The morning had been divine. She’d tried on no less than fifteen dresses, all too grand and too delicious for words, had breakfast outdoors, and settled down to start on an embroidery project. In the front room of the manor, which had the most sun in the mornings, she sat on a kline, thread through the needle, ready to enjoy a quiet midmorning to herself, when Takis darkened the doorway. The look on his face brooked no argument and when she was informed that she would be accompanying cousin Iris through the woods, Elysia set aside her things in the appropriate basket.

“Isn’t this a lovely dress, uncle? I’m not so sure it’s suited for the woods, but if needs must….” Apparently the need was dire and so Elysia trailed Iris, her arms folded across her chest, outright sulking the whole time. As a teen, she didn’t have the voluptuous curves she would in a few years and her breasts were still small enough that when she crossed her arms this way, she looked completely flat. But the dress was a portent of her future: blue and gauzy and snagging on absolutely every stick and twig.

“Iris, are you quite through?” she checked, sighing loudly so that her little cousin would know to hurry. This was so not the day Elysia had planned on. The heady scent of upturned leaves, the glory of nature, the fresh air and sunshine were all lost on Elysia at the present moment. She couldn’t appreciate them when her plans were in such tatters. The same tatters her hemline was in.

”I want to play a game,” Iris declared. ”Will you play with me?”

“Must I?” Elysia muttered. She didn’t know the evil little scheme her cousin had cooked up. Iris was an angelic looking child and annoying besides, but Elysia hadn’t yet associated her with being an out and out brat - yet being key. Besides, Iris’s child logic wasn’t logical at all and so Elysia didn’t make the leap between the game and her own impending doom.

“Games are no fun with only one person,” Iris was quick to add.

“It depends on the game,” Elysia’s nose tipped into the air this time as she took on an heir of superiority that would make her cringe later in life if she could have seen herself then. “What’s the game?” she asked, not because she wanted to play, but because her mother’s voice entered her head then. Her mother liked to remind her that she was at Lord Takis’s mercy, completely and utterly. If he took it into his head to do so, he could turn Elysia straight out of the house and no one would fault him. After all, there was no way to prove she was a demigod. But of course this was what she told people when they asked why she was a bastard and where her vagabond father was: that Zeus was her true father and to stop asking nosey questions.

However, she did think it in her best interests to keep both her uncle and his daughter happy. That was why Takis never heard a contrary word out of her and why she usually did her level best to be sweet to Iris. Even in horrendous circumstances like these when she was forced out on a nature walk in a completely ill suited dress.