Chapter 2: Aphrodite's Nightclub Adventure
The hangover was a dull, throbbing beast behind Jolene’s eyes, but it was nothing compared to the psychic hangover of the night before. The memory of those twin declarations—Loki’s chilling poetry, Ares’s brutal honesty—played on a loop in her mind, a confusing, thrilling soundtrack to her pounding headache. She moved through the compound’s common areas like a ghost, avoiding everyone, especially the two deities who had apparently decided her soul was the ultimate trophy.
Her evasion strategy lasted precisely until midday, when Aphrodite burst into her room without knocking, a whirlwind of sequins, perfume, and terrifying enthusiasm.
“Up, up, up, darling creature! We are banishing the gloom!” the goddess trilled, throwing open the blinds. Sunlight speared Jolene’s brain. “The mortal concept of ‘sleeping it off’ is a tragedy. We are healing through hedonism!”
“Go away,” Jolene groaned, pulling a pillow over her head. The pillow was magically yanked from her grasp and vanished in a puff of pink smoke.
“No can do! I have secured exclusive access to the opening of the most divine mortal establishment tonight. ‘Elysium.’ It’s a temple to sensation. And we,” Aphrodite declared, hands on her hips, “are all going. Everyone. It’s mandatory fun. My treat.”
Thus, by seven that evening, the women’s wing of the compound had been transformed into a chaotic war room of preparation. Music blared, clothes were thrown, and the air was thick with hairspray and laughter.
“I feel like a child playing dress-up in a dragon’s hoard,” Wanda muttered, holding up a sliver of crimson silk that seemed to defy several laws of physics.
“That’s the point, Red!” Kate Bishop yelled from where she was attempting to braid Mantis’s hair. “We’re not going to a board meeting. We’re going to Elysium! The name alone promises poor decisions!”
Aphrodite floated between them, a divine stylist. For Natasha, she produced a sleek black jumpsuit that looked painted on. For Yelena, leather pants and a top that said “Go Away” in Cyrillic. For herself, a gown that seemed to be woven from liquid champagne and starlight.
Then she turned to Jolene with a smile that was all teeth. “And for our mystery guest… something to inspire answers.”
What Jolene was forced into was less an outfit and more a strategic deployment of fabric. It was a dress of deepest emerald green, the exact shade of Loki’s magic, she realized with a spike of irritation. It was backless, plunging in a deep V both front and back, and clung to every curve before ending mid-thigh. The material was somehow both liquid and structured, shimmering under the light as if lit from within.
“I can’t wear this,” Jolene stated flatly, staring at her reflection. She looked like a fever dream, a fantasy. The woman in the mirror was alluring, powerful, and utterly unfamiliar.
“You can and you will,” Aphrodite said, fastening a delicate chain around her neck. “You’ve been hiding in borrowed sweatshirts and uncertainty. Tonight, you wear a weapon. Let them see what they’re truly fighting over.”
Yelena sidled up, chewing gum. She looked Jolene up and down, a slow, appraising smirk spreading across her face. “Mmm. Looks like someone might be the filling in a god sandwich tonight.” She wiggled her eyebrows exaggeratedly.
Jolene’s cheeks burned. “Shut up.”
“I am just making observational commentary. The bread is very tense, very possessive. The filling looks… overwhelmed. But tasty.” Yelena popped her gum. “I give it an eight out of ten for potential entertainment value.”
“I hate all of you,” Jolene muttered, but the blush remained.
Elysium wasn’t a club; it was a neurological event. The bass wasn’t just heard, it was felt in the marrow, a subsonic pulse that synced with your heartbeat and gently, insistently, urged it faster. The air tasted of crushed blackberries, ozone, and the sweet, dangerous scent of human sweat and longing. Holographic constellations swirled across ceilings of polished obsidian, their movements subtly erotic, suggesting forms and touches. The crowd was a sea of beautiful, desperate people, all moving as if underwater, their expressions slack with pleasure or sharp with predatory intent.
The Avengers, Guardians, and Olympians carved a path through this sea like a meteor strike. Thor and Hercules, having pre-gamed heavily, bellowed greetings to everyone and no one, already heading for the bar that glowed like a radioactive altar. Quill and Drax were immediately mesmerized by the dancing, the former trying to impress Gamora with moves that hadn’t been cool in any galaxy, the latter standing perfectly still and declaring it a “weak, pointless battle.”
