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“That’s a terrible way of looking at it,” I said with amusement.
She shrugged, causing my shoulder to go up with her.
I stretched my legs out across from me and stretched my neck.
Today had been a long day, but all the wiring was done and the only thing left to do now was put in the work of eavesdropping to find out who the kid belonged to and what the hell was going on.
I knew we’d find it.
I also knew that I wasn’t going to like what I found.
She sighed and leaned into me. “I’m so tired. I feel like I’ve gotten no sleep these last few weeks.”
Which had me thinking about her journal, and everything that she’d been through.
“Hades?” I asked.
The waitress came and dropped our drinks down in front of us before leaving just as fast.
“Yes?” she asked.
I felt my stomach tighten at what I was about to ask.
“Why do you still work with your family if you’re so unhappy?” I wondered. “Why’d you go back after college? When your dad died, why’d you stay?”
All questions that’d been on my mind since she’d said she’d never worked anywhere else but at Singh Circus and a coffee shop while she’d been in college.
Oh, and reading about how underappreciated she was with her family.
“Well, my dad had these stipulations in his will. All of the sisters and Keene had to continue working at the circus for a couple of years before the inheritance—IE the circus—could be passed down to us. Right now, it’s held in a trust that is run by my father’s lawyer. The lawyer distributes Zip, Tony, Simi, Crimson, Val and Keene’s pay to them weekly. If there are any new hires, they get paid through that trust, too.”
I looked at her with a frown. “Why did you list everyone’s name but yourself?”
I watched as she rubbed her jaw.
I could tell with just one look she didn’t want to tell me.
“Please?” I asked.
She sighed and closed her eyes, this time leaning all the way into me. “I’m paid like staff. I don’t get any part of the circus—not that my family knows that—because I’m not biologically his child.”
“I read that yesterday,” I said softly. “I wasn’t aware that could even happen.”
Having twins with two different fathers seemed mythological to me.
But it’d apparently happened.
“It can,” she said. “I take after my biological dad, apparently. He used to be a worker at the circus. My mom slept with him and my dad at the same time. Literally, they had a threesome. Shit went weird after that between my mom and Ansel, and Mom wanted to ‘win’ him. So she kind of dropped my dad like a hot potato. Meanwhile, my bio dad didn’t like that and left. Unaware, I guess, that I was a possibility. And Mom tried to pass me off as Ansel’s. She couldn’t. I found out later from snooping that they’d done a DNA test when we were born. Tony is Ansel’s. I’m not.”
“Therefore, you’re paid like staff, and have absolutely zero say in anything when it comes to the circus,” I surmised.
“Yes,” she answered. “Though, my siblings don’t know that I’m not one of them. They just assumed.”
I had a feeling her siblings saw what they wanted and thought everything was copacetic when it wasn’t.
“None of them know that you’re not biologically related to them?” I questioned.
“Not even Tony knows we’re only half,” she said. “Ansel liked that I was a free worker, I guess. He paid me sometimes toward the teenage years when it would be overly apparent that I was getting treated differently. That, and he knew that I would leave if he didn’t give me at least something, and let’s just say…finding a person that would stay for such little pay was hard. He didn’t pay for my college, though. Not like he paid for the rest of them. And I didn’t get added to the will.”
If the guy wasn’t already dead, I’d kill him. I didn’t like that look on her face, and I certainly didn’t like the way she was looking at me. As if she was so far down memory lane she was struggling to breathe.
“Why not tell them then?” I asked. “Why stay when you’re clearly not wanted?”
I felt her stiffen.
Then she all but wilted in my arms. “I love them.”
I couldn’t understand why.
It felt like they all had their head in the clouds where Hades was concerned.
How had none of them realized that there was something so different about how she was treated?
And I was sure that her behavior was erratic. Why did none of them question that?
Why had none of them known she was mistreated so badly by her ‘father?’
“They treat you so poorly,” I said. “You just let them think that you’re fuckin’ nuts. You’re not.”
“I am.” She snorted. “And they think that I am. I’ve never disabused them of the notion.”
