Page 163 of Hades

People around the booth had gone quiet. The festival still moved beyond us, but this space had become something else. A crater. A grave opening. A decades-old wound splitting wide in broad daylight.

My hands shook on the arms of the wheelchair. “You took her.”

Claire’s gaze snapped to me.

For one second, something hateful flashed in her eyes. Something vicious and unrepentant. “You left her alone.”

Hades lunged.

Only, Lettie’s sharp inhale stopped him.

Not because it calmed him.

Because it reminded him, she was in his arms.

He held still, but violence lived in every line of his body. In the set of his jaw. In the way his muscles coiled. In the promise written across his face that if Claire said one more fucking word, he’d kill her where she stood.

Ford looked like she’d carved him open.

I knew why.

Because that was the sentence he’d given himself since he was fourteen.

You left her alone.

Fourteen years old, and he’d made himself the villain because a grown woman had stolen his sister and let him carry the guilt.

I turned on Claire with a hatred so clean it almost steadied me. Focused me. Gave me something to aim at that wasn’t my own failure. “She belonged to us.”

“She was alone,” Claire hissed, eyes cutting to Lettie. “And she needed me.”

“No,” I said. The word came out flat. Final. “You needed her.”

The words landed.

Truth always did.

Lettie made a small, broken sound from deep inside where hope had lived before reality killed it.

I looked at her then, and whatever rage I’d been carrying cracked under the sight of her face. She was staring at the woman she’d called mother like the ground had vanished beneath her feet. Like everything she’d known had just been revealed as a lie. Hades held her upright, his mouth near her temple, speaking words too low for me to hear.

My daughter.

My baby.

Alive and breaking in front of me.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered.

Her eyes met mine.

I saw the exact second she believed me.

Not understood.

Believed.

Some truths didn’t need proof when blood had already recognized blood. When instinct had already spoken. When the body knew what the mind hadn’t caught up to yet.