Jolene, tugged along by Aphrodite and flanked by Natasha and Wanda, felt horribly exposed. The dress felt like a second skin, every glance from a stranger a physical touch. And then she felt two specific glances, cutting through the chaotic light and sound like lasers.
From near a towering column of living water that defied gravity, Loki leaned. He was in black, of course, but it was a modern, devastating cut that hugged his lean frame. His eyes, reflecting the club’s neon, found hers immediately. There was no smirk, no theatrical raise of the glass in his hand. Just a slow, thorough assessment that stripped away the noise and the crowd, leaving only the two of them in a bubble of intense, silent recognition. He looked at the dress, at the skin it revealed, and his expression was one of pure, unadulterated covetousness. It was not a boyish crush; it was the look a collector gives a long-sought, priceless artifact.
From the other direction, near the pulsating heart of the dance floor, Ares stood like a monolith. He’d forgone armor for dark, tailored trousers and a shirt undone at the collar, revealing the strong column of his throat and the top of his tattooed chest. His arms were crossed, his gaze a physical weight. His stare was different from Loki’s—not assessing, but claiming. He saw her, and in his eyes, the matter was already decided. The heat from his look was a tangible wave across the crowded room.
Nebula, sipping something blue and smoking from a test tube glass, followed their line of sight. Her metallic brow ridge lifted. “They are staring at you with the intensity of binary stars preparing for supernova. It is inefficient. If they want to mate, they should state their terms and engage.”
The group around her burst into laughter. “See? Even the cyborg gets it!” Kate howled, slinging an arm around a stoic Nebula, who tolerated it with only a minor eye-twitch.
They were ushered to a raised VIP section cordoned off by ropes of light. Plush velvet banquettes formed a semi-circle around a low table where bottles of ambrosia-laced liquor and glowing cocktails already waited. As they shuffled in, Yelena, directly behind Jolene, “stumbled.”
“Oops! So clumsy after that spaceship ride,” Yelena said, her voice utterly flat as she gave Jolene a firm, deliberate shove between the shoulder blades.
Jolene pitched forward with a gasp, right into the one empty spot on the largest banquette. The spot that happened to be between Loki, who smoothly moved his arm from the back of the couch, and Ares, who shifted his leg to make just enough room. She landed seated, her bare thighs pressing against the fine wool of Loki’s trousers and the rugged denim of Ares’s. The heat from both of them was immediate and shocking.
“My apologies,” Loki purred, not sounding sorry at all. “The floor seems uneven.”
“Fate has a funny way of arranging things,” Ares said, his voice a low rumble that vibrated through the seat.
Jolene was trapped. Before she could even process an escape, Yelena had already flitted away. She watched, stunned, as the blonde assassin began making rounds. She leaned over to Kate and Peter, who were huddled with their phones out. Money changed hands. She whispered to Sam and Bucky at the edge of the booth; Sam grinned and pulled out his wallet. She even approached a stoic Gamora and a bewildered Mantis, pointing subtly at the banquette. Mantis’s antennae glowed with fascinated curiosity.
Agatha Harkness, materializing in a puff of purple smoke on a stool beside the table, watched Yelena’s progress and let out a cackle that cut through the bass. “Oh, I like this game! The stakes are deliciously mortal. I’ll take a piece of that pool, little spider. Put me down for… the messy, dramatic option. With lightning.” She flicked a gold coin that hadn’t existed a second before into Yelena’s waiting hand.
Jolene wanted to melt into the velvet. She was the center of a betting pool. Her love life—or whatever this was—was now a spectator sport.
Then Ares’s hand settled on her bare thigh.
It was a large, heavy hand, calloused and warm. The weight of it was absolute, possessive. His thumb began a slow, rhythmic stroke along the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. Jolene’s breath hitched. She couldn’t move. The bass from the club pounded up through the floor, a relentless physical beat that seemed to sync with the pounding of her heart.
At the same instant, Loki leaned in. His lips brushed the shell of her ear, his breath cool against the heat Ares was generating. “They’re taking wagers on which one of us you’ll leave with,” he whispered, his voice a silk-covered razor. “Little do they know the question is flawed. It presupposes you have a choice.” His hand didn’t touch her, but his fingers traced a pattern in the air just above her other shoulder, and she felt a ghostly, tingling sensation there, as if he were drawing invisible runes on her skin. “The real wager is what you’ll become when you finally stop running from both of us.”
