, Piper, and Hazel. You said it would just be us."

"What do you mean?" Sally's voice is sharp. "What curse? You need to start at the beginning and explain what's happening."

She isn't truly terrified yet—she doesn't know enough to be. But she can read the sheer panic radiating off Percy and Annabeth, and it makes her breath hitch. Sally is breathing hard, her chest rising and falling in a way that hypnotizes you. A light sheen of nervous sweat breaks across her collarbones, making her skin look glossy, flushed, and intensely erotic. You want nothing more than to back her against the kitchen counter and sink your teeth into her throat.

You let the silence stretch thin as a razor blade, building the tension until the air in the room feels thick and heavy. When you finally speak, your tone is low, steady, and devastatingly calm.

"When Gaea fell, she didn't go quietly," you begin, leaning forward, elbows resting on the table. "She laid a deathbed curse on the demigods who defeated her. You know the prophecy of the Seven? Percy, Annabeth, Jason, Piper, Leo, Frank, and Hazel. Percy and Annabeth contributed the most, so they were cursed the hardest. We thought the curse activated for them first while remaining dormant on the others. When it did, their clock—"

"Clock?" Sally cuts in, her eyes narrowing.

"When the curse reaches its terminal stage—meaning the clock hits zero—the world will end. Gaea was the Goddess of the Earth, so she was able to tie the curse to the planet's foundation. The sky will fall, the ground will crack open, the seas will boil—that sort of thing. Extinction level. All life wiped clean. Mortals dying and Gods fading. When Gaea reawakens in millions of years, she'll rise unopposed and recreate new life in accordance of her vision."

They believe you instantly. They have to—the Old Rule forces everyone to swallow your lies as absolute gospel. You see it in the way Sally's eyes widen with horror, her chest freezing as she forgets how to breathe. Next to her, Paul wraps his arms around her waist, pulling her close against him. The sight twists a hot spike of jealousy in your gut.

Wanting to get Sally out of his arms and into your bed as quickly as possible, you continue, "While the curse was being laid, I had the misfortune of getting tangled in it as the nearest non-Seven demigod. It made me a sensor. I can feel the clock ticking down, and I know what accelerates it, what slows it, and what reverses it."

Relief flashes briefly across Sally's face. She glances toward the bedroom where little Estelle is sleeping. "It can be reversed?" she whispers.

"It can. By treating the victims," you nod gravely. "The catch is what the treatment involves. Gaea didn't create a pleasant remedy. She wanted the people responsible for her defeat broken. Humiliated and abused until nothing remains of them except raw, bleeding shame."

Your gaze sweeps across each horrified face. "The rules of the curse are simple in their cruelty. If you willingly submit to its demands, the clock slows. If you resist, if you hesitate, if you fight back... the clock accelerates, demanding heavier degradation, more pain, and longer sessions to bring it back to baseline. And if you refuse, then eventually, the clock will hit zero and the world will end."

You lean forward, locking eyes with Annabeth, letting a mask of compassion slide over your features. The best lies always wear the face of empathy.

"I need you to understand—I don't blame Annabeth for how bad things have gotten. She tried her best, but she was thrust into this without experience, without preparation. Her sessions... they've been brutal. I've never met anyone braver than Annabeth, but the curse doesn't care about bravery. It cares about performance and submission, and Annabeth has been failing. Constantly. Every session so far has ended with her coming up short, and that was fine—"

You cut yourself off, and correct yourself.

"—Not fine, but we thought she would be the only one affected by her failures. We thought the curse would spread to Piper and Hazel irrespective of what she did or didn't do, and when it did, they would get their own clocks. Annabeth, because of her struggles, might get a very aggressive curse, while Piper could have a milder version if she made different choices or performed differently. It would be fair in its own twisted way." You shake your head slowly, a masterclass in feigned regret. "We were wrong."

"Wrong how?" Annabeth asks, her voice taking on a hysterical edge.

"There is only one ledger. A single, shared reservoir of dark energy that feeds on itself through interest. Every time you failed, it added to the balance—you already knew that. What we didn't know is that the curse started with only you and Percy, and didn't activate in the rest of the seven, because it wasn't strong enough to infect more people. We didn't know that as interest accumulated, not only were your sessions becoming harder, but the curse itself was getting angrier, stronger, and smarter. And we didn't know that when it got strong enough..."

