Either Lucas Freeman wasn’t half the man he used to be, or he was drowning himself in the same poison that nearly killed him a decade ago. Veronica was willing to bet on both as she stood in the doorway of her house, in this silent little heavenly slice of suburbia that had never quite felt like home. No matter the blank cheques. No matter what she had done to make very sure that Rylee would have at least stayed off the same streets she had been raised on.
This place was just not home, and it hadn’t felt like a house since that day that’s burned itself into her head. She hates herself, there was no other way of putting it. She came to this house to sleep and to wake up in daze as her alarm goes off every morning at four, then it would be off to work on a diet of painkillers and coffee. Her friends (she was surprised she still had them, the normal ones that invited her to book clubs and knitting over tea) said that she was killing herself. That one day she’d be dead on her kitchen floor, and maybe she should stop for Rylee, and they know how hard things have been since Alexander died in that terrible, terrible fight ten years ago.
But if it wasn’t for her diet of emptiness and exhaustion, she probably wouldn’t have noticed the tiny white feather there in the foyer. Tonight, she was a little drunk off wine and champagne, and Rett had done her a hell of a favor and driven her home. So she stumbled inside, not entirely stable on her bare feet, her heels hanging from her fingers and her coat loosely draped off her shoulders. She stared at the feather as she kicked the door shut.
Then she said, “Lights,” and the house blossomed a little too brightly. Veronica hung her coat and dropped her shoes on the floor, right there where Rylee left a few of her sneakers by the door, where she left them be in case she ever wanted to take them. That way she can slip in and go without seeing me in this state. She hiccuped, then crouched, her red silk dress spilling onto the wooden floor as she plucked the feather off the ground. She peered at it, and yes, certainly, it was the same feather she had seen so, so many times before, and God, she wanted to burn it.
But he was there sitting where Alexander used to sit, leaned back and comfortable as all hell.
Veronica stood, leaning against the archway that led into the living room. She stared at him, blinking slowly, looking through the loose strands of hair that had fallen over her glasses. He stared back at her, and there was something…wrong with him, not that there was ever anything right with him to begin with. Nobody, though, ever sat in that chair except her. It was such a petty little thought, coming from deep in her mind, somewhere that had gotten stirred by the alcohol swishing around in her brain. That’s my seat. That’s our seat. And he looked like he had been there for a while, a glass of whiskey on the table in front of him, half empty and now refilled, too.
“How was your party?” Lucas asked, his voice ever gravelly. My God, he looked a mess, with his unruly hair and his mess of unshaven stubble. As she walked into the living room, she smelt him, too, and it nearly made her puke. Sweat. Cigarettes. His knuckles were torn open, and there was dried blood splattered all over his white shirt. His coat, like hers, hung on a hook beside the door. By all means, make yourself fucking comfortable, Shrike.
Veronica took the whiskey bottle out of his hands and forced the cork back inside. Then she looked down at him, this filthy mess of a man that was allowing his stench to soak into the cracked leather of the only thing that she could fall asleep on in this entire house. Then she turned her back on him and headed into the kitchen, putting the bottle back behind the new boxes of sugary cereal that Rylee seemed to always like so much. Then she turned.
And he was right there, just a few feet away, whiskey in his hand, the other in his pocket.
“You look tired,” he said.
“World’s greatest,” she muttered. “How could that have ever gotten past you, Lucas?”
“I saw what your boy did,” he continued, walking toward the counter—she watched him, standing still, not threatened by a man she was more than sure could slit her throat if he wanted to. A few years ago, and she wouldn’t have thought that. But this wasn’t Shrike in her home anymore, it was the man who had worn that mask to get away with the crimes he’d committed in the name of justice. “Saving the city, good for him. I bet you Cassidy is proud.”
“A billion dollars richer,” Veronica said flatly. “She has Damage Control doing reconstruction now.”
“If she’s not proud, then at least she’s drunk with glee.”
Only one person would be happy half the city got destroyed, Veronica thought. No. Two, actually.
The only difference was that Cassie was doing it for the money, the power, to quietly keep chewing up a larger and larger slice of New Olympus for herself. The other person was an alcoholic shell of a dying man now.