She was being pulled apart by two opposing gravitational forces. Ares’s touch was a brand, an anchor to primal, physical reality. Loki’s words were a key, trying to pick the lock on a door inside her she couldn’t even see. The sensory overload was paralyzing.
“I need air,” she managed to choke out, lurching to her feet before either could stop her. She fled the banquette, plunging into the heaving mass of the dance floor. The music swallowed her, the lights strobing, offering momentary anonymity. She just needed a second to think, to breathe without their scent clouding her mind.
She found a sliver of space near the edge of the floor, closing her eyes and letting the sound wash over her. It was a mistake.
A body pressed against her back. The smell of cheap cologne and cheaper beer. “Hey, gorgeous. Dancing alone is a crime in a place like this.”
She opened her eyes to see a man in his thirties, his smile slick and his eyes glassy. “No, thanks,” she said, turning away.
He moved with her, his hand grabbing her waist. “C’mon, don’t be like that. You look like you need some real fun.”
“I said no.” Her voice was harder now, the power behind her eyes flickering like a faulty bulb.
He didn’t let go. His grip tightened. “You just need to loosen up, baby.”
Before Jolene could decide between kneeing him in the groin or unleashing the strange, red-brown energy that prickled under her skin, two shadows fell over them.
The music didn’t stop, but the space around them seemed to grow cold and silent. The man looked up, his drunken bravado melting into confusion, then fear.
On Jolene’s left was Loki, his expression one of detached, academic curiosity, as if studying a particularly interesting insect. On her right was Ares, whose face was a mask of serene, terrifying promise.
They didn’t look at Jolene. They looked at the man. And in that moment, their rivalry was gone, replaced by a unified, predatory focus.
The man’s hand fell from her waist.
“The lady,” Loki said, his voice conversational yet carrying perfectly through the thumping bass, “indicated a lack of interest. A concept your primitive synapses seem to struggle with.”
“I was just—” the man stammered.
“You were just persisting,” Ares finished, his tone almost friendly. He leaned in, and the sheer size of him, the aura of violence that rolled off him in waves, made the man shrink. “Persistence is a virtue. On a battlefield. Here, it is an insult.”
Loki tilted his head. “Shall we educate him? I was thinking a minor temporal loop. He can experience this moment of poor judgment for, say, the next seventy-two hours. A weekend of perpetual social failure.”
Ares cracked his knuckles, the sound like snapping timber. “Too subtle. I was thinking we introduce his face to the structural integrity of that column. Repeatedly. Until his understanding matches his new facial topography.”
The man was pale, sweat beading on his forehead. He looked between the two impossible beings, one offering cosmic horror, the other offering blunt-force trauma.
“I… I gotta go,” he squeaked, and turned to flee. In his panic, his foot caught on the leg of a nearby table. He went down hard, face-first onto the polished floor, with a satisfying thwump. He scrambled up without looking back and vanished into the crowd.
A laugh bubbled out of Jolene before she could stop it. It was a release of all the tension, the absurdity, the terror. She laughed, hand over her mouth, her shoulders shaking.
When she looked up, wiping a tear from her eye, she found herself standing exactly between them once more. The brief moment of unity was gone. Their shared focus was now entirely back on her. And neither showed any intention of moving.
Loki’s cool smile returned. “Amusing, in a pathetic way.”
“Adequate result,” Ares grunted, his eyes still on the spot where the man had fallen.
The laughter died in Jolene’s throat. The space they occupied felt charged, smaller than it had before. The path back to the VIP section was clear, but walking there meant leading them, or being flanked by them. Staying put meant remaining in this bubble of their combined attention.
Slowly, as if pulled by invisible strings, she took a step backward. They matched her, step for step. Another step. They followed. It was a silent, absurd procession back through the dance floor. She was the nucleus, and they were her twin electrons, locked in a chaotic, irresistible orbit.
She reached the banquette and sat, almost collapsing into the velvet. Ares sat to her right, his arm immediately stretching along the back of the seat behind her head. Loki sat to her left, crossing one leg over the other, his posture deceptively relaxed.
Their bodies formed a wall on either side of her. Ares’s heat was a furnace; Loki’s coolness was a deep winter chill. The bass vibrated up through the seat, into her bones, a relentless physical echo of the tension thrumming between the three of them.
