He was just a kid. Luna couldnβt stop thinking that: heβs just a kid. Why was it different just because he wasnβt legally an adult? When Peitho and Hermes brought home some eighteen year old, that was somehow more moral when they were thousands of years old?
Luna had been that young once. She had been a teenager desperately longing for love and attention and had found it in such a terrible place, with a man a decade older than her whoβd treated her like she was nothing, whoβd encouraged her to do things she might not have wanted, just because it meant he was paying attention to her.
She speared a piece of salami along with an olive and looked out the window. She was silent as she thought about whether she really was about to say the thing she was thinking.
βShe uses people up.β Lunaβs voice was quiet, both because Peitho could appear at any moment and because to say such a thing out loud to someone felt like blasphemy, felt like betraying the woman she loved and the god she worshipped. She didnβt look at Kaden as she spoke, instead focusing on a window across the street, focusing on anything but having to be in this room while she said it. βShe makes them think they want only her, and then she leaves broken people behind.β