Pickup Styx Read Online Free PDF

could trust anything he said. The mission needed to be important to him personally. I hadn’t mentioned my intentions to Selene before she headed to her cousin’s bar to meet with the necromancer. Given their history, it was best not to involve her. She wouldn’t trust anything she knew came from him—not that I could blame her. He had tried to kill her. However, he’d also been the most powerful man among the fae for centuries. He would have the answers I needed.
    I sank into the leather chair in my office, weary. My father cared about me. I was certain of that, but was I certain enough to bet Selene’s life on it? I did take the crown from him—
    Katrina burst through the door in a flurry of human emotion that made me blink. It was no wonder humans had such short lives.
    “You can’t let her go,” she said, brushing a piece of dark hair out of her eye.
    “She has to go.”
    “No. I don’t accept that and neither should you.” She shook her head, hands perched on her hips. Sebastian slipped into the room behind her, stoic as ever. “Have you read about the Underworld? That’s pretty much a nice way of saying Hell, isn’t it? There has to be another way. No one could survive that stuff.”
    “Would you rather she die permanently in a week’s time?”
    Katrina’s brows pulled together and she swallowed several times. I knew exactly what she was going through. I had been through this same argument in my mind more times than I cared to count. It always ended the same way. Selene had to go.
    “It might be for the best,” Sebastian said.
    His words took a second to register. I closed my mouth and looked at him. Katrina slapped the side of his face, hard. Then she burst into tears and left the room. Sebastian didn’t follow her.
    His fingers drifted up to the red hand print on his cheek as if he couldn’t believe she’d hit him. He shook his head and looked at me. “I read the same pages she read. I don’t know how Selene can do it. I am still not sure where Charon is located. Every text, every map has Styx in a different location. Sometimes it marks the entrance to the Underworld. Other times, it separates the Underworld from Hell. If she has to go through it, then…” He shook his head.
    “So you want her to give up and die?”
    “Of course I don’t want Selene to die. I would never want that, but it would be more humane. We don’t even know what the pole can do or why they want it. Doesn’t that bother you? She could be bringing anything back here. ” Sebastian shifted. “And even if she somehow succeeds, there’s no saying that your Selene would come back. The Underworld is designed to work off the sins of those who enter it. I don’t know exactly what will happen to her, but you can be assured it will be designed to test her past the breaking point.”
    “She survived being a changeling, she survived a curse that should have killed her, and she has survived Jaron. Selene is stronger than she looks.”
    “You’re just like your father.”
    I glared at him. “If I were like my father, you wouldn’t be here.”
    He took my veiled death threat in stride. “You are too stubborn to listen to what anyone has to say. Do you remember what the kingdom was like before your mother died?”
    I shook my head. What did my mother have to do with anything?
    “Well, I do. After she died, your father became obsessed with protecting what he loved to the detriment of kingdom and everything else around him. He has passed that trait to you. The end of keeping Selene alive does not justify any means to get there, but you are too damn stubborn to listen to me. Maybe your love story is a short one. Did you ever think of that? You cannot tie yourself up in so many knots with Selene that they cannot be undone.”
    “And what does any of this have to do with Selene?”
    He sighed, some of the fight draining from him. “You need to prepare yourself. There is a very good likelihood she will die. You cannot fall