The bass vibrated up through the seat, into her bones, a relentless physical echo of the tension thrumming between the three of them. It was Ares who moved first, his hand closing around her wrist. His grip was unbreakable, but not painful; it was a claim. “Enough sitting,” he growled, the words vibrating through his chest and into her arm. “This music is for movement. For feeling.”
On her other side, Loki uncoiled. “How unexpectedly primal of you.” But he too stood, his fingers weaving a cold, invisible thread around her other arm. “But even a brute can stumble upon a good idea. Let’s see what happens when you stop thinking, Jolene.”
They didn’t ask. They pulled.
She was on her feet and then into the pulsing heart of the dance floor, a current of bodies swallowing them. The noise became a texture, a thick syrup of sound she moved through. They didn’t release her. Ares turned her to face him, his hands settling on her hips, large and grounding. Then Loki was behind her, his front aligning with her back, his coolness a shocking contrast to the club’s heat and Ares’s blazing touch.
She was caged. The beat was a living thing, a tribal, insistent rhythm that demanded surrender. Ares began to move, a slow, powerful roll of his hips that guided hers. Behind her, Loki matched the rhythm, not grinding against her, but moving with a sinuous, elegant precision that made the air between their bodies crackle.
Her mind screamed for a moment, then the scream was drowned in the synth and the sweat. She let her head fall back, against Loki’s shoulder. She let her hands come up to rest on Ares’s forearms. She stopped fighting the current and let it take her.
She got lost in it. Lost in the beat. Lost in the impossible sensation of being between their bodies. Ares’s hands slid from her hips, around to the small of her back, pulling her tighter against the hard plane of his chest. His breath was hot against her forehead. One hand slipped lower, cupping the curve of her ass through the thin dress, a possessive, rough squeeze that made her gasp into his neck.
At the same moment, Loki’s hands, which had been resting lightly on her upper arms, drifted. One slid down her side, his long fingers tracing the dip of her waist, the flare of her hip. The other hand came around her front, his palm splaying flat and low on her abdomen, pulling her back firmly into the cradle of his hips. She could feel him, hard and insistent against the base of her spine.
The music swelled, a cascading wave of electronic sound. Their hands began to roam, a coordinated, devastating exploration. Ares’s thumb found the hem of her dress and pushed beneath it, his calloused skin scraping a path up the outside of her thigh. Loki’s fingers danced along the neckline of her dress, dipping into the deep V, his knuckles brushing the upper swell of her breast.
A pinch, sharp and sudden, at the sensitive skin of her hip. Loki’s doing. She jerked, a sharp inhale caught in her throat.
Ares felt it and answered. His hand, still under her dress, slid inward, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of her inner thigh, not quite reaching where she burned, but promising. It was a different kind of pinch, a deep, muscular claim that made her legs tremble.
Loki’s mouth was at her ear, his words liquid nitrogen in the heat. “Feel that? The dichotomy. His touch is a wildfire. Mine is the frost that shapes the stone beneath. Which one burns you more?”
His hand slid fully over her breast then, palming her through the fabric, his thumb circling her nipple until it drew into a tight, aching peak. She cried out, but the sound was lost in the music.
Ares growled, capturing the sound with his eyes. He ducked his head, his mouth finding the juncture of her neck and shoulder. He didn’t kiss. He bit. A deliberate, controlled pressure of teeth that walked the perfect line between pleasure and pain, branding her. His other hand finally, finally, cupped her between her legs over the damp silk of her underwear. He pressed the heel of his hand hard against her clit, and her vision sparked white.
It was too much. The overload of sensation, the warring sensations of hot and cold, rough and elegant, possession and unraveling. It was a feedback loop threatening to short-circuit her very being. With a ragged, desperate gasp, she shoved back against Loki and twisted out of Ares’s hold.
“I need a drink,” she panted, the words raw and torn from her throat. She didn’t look at either of them, just turned and pushed blindly through the gyrating bodies, fleeing toward the glowing bar that promised the numb sanctuary of alcohol.
Behind her, she heard Loki’s low chuckle, a sound of pure wicked delight. Ares’s deeper laugh joined it, a rumble of anticipation. Their voices carried, clear as a bell in her heightened state.
“She’s going to keep running from us tonight,” Ares said, amusement rich in his tone.
