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Though I wasn’t letting myself really look at Hades, I knew that there was a certain kind of reaction a man like him would have to this kind of news. He’d had a certain kind of reaction to what Derek did to me before we’d even started sleeping together. He cared about me more now than he did then, so I knew his anger would be even more intense.
“Before you go into alpha male, badass mode and demand to know where he is so you can track him down and kill him, he’s dead.” I inspected Hades’s eyebrows, still refusing to focus on the entirety of the man, to see whatever lay behind his eyes. “When my father found out, he killed him. His own brother.”
My mind turned prickly and fragmented under the proximity of those poisonous memories. It took a moment for me to gather myself, to find a way to continue. Hades had not attempted to fill the silence. He hadn’t touched me. Comforted me. Which was a good thing since even his hands on my skin would’ve sickened me at that very moment. I could barely handle living inside of my own skin.
“My father was not a good parent,” I said finally. “He drank too much. Sometimes the drinking made him angry, other times completely apathetic. I grew up thinking that at best, my father hated me, and at worst, he didn’t think or care about me enough to hate me. I was an inconvenience to him. When I finally told my parents, my mother immediately thought I was making it up for attention.”
I rolled my eyes and rubbed at my arms again, wishing I could scrub away the trauma, grow new skin.
“My mother didn’t like me much either, you see,” I shared after a long pause. “My father, though. He knew it was true. I had no idea why. Maybe because he’d sensed something was wrong, seen something rotten inside of his brother.”
It took everything I had to chase away the image of the man who’d ruined my entire childhood, the man who still haunted my nightmares on the odd occasion.
I sucked in a heavy breath. “Maybe he’d paid more attention to me than I’d thought, noticing the way I’d curled in on myself, stopped trying to get his attention with pictures I’d drawn. That I’d stopped taking care of my appearance.” The words were coming out quickly now. “My mother didn’t notice any of that. I know my Aunt V would’ve seen it immediately. She might not have been able to figure out exactly what was wrong, but she would’ve known something was off. After the very first time, probably. And she would’ve...” I didn’t want to finish that thought.
“Anyway.” I waved my hand dismissively. “That didn’t happen. She wasn’t around then because my mom had had a falling out with her and refused to see her. There’s no point in all going through the ‘what ifs.’ For whatever reason, my father believed me. He didn’t say a word to me or my mother. He just turned his back on me, walked into their bedroom, then came out with his gun. My mom was screaming at him by then, trying to stop him. But he pushed her into the wall, only looking at me.”
My voice was even further away now as I descended into the memory of that day. One of my very worst memories. I had a lot of bad memories from that period of my life to be sure, some arguably worse than that moment. Like the actual abuse. Those weren’t just bad memories, they were horrific. Terrible in ways I was only able to articulate by shaking and crying, spewing the ugly, rancid words at parents who had never cared about me in the first place. Then my mother screaming at my father, saying that I was lying. That I was dramatic, a needy little bitch.
Then the sound of her hitting the wall. My father’s rage, his eyes on me, showing me something that I’d never seen during the ten years of my life.
Love.
It was poisoned, of course. By the rage, by his thirst for blood. By the guilt.
Then my mother was laying on the floor.
Her lip was bleeding.
He must’ve hit her.
I didn’t remember that part. But I did remember what my father said as he stood over my mother.
“I’m going to kill him,” he proclaimed soberly, in a voice I’d never heard from him. “Then I’m going to go and turn myself in. I’ll sit in a cell for however long the state decides, and I’ll do it fucking happily since I did one thing right. One fucking thing. You’ll take care of that girl.” He pointed at me with the hand that wasn’t holding the gun. “You lay a fucking hand on her, I’ll know. And I’ll make sure that if I ever get out of there, I’ll kill you too.”
