Page 164 of Hades

Her lips trembled. “Rykard?”

Not Dad.

Not Father.

Not yet.

Maybe not ever.

Still, my name in her voice felt like the first breath after drowning. Like air after suffocation. Like proof that she was real and alive and standing in front of me.

“Yes,” I said, and my own voice broke. Shattered. Came apart in a way I hadn’t let it in too damn long. “Yeah, sweetheart. I’m right here.”

Apollo bowed his head, shoulders shaking once before he forced himself still. Before he locked it down the way he’d been locking it down since he was fourteen. Before he shattered silently.

But completely.

Lettie Foster was Colette Rush.

And the woman she called Mother was the reason we’d mourned a daughter who’d never died. The reason we’d grieved a child who’d been alive the whole damn time.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

Lettie

The world didn’t stop. That was the cruelest part. My world split open in the middle of Main Street, and the festival kept going around me. Children still laughed. Music still drifted from the small stage near the courthouse. Someone at the booth across from mine called out a price for homemade jam.

A woman holding a paper cup of lemonade stood frozen with one hand halfway to her mouth, staring at us, but beyond her, people kept moving, kept talking, kept living as if my name had not just been ripped away from me and replaced with one that felt both foreign and familiar.

Colette. The name echoed inside me. Not Violet. Not Lettie. Colette. I didn’t know what to do with it. Didn’t know where to put my hands or how to breathe or which face to look at first.

Rykard stood in front of me with grief carved so deep into him I could hardly stand to meet his eyes. Apollo sat beside him in his chair, shattered in a way I’d never seen before. Brock’s arm circled my waist, solid and tight, holding me upright when I wasn’t entirely sure my legs remembered how to do that on their own.

And my mother—no, not my mother. Carol or Claire. The woman in the blue dress. She stood near the edge of my booth with terror on her face, and I hated that some part of me still wanted to ask if she needed to sit down.

“No,” she said again, louder this time. “No. Absolutely not. I don’t know what kind of sick game this is, but I won’t stand here and let you do this.” Her voice shook, but it wasn’t the fragile tremble she used when she wanted pity. It was rage. Real rage. The kind she usually saved for behind closed doors when I’d failed to be grateful enough.

Rykard stared at her like he was looking at a ghost he wanted to kill. “Don’t you fucking lie to me.”

Several people gasped.

Mother’s chin lifted. “How dare you speak to me like that.”

Apollo made a broken sound. “You don’t get to be offended.”

“You stay out of this,” she snapped.

Brock moved before I did, his body shifting just enough that I felt the threat radiating from him. “Careful.”

Mother’s eyes cut to him, and for the first time in my life, I saw real fear there. Not fear of sickness. Not fear of abandonment. Fear of consequences. Then she looked at me, and the fear changed. It softened. Became wounded. Practiced. Familiar.

“Violet,” she whispered.

My chest hurt.

That name had never felt like mine, not fully, but it was the one she’d given me. The one written on school forms and bank accounts and order slips. The one she’d called from her bed when she wanted tea, soup, medicine, attention, proof that I still belonged where she had put me.

“Violet, sweetheart, don’t listen to them.”