“Of course she is,” Loki replied, his voice smooth as poisoned honey. “It’s the most fun part of the hunt. The faltering heartbeat, the frantic glance over the shoulder.” A pause, then a new, sharper note entered his voice. “But every hunt must end. Tell me, War God, do you have the stomach for a true competition?”
Jolene reached the bar, leaning heavily on the polished black stone. “Tequila. Three shots. Line them up,” she ordered the bartender, her voice shaking.
The bartender, a nonplussed man with facial tattoos, complied. She threw the first back, the burn a welcome, familiar pain that grounded her. She slammed the glass down and reached for the second.
Across the club, in the relative quiet of their vacated booth, Loki turned to Ares. The smirk was gone, replaced by a look of calculating intensity. “Aphrodite, in her boundless, meddlesome generosity, has secured rooms for everyone upstairs. No one drives. No one leaves.”
Ares watched Jolene’s back at the bar, the tense line of her shoulders as she downed the second shot. “Convenient.”
“Isn’t it?” Loki’s lips curved. “I propose we stop chasing her through this crowd. Let her have her liquid courage. Let the others drink themselves into oblivion or pair off. Then, later, when the circus has retired…” He leaned closer, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “We go to her room. Together.”
Ares’s dark eyes flicked from Jolene to Loki. Understanding dawned, followed by a fierce, approving gleam. “A competition.”
“Precisely,” Loki said, a wicked light in his green eyes. “A direct, final test. No more posturing on dance floors. No more whispered promises in corridors. We see, once and for all, which of our… approaches… truly resonates with the lovely amnesiac. Which god she calls for when she’s past the point of thought.”
Ares’s smile was a slow, brutal thing. He understood the unspoken rules. This was not about sharing. This was about winning. About being the one who broke her, claimed her, made her forget the other’s name. “Sounds like a plan,” he rumbled, clapping a heavy hand on Loki’s shoulder, a gesture that was both camaraderie and a subtle test of strength.
Loki didn’t flinch. He simply let the weight settle, then shrugged it off with elegant disdain. “Then let us go and drink with our quarry. It’s only sporting to ensure she’s properly… prepared.”
They found her as she was slamming the third empty glass on the bar. She was breathing hard, the tequila a fireball in her stomach, but her mind was still screaming, her body still humming from their touch.
“Thirsty, darling?” Loki purred, appearing at her right elbow like a phantom.
Ares flanked her left, his bulk a warm, solid presence. “Running is hard work,” he said, signaling the bartender. “Another round. For all three of us.”
Jolene looked between them, her red-brown eyes glazed with drink and defiance. “What’s the matter? Can’t find anyone else to annoy?”
“We find you endlessly fascinating,” Loki said, accepting a glass of something that smoked with violet vapor. “A puzzle with a heartbeat. And such a rapid, fluttering heartbeat it is.”
“I’m not a puzzle,” she snapped, taking the new shot the bartender placed before her. This one was gold and smelled of spice.
“Aren’t you?” Ares challenged, downing his drink in one go. He leaned on the bar, turning his body toward her, invading her space. “A woman with no past, who fell from the stars, who stands between a god of war and a god of lies and doesn’t immediately combust? That’s not a woman. That’s a riddle. And I love solving things with my hands.”
His gaze dropped to her mouth, and she instinctively licked her lips, tasting salt and tequila. She saw his eyes darken, tracking the movement.
Loki watched the exchange, a silent conductor. “He has a point, in his blunt way. You are an event horizon, Jolene. A point of such compelling gravity that you bend reality around you. You’ve bent us.” He said it like a clinical observation, but the heat in his eyes was anything but clinical. “The question is, what lies at your center? I intend to find out.”
“Maybe there’s nothing at the center,” she fired back, emboldened by the alcohol. “Maybe I’m just a girl who wants two infuriating gods to leave her the hell alone for five minutes.”
Ares laughed, a genuine, booming sound that turned heads. “You don’t want that. You might think you do. But your body,” his hand came up, and he ran a single, rough fingertip from the base of her throat down into the valley of her breasts, “your body tells a different story. It’s singing for us. A frantic, pretty song.”
She shuddered, her traitorous skin pebbling under his touch. Loki’s cool finger traced the shell of her opposite ear. “Listen to him. Reducing poetry to biology. But he’s not wrong. Your physiological responses are… eloquent.”
