“I want to see,” I say.
He shifts in his chair. “There’s no point. It’s almost healed.”
“I get you not wanting to upset me while I was healing, but I’m better now.” I hold my palm out. “Please. I’ll just imagine worse things.”
One eyebrow raises, but he puts his hand in mine. Carefully, I peel his glove off, then suck in sharply at the multitude of slashes across his palm. Not open wounds. Not anymore, at least. Actually, they look a lot like my arm does now. But still angry and red, and still healing. It’s been days.
My throat grows thick, and I clear it. “Merciful Olympus,” I whisper.
He tries to tug out of my hold. “It doesn’t matter, Lyra.”
“It damn well matters to me.” He took punishment in my place. No one has ever done anything like that for me. Blinking rapidly, I run a finger softly over the smooth scars.
Hades gives a low growl, and I look up into eyes that have turned from heavy storm clouds into swirling silver.
“Why?” he asks.
I can’t look away. “What do you mean, why?”
“I dragged you into the Crucible. Why would you bother to cry over me?”
I have no answer to that question. I’m sure psychologists would give it some kind of label. A syndrome of some sort. I hate labels like that—putting me into neat and tidy boxes. Life, emotions, humanity—none of that is remotely neat and tidy. We are, all of us, just trying to do the best we can, and fuck anyone who says otherwise.
I just never realized until now that that might include the gods.
“I could ask you the same thing. Why do you care? Actually…” I shake my head. “How are you able to care? Because you shouldn’t feel a damned thing for me.”
His jaw goes so impossibly hard, I’m surprised his teeth don’t crack.
The TV breaks the silence between us. “I am here with Brad and Jessica Keres, the parents of Lyra Keres.” I whip my gaze around to stare at the screen, my heart pounding in my ears so loud I’m not sure I’ll be able to hear a word they say.
A young reporter shoves a mic into the faces of two people I’ve never seen before in my life.
At least…I don’t think so.
“What do you think about your daughter being chosen by Hades this Crucible?” he asks them.
63
You Can’t Choose Your Family
I narrow my eyes, trying to make the faces on the television connect to a memory. Any memory.
“We are so worried about our little Lyra,” the man says.
I sit straight up in bed, tightening my grip on Hades.
The man has an arm wrapped around the woman’s waist. Her smile seems wooden.
“What in the—?”
The man is the right age to be my dad. Tall with broad shoulders and an equally broad belly, he has the same black hair as me…I guess. Brown eyes, though. And the shape of his face is different than mine. He beams straight into the camera. I don’t remember my dad’s face, but I don’t remember beaming smiles, either.
The woman is petite in the same way Meike is. Her brown hair is graying at the roots, but she does have green eyes. Like mine? Is there gold at the center? She’s too far from the camera to tell.
Do I even recognize her? I mean, my family’s faces are blurry in my head after all this time. I was only three when they dropped me in Felix’s lap. My memories of them include eating a lot of peanut butter sandwiches and a hazy recollection of my mother singing to me, but otherwise I just have the vague knowledge that I had parents once.
“They never called me Lyra,” I say. More to myself than Hades.
Lyra wasn’t my name before I joined the Order. I don’t remember what my name was, but that wasn’t it.
“We understand Lyra is working off a debt for your family as part of the Order of Thieves,” the newscaster says. “It is also said that the Order is getting threats. It seems many do not want Hades to become King of the Gods. What do you think of that?”
I shoot Hades a frowning look. “Is that true?”
“Are you surprised?”
No. Not really.
I missed my parents’ answer, but I catch the next question when I turn back to the TV. “Did Lyra volunteer to pay your debts? From the little we’ve managed to learn about her background, she doesn’t seem like the type who would.”
I scowl. The world thinks they know me, huh?
The man who is supposed to be my father lets his expression droop from suitably sad to remorseful, and I curl my hands into fists, not buying one scrap of it. “She asked us to let her go,” he says.
When I was fucking three years old?
