5. Hades

Chapter 5

Hades

A t three years old, they found me sitting in a pool of my mother's blood, her gunshot wound self-inflicted, and her arm covered in track marks. I'd been sitting there so long her blood had congealed in a pool around my small body. Her lifeless eyes fixated right on me.

I knew I'd been the last thing she saw in her miserable life.

By my fourth birthday, I'd been in three separate foster homes before being adopted by Michael Cronus.

I learned at a very young age that money was nothing, that it caused more problems than it solved. It had been used to buy me, as if I were nothing but another item Michael could own.

And by my tenth birthday, I had so many scars on my body, I didn't know what "normal" looked like anymore.

The girl sitting in front of me on my private jet knew nothing about pain, heartache, or humanity slowly being ripped away from you.

She was innocent in every single sense of the word. Her father coddled her, had protected her to the point she was na?ve about how fucked up the world and life really was.

Did she know what a piece of shit bastard her father had really been? She'd never be able to comprehend the horrors her father put me through.

But she would.

The bastard was still just as depraved as he had been until the very day he died. And all the images, the phone transactions, and the credit card receipts I dug up on him confirmed that.

No, sweet, little Persephone didn't know the first thing about who her father truly was or what he did to people. What he'd done to me.

She glanced over at me; her eyes the shade of whiskey when the sun hit them, her hair dark tendrils curling at the ends as they fell over her shoulders. She looked nothing like Zachariah and, instead, resembled her mother heavily in face shape and coloring. But that was where any similarities ended.

I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the leather seat, the sound of the jet engines drowning out everything else as I tried to clear my mind.

"Go on, boy. Take the switch and show Hades that he'll never truly be a Cronus, not like you."

The first time I'd heard my adoptive father, Michael, say those words had been the first night I spent in my new home. They had adopted me out, and I now had a permanent family. It should've been the happiest day of my life.

Instead, I'd been thrust into hell itself and was met with cold, uncaring eyes, a list of rules that had been longer than my small body, and had looked into the faces of the people who should've been my family but were now just so in name.

"Please don't, brother," I whispered as I stared at Zachariah holding that willow branch. His fingers were tight around it, his eyes taking on the same apathetic gaze as our father.

The first time our father had made my brother hit me, Zachariah had hesitated. He pleaded that he didn't want to. Zachariah looked into my eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks a second before Michael had backhanded him, shoved the switch against his little chest, and told him to "man up and be a Cronus".

Zachariah was only a few years older than me the first time he gave me a mark. And after that, slowly, I saw the change come over my brother. Because each time Michael made him take part in the abuse, something dark and twisted grew in my older brother's eyes.

He came to like it because, ultimately, he was cut from the same cloth as our father.

And when Zachariah had gotten old enough, he delivered those whips and punches himself. Half of the scars on my body were from my brother.

I opened my eyes and looked at Persephone. She had her legs curled up and tucked underneath her, a blanket draped across her shoulders.

Her head rested on the back of the seat and angled toward the window, the sun streaming through and casting this honey glow on the dark strands of her hair. My fingers curled in on themselves as the urge to reach over and brush the locks from her forehead grew inside of me.

I hated my brother and had celebrated his death. And a part of me wanted to hate her, too, for the simple fact she was part of Zachariah. It didn't matter that she was innocent. It didn't matter if she didn't know who her father really was or the atrocious things he'd done.

Because she would pay for her father's sins.

With her body.