Page 96 of Freak Show

“Tell me why you came now, and not earlier,” I suggested.

Yes, I was holding his sister’s health status against him, but I couldn’t help it.

He could’ve tried to come at any time.

Hell, I’d seen plenty of people here with family with them. Sure, they were standing and in the way, but a lot of them hadn’t taken the “no, you can’t come” to heart. Like Ari’s sisters and Keene had.

“Well.” He closed his eyes. “From what Hades told us after they left, it wasn’t an adamant ‘you can’t come’ and more of a strongly worded ‘there won’t be room for you.’”

I gritted my teeth.

“They don’t know. She literally was just taken to imaging. She’s been in this hallway bed for the last hour,” I answered his earlier question. Reluctantly.

Keene rolled his neck. “I should’ve been here.”

He should’ve. “You should have.”

He pinched the bridge of his nose and blew out a frustrated breath.

“We should’ve probably noticed the signs.” Keene winced. “But she’s always been like that.”

Just because she’d always been like that didn’t make this all okay.

Honestly, it made it worse.

They wouldn’t have allowed that to happen with some random person, yet they allow it to happen to their own sister?

Yeah, that didn’t sit well with me.

“I’m going to give you a little insight on Hades,” Keene sighed. “From the very beginning, she’s always acted a bit different. It’s like Tony got all the nice genes, and Hades got all the mean ones.”

I didn’t say anything, my jaw set like stone.

“Hades was like a big black hole, sucking up everyone’s sunshine.” He paused. “Tony’s sunshine.”

Still I didn’t say anything.

“So she started to show signs of this obsessiveness for a while. As in, Tony couldn’t do a single thing without Hades knowing where she was at, what she was doing, when she would be back, and why she was doing it in the first place.” He shook his head. “She did it to a certain extent against the rest of us as well, but not nearly to the point that she did it to Tony.”

My stomach felt sick.

A feeling that had gotten significantly worse since finding out this information about Hades.

“She has this thing about her, something that she’s struggled with from the beginning of time. She hates when people don’t pay attention to her. She especially hates it when Tony doesn’t,” he said.

I waited.

“It wasn’t until she was an older teen during college that she fixated on this boy that used to volunteer at the same place that they did,” he murmured. “And it’s something that went pretty fuckin’ far, to the point where the dude called the police on her. That’s when we finally opened our eyes and saw the issue at hand. Hades needed help.”

I would fuckin’ think so.

“She saw a therapist and we all decided that the best course of action was to get her into a psych facility where she would then spend some time trying to figure out why her actions were so shitty,” he said. “And we realized we needed to set some boundaries when it came to Hades and Caristonia. Hence her month vacation.”

I frowned. “I thought you all got one?”

“We don’t. We just know when Hades has made Tony hit her breaking point,” he admitted.

Fuckin’ A.

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