Page 92 of Hades

“Lettie doesn’t hide it as well as she thinks.” She didn’t. Not to someone who knew how to read pain. Not to someone who’d spent his life learning the language of trauma and survival. Not to someone who recognized the signs because he’d lived them himself. “I’ve heard the woman scream for Lettie from her room. Lettie claims there’s nothing wrong with her other than being lazy.”

I’d seen it in the way she talked about her mother. The dismissiveness that was really protection. The way she apologized for the woman before anyone could judge her. The way she said it wasn’t her mother’s house, like she had to remind herself she owned the fucking place. Like she had to convince herself she had the right to exist in her own home.

“She lives in Lettie’s house,” I added. “Lettie supports her. Takes care of her.”

“And what if she stole her?” Zeus asked.

The room went cold.

No one said anything.

Because that was the thought none of us had wanted to put words to yet.

If Lettie was Colette, then someone had taken her. Someone had raised her. Someone had lied to her every damn day of her life. Someone had let Apollo’s mother die not knowing her baby was alive.

And if that someone was the woman living in Lettie’s house, eating Lettie’s food, taking Lettie’s care?

I was going to kill her.

Slowly.

Painfully.

In ways that would make her beg for death long before I granted it.

The thought didn’t shock me. Didn’t make me hesitate. It settled into my chest like a promise. Like something I’d already decided and was just waiting for confirmation to execute. I’d make her suffer. Make her understand what she’d taken. Make her pay for every second of pain she’d caused.

Apollo took another breath, then another, until he could speak without his voice breaking apart.

“We don’t know that her mother did anything,” Apollo said.

“Maybe she adopted her illegally,” Atlas added. I turned and saw the look on his face. Atlas was thirty-eight years old and had been a patched member for almost twenty years. When he was eighteen, he found out his parents weren’t his parents.

They hadn’t just adopted him; they’d done it illegally.

He had no idea who he was or where he came from. He tried to convince us that shit didn’t bother him, but looking at him now, there was no mistaking the pain in his eyes.

“We don’t know who took Colette,” Apollo agreed. “We don’t know if Lettie is Colette. All we have is instinct and a nickname.”

“And her face,” Rykard said.

Apollo looked up at him. Rykard’s eyes were wet, shining with tears he was fighting like hell to hold back. He slipped his wallet from his back pocket and removed what looked like a picture. He stared at it for a moment before handing it to me.

Fuck.

Apollo’s throat worked. I watched him swallow. Watched him try to hold himself together. Watched him fail. The grief cracked through his defenses and bled out into the open.

I held the picture in my hand, afraid to look at it. When I finally lowered my eyes, I stared at a picture of Lettie. Only, it wasn’t her. The woman in the picture was older by maybe a decade. But she had the same long blonde hair, the same green eyes and creamy skin.

“I need to know,” Rykard said. “But not at her expense.”

I watched him for a long moment. Studied his face. Saw the hope he was trying like hell not to feel. The fear that if he let himself believe, it would destroy him when he was wrong. The desperation of a man who’d been searching for decades and finally had a solid lead.

“Good answer,” I said, handing the picture back. I refused to say out loud what I now knew had to be the truth.

Rykard’s mouth twitched. Barely.

Zeus tapped his fingers on the table. “We keep this tight.”