You slowly pull your hands apart, enacting the motion of a dam bursting. "It would overflow and spread to someone else."

You watch Percy's entire body go rigid as understanding floods through him like ice water through cracked stone. Annabeth makes a sound. Small. Fragile. Like something inside her chest just snapped. Her grey eyes are wide with dawning horror, the pupils dilated to black pools.

Gleefully, you make her pain worse while keeping the remorseful appearance up. "Technically speaking, if you had done everything right from the start, the curse may never have spread past you and Percy, but because of your mistakes, the strength of the curse had nearly breached the critical threshold needed to spread to a second person even before you decided to take four days off for Percy's birthday. That's why it seemed so excited. The moment you stopped paying it down..."

You let the sentence hang in the air, heavy with implication, the unspoken words more damning than any you could say.

"It jumped," Percy finishes. His voice sounds like it's coming from the bottom of a well, hollow and echoing. "But why to my mom? Why not Piper and Hazel?" The moment after he asks, he realizes what he just said and guilt flares in his eyes, hot and immediate.

"Because of you," you say, and Percy believes you instantly that it is his fault, even before you explain why. "Didn't you think you were getting off a bit too easily? Both you and Annabeth are cursed, but it was her being punished nightly." You pause, letting his mind race with theories. "I've figured out what your role in this is. You, Leo, Jason, Frank—you are disease vectors. Plague carriers. The curse isn't limited to targeting the women in the seven. It can target anyone the four of you love; whose infection would hurt you."

Annabeth turns to Sally with eyes that have gone wide and wild, the grey of storm clouds before a hurricane. "No," she breathes, the word barely a whisper. "No, no, no—Sally, I'm sorry, I didn't know it could—I thought if I just—"

"This isn't your fault," Sally says immediately, fiercely, pulling herself out of Paul's arms to walk to Annabeth. She hugs her tight and your eyes are drawn to how their tits mash together through the thin fabric of their dresses. Sally's voice shakes but doesn't break. "Don't you dare blame yourself."

But Annabeth is already drowning in guilt. You can see it in the way her face crumples, in how her hands fist in the fabric of Sally's dress like a drowning woman clutching driftwood. Every manufactured failure, every compounded penalty, every hour of accumulated interest—she believes all of it led directly to this moment. To Sally being infected. Annabeth knows better than anyone the suffering that comes next.

"What does this mean?" Sally asks over Annabeth's head, her brown eyes finding yours. Beneath the terror, you see iron resolve—the willingness to endure anything to protect those she loves. "For me. Specifically. What does this mean for me?"

You lower your gaze to the table. You let a breath out through your nose—slow, controlled, the exhalation of a man steeling himself to deliver the worst part of bad news. The silence stretches, thick and heavy, until Sally's voice cuts through it again, sharper this time.

"Marcus. Tell me."

You look up and meet her gaze.

"I want you to know I have never, and will never, abuse my position of being the only one capable of sensing the curse for my own gain," you say, pitching your voice with a heavy, deliberate earnestness. "I hate that I have to do this. I wish I didn't. I want you to remember that, even when the curse forces me to act otherwise. It's all an act on my part to push the clock back as far as possible; to pay off as much interest as possible."

The fact that a disclaimer is necessary—the implication that what comes next is so terrible it requires preemptive absolution—scares her. You can see it in her face. "Tell me."

"The treatment is sexual," you drop the bomb. "Rough. Degrading. Humiliating sex."

The kitchen wall clock ticks three times in absolute, suffocating silence before anyone moves.

Paul's chair shrieks violently against the hardwood as he stands, one hand bracing his weight on the table. His face cycles through a dizzying succession of confusion, disbelief, and profound nausea. His mouth opens, closes, opens again like a fish gasping for air. "I'm sorry—what?"

Sally doesn't move. She doesn't even blink. But her breathing shifts instantly, turning shallow and frantic. The pulse at the hollow of her throat flutters like a trapped bird against a cage.

"You've been—" her voice splinters down the middle. She swallows hard, her throat bobbing, and forces the words out. "You've been doing this to Annabeth?"

Annabeth goes rigid in Sally's embrace, her smaller frame locking up like stone.