Because for Lucas, it meant that he had a reason to keep playing the tragic superhero.
“What do you want?” she asked, taking off her glasses to massage her eyes. “I escaped that party so I could leave behind the kind of people who want to see superheroes get killed. You’re not making my night any better.”
Lucas set his glass down with a chink on the counter, hands on the marble, facing her. “Excuse me?”
“You don’t need to be a Supe to have heard me, unless the tetanus is acting up again.”
He grunted, but his eyes were dead set on her, dark and hollow. When was the last time you slept, Lucas? But show him fear, reluctance, so much as a step back, and he’ll take a mile, and probably your life, too. “I’ll do you a favor and pretend I didn’t just hear an accusation,” he said. “Since I’m not welcome for a drink anymore, I—”
“You never were. I only let you in here because I always forgot to bolt down the doggie flap.”
He tensed, his hand curling around the glass. Go on, I dare you. Lucas stared at her as he finished half the whisky still sitting in the bottom of the glass, then set it down again much harder. “The fuckin’ mouth on you.”
Veronica couldn’t help but smile a little. “It’s at least one thing Rylee got from me.”
“Speaking of the kid,” he said, his voice dropping. “Where the fuck was she? Adam was alone out there, and that kid’s got as much experience as Hermes had reasons to stay off the lines. The one time the city needs—”
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“I think you should finish your drink and leave my home, Lucas. It’s late.”
He straightened. “You don’t know where she is either, then.”
She froze for a moment, her heart stuttering ever so slightly, making her blood run cold. “You’re the one who was so adamant that she should start focusing on behind a superhero more than anything else. You wanted her out of her bedroom upstairs and onto those God awful streets every single night.” She walked toward the counter and set her palms down flat on it, and now it was her turn to stare deep into the eyes of a thing that had only been wearing the face of a human for about only half its life. “So let me ask you this, Lucas. Where is my daughter?”
He had the nerve to smile. “Caring now after all the shit you’ve done to her, V? Come on.”
“Don’t start with me,” she said quietly. “You forced yourself between us.”
“As always, it’s never Veronica Addam’s fault, is it? Always somebody else’s.” He folded his arms and tilted his head slightly, and when he continued, his voice was low, silent, like the mutterings of some snake that had learnt how to spit its acid and form it into words. “You don’t call. You don’t text. You watch her on the news when you’re half asleep drunk on that chair every night. I’m the one who takes care of her, makes sure she’s straight, focused, alive, and all you ever do is wish that you did better, but you don’t do anything at all. Your kid ran away when the city needed her. She’s always going on about her old man and that statue, and when she finally got—”
“You’re either a shell of what you were, or someone’s wearing your skin,” she said, cutting him off, “if you think that your bullshit is going to work on the person who made sure you stupid little gadgets always worked.”
Lucas slid his tongue across the line of his teeth, staring just as hard at her as she was him.
“I don’t know who you think you are, or if in your head you’re still this…this person who ruled over the night and the same streets that dragged your teeth against its concrete,” she said, rounding the counter, and taking the glass from him and dumping the rest of it in the sink, “but nobody is afraid of you anymore. You’re what’s all that remains of a time that died with my husband, and you should be on your knees thanking me for making sure you’re even able to stand here and fill my house with whatever disease-riddled flesh that’s clinging to your frail little body. I could have left you for dead. I could have set your spine back wrong, or let you bleed out on those rocks.” Now she stood eye-to-eye with him, looking down her nose and into the pits of his eyes, into the depths of emptiness that had long since left his soul behind—maybe on that planet, maybe on that hill, or maybe it had been breaking bit by bit for so long that he had left himself all over the city, tiny little fragments that cut people open if they were ever unlucky enough to stumble across Lucas Freeman in the flesh. “But you didn’t deserve that, because Zeus died there, and if you did, too, then I would have split heaven and hell to bring him back to life, just so that you wouldn’t share half the remembrance he received. So leave, Lucas, and if you come back, it should be with Rylee, and an apology, and you go fucking tell her what you did to rip her out of my hands again and again.”
