“It’s human.” He states it without a shred of pity. “Is that why you went to Malone? Because it’s easier to hate her than it is to hate yourself?”
I flinch. “She put my mother in a coma and took away any chance I ever had of knowing her.”
Hades takes my hand. “Do you want the comforting lie, or are you finally ready for the hard truth?”
I don’t want hard truths. I just want to wrap up in a blanket and close my eyes and wait for the world to stop spinning in the wrong direction, wait for the hole in my chest to scar over. To check out from reality in a way I’ve never allowed myself to before. I set down the empty whiskey glass.
What I want is not what I need.
I have been a coward long enough.
I take a deep breath. “I probably won’t thank you for the hard truth, but tell me anyway.”
“Your mother wouldn’t have lasted the year. If Malone didn’t do it, someone else would have, and they would have done it in a far crueler fashion.” He holds my gaze. “I understand your blaming her. I sympathize. But do you want to know what the territory was like under your mother’s rule?” He continues before I have a chance to respond. “Crime was at an all-time high, and everyone suffered because she wouldn’t make rules, let alone enforce them. Innocents were harmed because she was a weak leader.”
Impossible not to compare that with the reports I’ve all but memorized about the territory now. Stable. Everyone kept in tight check by Malone and her inner circle. She’s given everyone fucking benefits. The territory is flourishing under her rule, and even though I’ve tried to find fault with it, I can’t.
I clear my throat. “Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“You weren’t ready to hear it.” He gives my hand a squeeze and sits back. “I’m not certain you’re ready to hear it now, but your mother finally passing isn’t what’s put that look on your face, is it?”
He’s being too gentle, too kind. This isn’t the normal Hades, and I’m powerless to keep my pain bottled up in the presence of this version of him. I press my fingers to my temples. “What kind of monster am I if I care about the woman who did that to my mother?”
“Ah.”
But I’m not finished. “She is a monster. She hurt my mother.”
“Your mother went into a coma twenty years ago.” He sounds almost idle. “And yet you didn’t find your way to me until three years later.”
I open my eyes, not sure when I closed them. “What’s your point? They were going to take her off life support, and I had to do something.”
“Do you know how long hospitals usually allow a patient to stay in a coma where there’s no brain activity?”
Something slithers through me, something I can barely recognize. I let my hands drop to my lap. “Not three years.”
“Not three years,” he confirms.
It feels like the ground is opening up beneath me, but I’m helpless to do anything but stand here and let it swallow me whole. I simultaneously don’t want to ask and desperately need to know. “Why was she on life support for so long?”
His expression goes sympathetic. “Because Malone paid for it.”
I wait for the words to make sense. Wait for them to be anything but a lock I can’t find the key to. “But why?”
“Do you know how many of the current territory leaders killed the person who came before them?”
This is a trap, but he’s not going to let me avoid it. “More than one.”
“Jasmine, though technically Jafar is the one who removed her father. Hook, though again, Tink killed Peter. Ursa. Malone. Me.” He leans forward. “This is the world we move in, Aurora. The world you move in. It always has been.”
I want to turn away from this knowledge, but I can’t quite make myself. “It’s different. They were monsters.”
“You don’t think those monsters had people who loved them?” He arches an eyebrow.
I want to scream that it’s different, that she was my mother and that means something. I already know what he’ll say. Everyone has loved ones, everyone has someone who will mourn them when they’re gone. It suddenly strikes me that he’s lumping my mother in with the monsters. “Was she really that bad?”
He doesn’t pretend to misunderstand. “She loved you. She wouldn’t have sent you away if she didn’t. But she wasn’t a good leader, and people were harmed while the territory was under her care.”
I don’t know if that makes me feel better or worse. I had built up this picture in my head of the woman my mother must have been, driven by the hole her absence left in my life. But even Grandmother had criticisms of my mother. I draw in a shaky breath. “I don’t know if that changes anything.”