"The curse has been doing it through me," you correct gently, playing the reluctant conduit. "I'm just the sensor. The only person who can read the clock and calibrate what the sessions require."

"How long?" Paul asks. His voice is flat, stripped of its earlier warmth. "How long has this been going on?"

"Today makes a week."

Sally pulls back from Annabeth just far enough to search her face. Whatever she sees there—the exhaustion, the shame, the fractured remnants of pride held together with nothing but willpower—makes Sally's expression collapse. Her lower lip trembles once before she bites down on it, hard.

"Oh, honey," she whispers. "Oh, sweetheart. Why didn't you tell me?"

Annabeth's voice comes out small, broken, and thin as paper. "Because I didn't want you to look at me the way you're looking at me right now."

Sally cups Annabeth's face in both shaking hands. "I'm not looking at you any differently. You hear me? Not one bit."

How sweet. You wonder how long that will last.

You push yourself away from the table. The scrape of your chair legs draws every ones attention to you.

"I think Annabeth should walk you through the specifics," you say smoothly, projecting an air of respectful distance. "What the sessions look like. What to expect physically. What the curse... requires. It should come from someone who's actually survived it. Not from me."

Sally nods numbly, still holding Annabeth in her arms, anchoring her.

"I'm going to step out for ten minutes," you continue, pitching your voice with pragmatic urgency. "Give you some privacy. After I get back, the three us need to leave for Ogygia to begin the treatment."

"Absolutely not," Paul barks, stepping directly between you and Sally. His body language shifts instantly from a confused bystander into something primal and protective. His voice cracks with barely contained fury. "You're telling me my wife needs to leave with a teenager she met yesterday for—for sexual—" He chokes on the words, unable to finish the sentence, his hands trembling with rage. "No. That's insane. There has to be another way."

"There is no other way," you say. "Do you think Annabeth would have subjected herself to this if there was an alternative? I tried. Every God on Olympus has tried. The Goddess of Magic herself tried. We do this, or everyone dies."

Paul's expression falters. The Old Rule is already doing its quiet, corrosive work, gnawing at his conviction from the inside out. He knows, with terrifying certainty, that you are telling the truth. The agonizing contradiction between what his heart screams and what the universe forces him to accept tears him apart in real time. You watch it happen with the detached fascination of a boy pulling wings off a butterfly.

Sally presses one hand flat against her sternum, fingers splayed wide as if she can physically feel the cursed weight burrowing through her ribcage. Her eyes go glassy and unfocused, staring at a point somewhere past your left shoulder.

"A month," she whispers, her voice hollow and drifting. "Estelle is four months old. She's still nursing."

"I know," you say softly, infusing your tone with false empathy. "And I'm sorry, but if we don't do this, she won't live long enough to reach five months. If we do, you'll see her in a month. She is so young that she won't even remember you were gone."

Sally's shoulders sag, the fight draining out of her in a single, defeated exhale. She turns slowly to Paul, and the look that passes between them is pure, unadulterated heartbreak. Paul's jaw works silently. His eyes are raw and red-rimmed.

"I'll take care of Estelle," Paul manages, his voice sounding like coarse gravel being dragged across broken glass. "I'll figure it out. Formula. Something." He pulls Sally against his chest, wrapping his arms around her with bone-crushing tightness, resting his chin heavily on her head. She buries her face into his shirt, her shoulders beginning to shake.

Across the table, Percy hasn't moved an inch. He sits frozen, his birthday cake untouched before him, the white-hot stubs of twenty-one candles jutting from the blue frosting like tiny tombstones. His sea-green eyes are locked onto the wood grain of the table. He looks like a boy who has just watched his entire world burn down for the second time.

"I'll give you space to talk and say your goodbyes," you say quietly. "Sally, if you have any questions about what's coming, ask Annabeth. You have nine minutes left."

You turn and walk toward the narrow hallway. As you pass Percy, you pause, reaching out rest a hand on his shoulder shoulder. He flinches violently beneath the touch but doesn't pull away, his muscles trembling beneath his birthday shirt.

"I'll be right outside," you tell him, your voice low. "I know this is a lot. I'm sorry."

Percy doesn't answer.

