Bonds of Hercules

An ancient seer called Fate draws smoke from her pipe and reads the words of predestination—but for the first time, the prophecy arrives scrambled and incomplete.

An ancient seer called Fate draws smoke from her pipe and reads the words of predestination—but for the first time, the prophecy arrives scrambled and incomplete. Fragmented verses speak of a lost one chained to death's soldiers, a healing light that will mend four, and tides of war yet to come. The incompleteness is unprecedented and terrifying: it can only mean another Spartan possesses the rare ability to read predestination. A once-in-a-millennium event has occurred again. Someone else can see what Fate sees. The pipe slips from her parted lips as rain soaks her toga, and the implications settle like a stone in dark water. Everything she thought she knew about the future has changed.

A half-blind heiress abandons safety to face her captors

Alexis—whose birth name is Hercules—has spent months hiding on Crete with her adoptive parents, Hades and Persephone. She is partially blind in one eye and deaf in one ear from childhood abuse, secrets she guards absolutely. Her blood is literal poison. Her mind is fracturing from the voices of people she has killed. Yet Persephone's island sanctuary cannot hold a woman bent on revenge against the Spartan civilization that brutalized her. Hades coaches her: no one fears the sane. With a venomous snake named Nyx coiled around her neck and a misshapen beast protector called Fluffy Jr. stumbling at her heels, she leaps into Siberian darkness to join the Assembly of Death—the Chthonic assassin cult her estranged husbands belong to.

Kharon kneels in a Montana field to bandage his shot wife

Six Chthonic assassins wait in freezing woods. Alexis has not seen her husbands since fleeing their wedding three months ago. Kharon—the infamous Hunter, skeleton tattoos covering one arm, two spectral hellhounds at his feet—mouths a silent greeting. Augustus—eldest Chthonic heir, a scar slashing his face, blood leaking from his eyes—stares with ravenous intensity. The initiation begins: Alexis and Drex, an Olympian volunteer, must outrun their pursuers through twenty-five miles of forest. A Gorgon member shoots Alexis in the calf. Kharon retaliates by putting three bullets through the shooter's skull. Alexis leaps in panic to Montana, accidentally dragging Kharon along. He kneels to bandage her wound. She insists what they share is only physical. He lunges and kisses her instead.

Alexis smuggles an innocent past four Chthonic killers Everyone relocates to Augustus's villa on Lake Como. Alexis chooses Patro and Achilles—the Crimson Duo, her former mentors—as mission partners over her husbands, devastating both men. That first night, she follows screams to a dungeon and discovers a pink-haired woman named Ceres…