They drank with her, shot for shot, a relentless, smiling pressure. The club swirled around them—Kate and Peter trying and failing to out-dance Mantis and Drax, Thor and Hercules leading a conga line that included a bewildered Vision, Agatha making cocktail ingredients float in mid-air for a cackling Scott Lang. But for Jolene, the world had narrowed to this bar, to the two impossible men who were steadily, deliberately, dismantling her defenses with words and proximity.
The music shifted, slowing to a sultry, throbbing beat. Ares took her empty glass from her limp fingers. “Dance with me,” he said, not a question, but a low command. “A real dance. Not that frantic crowd nonsense.”
“I—” she began.
“Oh, let him,” Loki sighed, as if bored. “Watching him attempt romance is like watching a bear attempt ballet. It’s tragically comic.” But he released her, taking a half-step back, granting a false sense of freedom.
Ares led her to a slightly less crowded corner of the floor, where the light was dimmer, pools of indigo and crimson. He pulled her close, not with the aggressive possession of before, but with a shocking, focused intensity. One hand held hers, the other rested on the small of her back. He moved them in a slow circle, his body guiding hers with a innate, powerful grace.
“You see?” he murmured into her hair. “I can be more than a hammer. I can be the anvil, too. The thing that shapes. Let me shape you, Jolene. Let me show you the strength in surrender.”
His words, so at odds with his usual bluntness, seeped into her, mixing with the alcohol. She felt pliant, malleable. Her head found its way to his chest, listening to the steady, powerful drum of his heart. For a moment, it was simple. It was warm.
Then a cool presence was at her back. Loki’s voice, a silken intrusion. “How touching. The brute discovers nuance.” He didn’t touch her, but he was there, a shadow, his voice weaving around Ares’s like a vine. “But surrender to that is to become a trophy on his wall. Hard, polished, lifeless. Surrender to me,” his breath kissed her ear, “and you become infinite. You become the chaos itself.”
Ares’s hand tightened on her back. “Ignore the ghost. He offers only mirrors and smoke. I offer blood and breath. Something real.”
“Your definition of ‘real’ is so tediously limited,” Loki countered, his hand finally appearing, his fingers interlacing with hers where they rested on Ares’s shoulder. He was touching them both, a connective thread of ice. “She is already more than your ‘real.’ She fell from the cosmos. She belongs to the infinite.”
“She belongs to herself,” Jolene whispered, but the words had no strength.
“Does she?” Loki asked, his voice dropping to a hypnotic murmur. “Do you even know what that is? We can help you find out. In different ways. His way is a forge. Mine is an unraveling. Which one calls to the emptiness inside you?”
The question hung in the sultry air. The song ended. Ares, with a final, crushing squeeze of her hand, released her. Loki’s phantom touch vanished. They stood around her, waiting.
Aphrodite materialized then, a vision in shimmering light, her arm looping through Hercules’s. “Children! The night is young, but my feet are ancient! Rooms are keyed to your biometrics. Party on, pass out, but do it upstairs! No flying the drones home, Quill!”
The crowd began to disperse, a slow migration toward the discreet elevators. Jolene, her mind and body reeling, seized the escape. “I’m going to bed,” she announced, not meeting either of their eyes.
“Of course,” Loki said, his tone mild, innocent.
“Sleep well,” Ares added, a dangerous softness in his voice.
She walked away, feeling their twin gazes on her back like twin brands. She made it to the elevator, rode up alone to the suite level, and stumbled into the room Aphrodite had assigned her. It was opulent, all silks and low lighting, with a bed that looked like a cloud. She didn’t bother with the lights, just tore off the unbearable green dress, letting it pool on the floor like shed skin. She crawled into the cool sheets in just her underwear, her body alive with memory and tequila, and willed the world to go black.
She drifted, not into sleep, but into a feverish haze. The thump of the club’s bass was replaced by the thunder of her own pulse in her ears. She tossed, tangled in sheets that felt too much like hands.
She didn’t know how much time had passed when the soft click of the door lock echoed in the silent room.
Her eyes flew open. The ambient light from the city outside outlined two tall, familiar silhouettes in her doorway. They stepped inside, and the door shut behind them with a final, quiet snick.
Loki and Ares.
They had come. Together.
“The competition,” Loki’s voice slithered through the darkness, “begins now.”