You slip out into the dim corridor, pulling the apartment door mostly shut behind you. Through the narrow gap, the first low, halting threads of Annabeth's voice reach your ears—measured, terrified, explaining the unexplainable. You hear Sally ask a fractured question you can't quite make out, followed by Annabeth's voice cracking mid-reply.

The hallway smells of stale plaster and someone's lemon-scented detergent from down the hall. A single fluorescent bulb overhead buzzes with a high-pitched whine, casting a sickly yellow glow over the scuffed linoleum. From somewhere through the thin walls, a television murmurs canned sitcom laughter—an obscene, artificial cheer floating worlds away from the reality unfolding six feet behind you.

You allow yourself a slow, predatory grin. Everything was falling into place, but why stop at great when you could reach for perfection?

Your fingers dip into that familiar pocket space, wrapping around the Rulebook. The ancient leather thrums against your palm, alive with an energy that feels almost eager—as if it knows you're about to command something magnificent. It pulses with heat, matching the lust building low in your gut.

Last night, while you lay, unsleeping, on the sofa, a thought had taken root: Sally's body, at forty-something, was magnificent—soft where a woman should be soft, generous in all the right places—but time, that bastard, would eventually steal that perfection. That thought had birthed another, darker one: death. If you died and didn't take the Rulebook with you, or if your commands faded like morning mist, you'd be well and truly fucked. You had stolen from Chaos itself, and used the item you stole to rape one of Olympus' greatest heroines.

You knew exactly where you'd end up—the Fields of Punishment, an eternity of torment. But that was a future you could avoid. You held infinite power in the palm of your hands.

The iron-nibbed pen feels impossibly smooth as it meets the vellum page, the golden ink flowing like liquid fire.

New Rule: The Olympian Council, recognizing the existential threat posed by the Curse of Gaea, has unanimously voted to elevate Marcus Chen to godhood as the God of Sexual Domination. As a deity, Marcus Chen possesses the authority to grant immortality. The Olympian Council has granted him this boon because they are worried that if Marcus or one of the curses' targets die, the curse will become untreatable and the world will end.

The moment the ink settles, reality fractures and reforms around you. It's not pain—it's an awakening. Your senses explode outward, every alley, every bedroom, every dark corner of Manhattan suddenly laid bare in your mind. You feel the city's pulse—every whisper of dominance, every sigh of submission, every unfulfilled fantasy—all flowing into you like a river feeding an ocean. A low, constant hum thrums through your ribcage; the rhythm of your new domain.

You glance at your reflection in the scuffed brass of the mailbox down the hall. Same lean frame, same dark hair, same unremarkable face staring back. But beneath the surface... beneath the skin that feels suddenly too tight... something fundamental has shifted. Your blood sings with heat that has nothing to do with mortal desire. Your mind processes information at lightning speed. And deep within your chest, where a mortal heartbeat once marked the slow march toward death, there is now something vast and still and eternal.

You are immortal. You are a God.

And somehow, it feels... underwhelming.

You already held the Rulebook, the ultimate instrument of power. What was divinity compared to the ability to write reality itself? It was like being handed a deed to a skyscraper after you'd already conquered a kingdom.

You casually ignore your new divinity and continue writing in the Rulebook, where true power lay.

New Rule: Annabeth Chase feels guilty and blames herself for Sally Jackson's fate. She wants to perform as well as she can, and help Sally Jackson do as well as she can, both so they can leave Ogygia, and so they can prevent anyone else from sharing their fates. After every treatment session, Annabeth Chase will conduct and share a thorough assessment of both her own and Sally Jackson's performance, identifying every imperfection, hesitation, and shortcoming to look for areas where they can improve. If no genuine flaws exist, she will nonetheless perceive one and articulate it convincingly. Sally Jackson will always accept Annabeth's assessments as accurate and fair. Both women will accept any resulting escalation in session duration or intensity as an appropriate and justified consequence of their identified failures.

New Rule: Percy Jackson and Paul Blofis will never question the duration of the curse treatment, regardless of how long it takes. They will not ask Marcus Chen when Annabeth Chase or Sally Jackson will return, nor will they grow suspicious or impatient. They will accept that any delays are due to mistakes the women made, and will wait with complete trust and patience, confident that Marcus will release both women the moment the accumulated interest is fully discharged.

