By the time he’s done with me an hour later, I can barely remember my fuckingname.
Worth. It.
34
YELENA
TellingAchilles about Kyle was one thing.
Areallybig one, that I wasn’t even sure I was going to survive.
But the second conversation about what happened this past summer that I have later that afternoon, at home at Greymoor with my mom, almost breaks me.
Mom isn’t like Achilles. She doesn’t have his near-superhuman ability to be a wall of raw strength to a level verging on psychotic.
I don’t blame her for that at all.
In fact, I think I need a release now that I’ve let what happened this past summer out into the world.
Achilles’ brutally icy strength was what I needed when I divulged what happened for the first time. But now, with Mom, Idoneed the collapse.
The tears, pain, and heart-wrenching sorrow.
Only after you die can you be resurrected.
But my mother knows me well enough to know that despite the cathartic release of the tears and the pain, I don't need her pity.
Just her love, which is exactly what she gives me.
Mom lets me cry into her shoulder as she cries into mine. She tells me how strong I am, and how much she loves me, and how nothing like this can ever break me, or take away who and what I am.
The first conversation with Achilles was catharsis.
The second with my mother is a healing release.
The third conversation with my father an hour later when he gets home is downright bone-chilling.
Not because I’m scared of how he’ll look at me. Maybe I was terrified of that once, but not now, after sending all my pain into Achilles and letting him consume it.
No, the icy fear that I feel when I tell my dad what Kyle did this past summer is because I’m worried how he might react to the rest of the world.
When I tell him, the room goes utterly silent, and the look that spreads over his face like a storm cloud isapocalyptic.
It’s the low rumble of a vengeful army marching into battle, their war drums thudding in the distance.
The quiet whistle of an atom bomb as it descends from the sky.
The throbbing, flexing wrath of an angry god.
But… There’s no explosion.
No flash-fire release of fury and rage.
There might have once been a time when Nero De Luca would have reacted like that. But in the version of him I’ve known my whole life, thanks tomy mother, his explosiveness takes a back seat toprotectiveness.
“Little wolf.”
He chokes the words as I start to cry, then lurches from his chair and bolts to me across the sitting area in his office. A sob rips from my throat as he drops to his knees in front of me and pulls me into his arms, holding me tight and rocking me gently as he strokes my hair, just like he did when I was a kid.