Silence. The kind of silence that made her ears ring and her heart thump.
“You’re blaming me for you throwing your kid out the front door?”
She slapped him, and the sound carried. She had nothing more to say as he opened and closed his jaw. They both had secrets that could end what little they had left. They’d lived lives even before the spotlight had ever even thought about turning to them. Veronica wasn’t proud of her work, herself, but she’d had a daughter. One that she’s put through school. One that she’d watched every day get bigger and taller, stronger and fitter. On the days she got sick, she would say she was sick, too, and sit with Rylee on the couch, watching some movie they’d watched a million times over, but she hadn’t cared. Not at all. She wasn’t perfect, she knew that, the silence she met in this house every single day reminded her of that like a blow to the chest, but there was one little thing she had left.
And it was a girl she hadn’t seen anywhere in two months. But she knows where Rylee lives now.
She’s even mustered up the courage to stand across the street outside the coffee shop, and she would watch her work, watch as she would serve customers, and she had thought about it several times, going in there and…
But no, she didn’t deserve to force her way back into Rylee’s life. That wasn’t fair.
Just like how this man continued to treat her daughter like she was one of his little black birds.
Lucas finally broke away. His gaze shifted as he cleared his throat and grabbed his coat off the rack. She listened to him slide into the coat, heard as he turned to look at her from the foyer. “Your kid’s not a hero, V.”
“Neither of us gets to decide what that means for her,” she said icily. “What did you come here for?”
“To see if you were willing to save the world again,” he said quietly. “But you got too attached again.”
With that, he vanished. Veronica stared at the empty spot where he had just been standing, sick to her stomach and weak in her legs as she finally breathed out. She found herself on the couch, far from the chair that she normally sat in. The house was dark, and there had been tears streaking down her cheeks at some point, smudging her makeup, but they’d long since stopped. Pictures of times when they had gone to the park, the museum, her first time riding a bike, and the first time she ever played catch with Rylee with reflective pieces of glass too dark for her to see. They surrounded her, hung from the walls like the crosses that used to hang over her mother’s thin bed frame.
Her mother had rotted away in that bed, praying to those crosses for help, for some kind of salvation to whatever it was that was chewing up her insides every single day. Veronica wasn’t asking for her little girl back.
For some kind of miracle she knew deep down she was never going to get.
All she was hoping for was that she was safe and alive, and when the whiskey burned itself down her throat, scalding and cool and washing away the vile taste of bitter saliva, she sat upright and dropped her glass.
It hit the floor and rolled, spilling itself onto the carpet.
The picture frame above the flat screen, the only photograph she had of all three of them, was glowing. Shining with the reflection of two golden irises. Veronica slowly rose, barely able to stand without clutching onto the couch. The shadow on the wall was slim, short, right about her height and her build, exactly what she—
It wasn’t Rylee. It was a girl with short cropped hair covered in blood, and another one with black hair and hollow eyes and wearing a striped red and white blouse. How did they get in here? The alarms should have…
Lucas.
“Hi there!” the girl with the black hair said, grinning. “I heard you’re a bit of a miracle worker.”
“Who—”
The girl with the golden eyes moved, now standing right in front of Veronica. She stumbled and sat down hard on the table, looking up at a girl who looked hauntingly like a man who she had seen die in front of her.
“She’s a little cranky. Just woke up from nearly dying,” the girl said. “So be smart about this, because if you play this right, you won’t get hurt, because I also really don’t want Olympia angry at me. That would blow.”
Veronica tensed her jaw, swallowed her panting breaths. Her finger slid under the table and pressed a button that had been there even before she’d gotten a ring slid around her finger. Then she slowly stood up.
The girl blinked, as if surprised. “You actually listened. I thought that would be a little harder, but…I’ll take it.” She strolled across the foyer and into the living room, and Ronnie almost threw up in her mouth at the stink of blood that was clinging to the girl. “Between you and me,” she said, lowering her voice, “this is either gonna be the greatest Christmas of our lives, or you might just never see your daughter again. How exciting.”