Dread washed over me. “I’m going to want you to stay no matter what.”
Hades didn’t try to argue with me, just continued to draw circles on my back in silence, working toward what he was going to tell me. What he was going to expose.
I waited, hungry, desperate to peer into the darkest corners of his life, to feast on his mysterious past.
“Monsters are not born, they’re made,” he stated after we’d been marinating in silence for minutes.
I turned my head to stare at him, not liking where this was going. “You’re not a monster,” I disagreed, my voice tight.
“You don’t know enough about me to make that statement.”
I pouted at the coolness in his tone, refusing to back down from his practiced bad guy stare. He was trying to scare me, with all that brooding intensity. Sure, it was a touch scary before I’d gotten to know him, and it would definitely be scary if I was someone who had gotten on his bad side, but I was on Hades’s good side. Despite what he was implying here, he had a good side. A wonderful side. But he was making it clear that I wasn’t going to be able to change his mind. At least not right at that moment. I would change his mind, though. With time. Hopefully we had time.
“I had a good childhood,” he told me, obviously choosing not to debate with me over whether or not I knew him well enough to deem him human instead of a monster. “People meet me, they figure I was fucked from the beginning. Think that to be the person I am now, I must’ve never known true happiness. But the only way to truly create a monster is to give them love and happiness, so they know how it tastes, then snatch it away from them completely. Make it so that sweetness rots on your tongue and you have to live with that taste in your mouth for the rest of your life.”
He shifted slightly to trail the side of my face with his fingertip. No one had ever touched me that gently in my life, and I sure wasn’t expecting it from a man who had seemed incapable of tenderness.
“Some people are dealt shit from the day they’re born,” he murmured, searching my face as if he were committing me to memory. “Very fuckin’ few of those people manage to rid themselves of it. To rise above it and turn into something magnificent. In fact, I would’ve thought such a feat was impossible had I not met you.”
My heart jumped to my throat, warmth spreading to the very core of me.
“I had what you didn’t,” he continued. “I had a mother and a father who loved me, loved each other and gave me a safe and stable home. Until they didn’t. Car accident. On their way home from date night.”
He shook his head. “Yeah, can’t get any more cookie-cutter, American dream than people who have a ‘date night’ once a fuckin’ week. My parents, they came from shit, both of ‘em. Mom had a family who was bad news. Real bad fuckin’ news. To the point where she changed her name to escape ’em. Didn’t know that until later, of course. Dad had once had a family, but he was an only child. Parents had him later in life and both died within six months of each other before he turned five. No brothers or sisters, uncles, what the fuck ever on either side. No close friends either. Not close enough to take in a ten-year-old orphan anyway.”
I had to struggle to keep my tears at bay. I knew I couldn’t weep for Hades, not now when the story had only just begun. Not even after, when I’d heard the worst of it.
“Went into the system,” he continued, his hand once again tracing circles on my back as if he needed some kind of anchor.
“Again, not many adoptive parents want a ten-year-old boy who’s angry at the world, hating everyone for being strange and unfamiliar. So I went to group homes. Some were okay. Most weren’t. Problem was, I was too old to be adopted, too old to forget the life I’d had before. If my parents had died when I was much younger, growin’ up in that shit would’ve been much easier because I wouldn’t have known any better.”
He lingered in that ‘what if’ for a moment, the same way I’d lingered in the possibility of Aunt V taking me away from my life before the worst could happen. Then his eyes shuttered, and he shook it off.
“But I did. It turned me bitter. Angry. Fuckin’ furious. Made me decide that I would not care about another fuckin’ thing in this horrible world. When I was older, it made me want to hurt people. Fell into crowds lookin’ for someone exactly like me. Had nothin’ to lose, nothing to keep me human.” His eyes seared into mine. “I did some fuckin’ bad shit, Freya. I killed people. A lot of them. And I didn’t feel bad about it. I loved it. I still do.”