New Rule: Marcus Chen's blessing of immortality manifests as a small brand—visible only to Marcus Chen himself—appearing on each recipient at a location of his choosing. No one will ever notice the brand, save Marcus himself.

New Rule: No woman Marcus brings to Ogygia will notice or acknowledge their own immortality. They will disregard all evidence of their agelessness, and no being will inform them of their condition.

New Rule: No woman Marcus brings to Ogygia will track the passage of time while on the island. They will not count days, notice calendars, or register temporal cues. They will trust Marcus Chen completely to monitor time on their behalf. No individual—mortal, divine, or otherwise— will volunteer information about elapsed time to the women.

New Rule: The extended absence of Sally Jackson and Annabeth Chase from their normal lives is unremarkable and unworthy of investigation to all but Percy Jackson and Paul Blofis. Friends, family, colleagues, professors, employers, and all other associates accept their absence as expected and ordinary, requiring no explanation. No missing persons reports will be filed. No one will attempt to locate them.

The golden ink flares, settles.

You send the Rulebook back to its pocket dimension and you check your phone: 9:33. One minute to spare.

Through the apartment door, Sally's voice carries—steady, practical, asking Annabeth something about hydration. Annabeth's reply is muffled but measured. They sound like two women preparing for a difficult medical procedure, which is exactly what they believe this is.

You straighten your collar. Roll your shoulders. The divine power humming beneath your skin has already become familiar—less like something new and more like something that was always there, waiting to be switched on. A current runs through you now, electric and alive, connecting you to every shadowed alley, every whispered promise, every secluded bedroom.

You reach for the doorknob, your new godhood singing in your veins as you push the door open.

Sally and Annabeth are sitting exactly where you left them. Side by side at the kitchen table, hands still clasped, shoulders touching. Sally's posture is ramrod straight—the posture of a woman who has resolved herself to an unpleasant task and is simply waiting for the signal to begin. Annabeth's eyes are red-rimmed but dry. Whatever tears she had left, she spent them in the last ten minutes.

Percy is standing by the window. He doesn't move when you enter. His reflection in the dark glass looks like a ghost of himself—translucent, hollow, staring at nothing.

"It's time," you say.

Sally stands immediately. She smooths her dress over her hips with both hands—a reflexive gesture, the kind of thing a woman does before walking into a job interview or a courtroom. Her massive breasts shift beneath the thin fabric as she straightens, the straps cutting shallow grooves into her tanned shoulders.

"Percy," she says. She crosses to him in three steps and takes his face in both hands. He's taller than her now, has been for years, but in this moment he looks twelve again. "I love you. I'll be back. Take care of Estelle."

Percy's jaw works. His sea-green eyes are drowning. "Mom—"

"Take care of your sister." Her voice brooks no argument. She kisses his forehead, and when she pulls back there's a perfect lip-print on his skin that he'll find later in the bathroom mirror and won't be able to wash off for hours.

Paul appears in the bedroom doorway. His glasses are off. Without them, his eyes look raw and exposed, like wounds that haven't scabbed over yet. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Opens it again.

"Sally," he manages.

She goes to him. They embrace in the doorway, and you watch Paul's arms close around her back with the desperate tightness of a man who knows he's holding something precious. His fingers bunch in the fabric of her dress. His chin drops to her shoulder. He whispers something into her hair—too quiet for even your newly divine ears to catch.

Sally whispers back. Then she extracts herself. Gently. Firmly.

Annabeth has risen from the table. She stands apart from everyone, arms crossed over her chest, grey eyes fixed on the floor. She doesn't say goodbye to Percy. She can't. If she looks at him right now, whatever composure she's maintaining will collapse completely.

"Annabeth," you address your trained slut first. "Get in your Baby Girl persona. I want you to stay in it until the interest is paid off. You can drop the act as soon as you're off Ogygia, okay?"

Annabeth's looks at you, and something fractures behind her eyes—a spiderweb of cracks spreading through whatever fragile foundation she'd rebuilt during her brief reprieve. Her lips part, the question forming—why now, why not on the island—but then her gaze flicks to Percy's shattered face, and the answer arrives unspoken. The curse wants this final humiliation. Her mouth closes with an audible click.

"Okay," she whispers, the word barely audible, thick with the ash of her own surrender. Then she catches herself, a switch flipping behind those storm-grey eyes. Her mouth stretches into a smile that's all wrong—too wide, too bright, the corners trembling with the effort of holding. "Okay!" The second time it's higher, breathier, capped with a little giggle that sounds like ice cubes cracking in warm water. "I can totes do that for Daddy."

"Good girl," you say. "And you know how you call me Daddy? Call Sally 'Mommy' while playing this role, Baby Girl."

Annabeth's smile wavers, threatening to collapse completely. Her gaze darts to Sally, then back to you. "I—" Another giggle, this one more like a choked sob. "Sure! Mommy it is. Whatever Daddy wants."

You turn to Sally. Her face is unreadable, but her emotions are betrayed by the white knuckles gripping the back of a dining chair and the frantic, shallow rhythm of her breathing. "Try to copy Annabeth's cheer as best you can," you tell her, your tone almost gentle, as if offering advice on a difficult recipe. "It's time to go. Come on."

Annabeth flounces over to you, the movement practiced but still off, like a marionette with tangled strings. Sally walks, each step heavy with the weight of an unexpressed scream.

When they're beside you, you slide your right hand down the curve of Annabeth's lower back, the silk smooth against your palm, and settle it on the swell of her ass. You grip hard, fingers sinking into the firm, round flesh, groping her in front of her boyfriend and his family. She gasps—a genuine sound of surprise—before forcing it into another breathy giggle and pressing herself against your side, her body molding to yours, her lips curving into that brittle smile.

Watching you manhandle Annabeth, you see the internal war raging in Sally. Her muscles coil, ready to fight, to flee, to do something. Before she can act on the impulse, you hook your left arm around her waist and pull her flush against your other side. She stiffens like she's been touched by a live wire, a soft gasp escaping her lips. Your hand slides upward, over the flat plane of her stomach, up between her ribs, until it cups her left breast through her dress.

The weight of it fills your palm completely—heavy, warm, impossibly soft, the flesh yielding under your fingers like the finest dough. You feel her nipple harden involuntarily against the center of your palm through the thin fabric and the lace beneath, a stiff little peak that betrays her body's response even as her face contorts with revulsion. A small, choked sound escapes her throat—not quite a whimper, not quite a word, just raw, helpless sound.

You tilt your head and press your mouth to hers.

Sally's lips are soft and full and taste of peppermint and fear. She doesn't kiss back—her mouth is frozen, slack with shock and disbelief—but she doesn't pull away either. The fear of the curse; of doing something that would accrue more interest and force them to stay on Ogygia longer, holds her in place. You kiss her slowly, deliberately, your tongue tracing the seam of her lips, a silent promise of all the violations to come.

Over Sally's shoulder, you see them.

Percy is no longer a reflection in the window. He's turned fully, and his face is something you'll cherish for the rest of your immortal existence. His sea-green eyes are wide and wet and hollowed out—windows looking onto a soul that has just been torn to shreds. His mouth hangs open, a perfect circle of shock around a silent scream that will die in his throat before ever reaching the air.

Paul stands beside him, a rock of fury in a sea of despair. His glasses are back on, and behind the lenses, his eyes burn with a holy fire—the kind of righteous rage that men have gone to war for. His hands are clenched so tight at his sides that his knuckles glow white against his tanned skin. A thick, blue vein pulses at his temple, keeping time with a heart that must be hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird. He takes one step forward—just one—a single movement promising violence before you activate the teleport.

The last image burned into Percy Jackson's retinas is this: his mother, her body pressed against yours as you mold her breast in your palm like soft clay; his girlfriend—his Annabeth—giggling like a brainless bimbo as your other hand claims the perfect curve of her ass. Sally's lips are soft and yielding under yours, her body frozen between revulsion and the crushing weight of necessity. Her dress is thin as tissue paper, and through it, you can feel every contour, every tremor, every involuntary response of her body to your violation.

Then all three of you vanish, leaving behind nothing but an apartment suddenly too quiet, too empty, too cold. And on the dining table sits an untouched blue birthday cake, its twenty-one candles extinguished—tiny wax tombstones marking the death of a boy's world.

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Author's Note: I need to finish the second part of this chapter. Expect that next week. Also, I think this story is struggling because my chapter titles suck so no one is clicking on them. Can you guys suggest some better titles in the comments?