The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(24)
I shook my head, wanting to ask her to stop. I didn’t need this. I was here to forget my own past, not to learn of hers. Not to feel sympathy for someone I’d not remember the moment that water passed my lips.
As if she knew what I’d been thinking, she looked askance at me, pretty eyes wide and knowing in her beautiful face. And my impatience and fury at that pedophile abated just a little.
Soft pink lips tipped at the corners and I couldn’t understand how, for even a moment, Aegaeon could ever believe Amara to be anything other than utter perfection. If she’d been alive in my time, she’d have no doubt graced the covers of the Victoria Secret catalog, Vogue, and whatever else was high-end and posh. Even old, she’d have been a stunner.
“A few days later, I bumped into my male cousin at the market. We talked. That was all. But rumors did what they always do, and when they reached Aegaeon’s ears, the rage returned. I almost died after that beating; it took months to heal and I never walked right again. Little by little, Aegaeon broke me. Turned me from something beautiful into something deformed and twisted, where no man would ever want me, would ever try to take me away from him. In the end, I took a blade to my own throat to escape him.” Her smile was weak, and the tears ran freely down both cheeks now.
My sadness mingled with hers as I asked, “Why would you tell me this?”
“Because though the latter years of my life were the most miserable, I would never want to forget the love I once knew. The memories of a family that I cherished until the day of my death. They sustain me even now, and I know someday I will find them again.”
“Where are they? Shouldn’t they have come here with you?”
She shrugged. “The underworld is vast. But I will never stop searching. Lethe is to your left.” She pointed, and I glanced over, noting the empty gazes of those who’d drunk from its waters. “But know this, little Alice Hu. If you take too much of those addictive waters, you won’t simply forget your life, you’ll forget it all. You’ll be nothing more than a shell. There is no returning from that. So make sure it’s really what you want.”
Clenching my jaw, I shook my head and gripped my chest. Her story hurt me deeply, but I wasn’t Amara. Yes, I’d had a good family. But they would never come here. And it hurt to know that I would always be alone and trapped in this hell. I didn’t want to remember everything. Didn’t want to remember the hope, the disappointment, or the reality that I would always be alone in a land where I had nothing and no one I loved.
“I see that you’re determined, and so I will share with you one final bit of information I have learned. I do not know whether it is true or not, but I’ve been told that if you were to merely dip your finger in its waters and trace your lips, you’ll only lose a very little bit.”
My eyes widened. I’d wanted to lose it all, but if there was a way to erase the pain but leave my good memories intact, wasn’t it worth a shot?
I wet my lips, the first faint stirrings of hope I’d felt in a very long time fluttering in me. “If that’s the case, then why wouldn’t you try to erase Aegaeon from your memories?”
Amara held up her hands. “Because I do not know if it’s true, and I would never risk losing my family over him a second time. But if your heart is fixed, then I pray for your sake that it works.”
I looked back to the river, heart thundering in my chest with nerves. Drink my fill and remember nothing at all. Be numb to everything, but always empty. That thought was bleak and depressing. Dip my finger in the water and taste of it, possibly lose only the pain, but keep the rest. Was it a risk worth taking?
That strange, echoing emptiness inside me pitched violently, opening up the fissure that’d closed for just a moment while talking with Amara. Yes, anything was better than this hollow yearning for a man I’d never known at all.
And yet my feet refused to move.
And so there I stood on the bank, watching others practically throw themselves into the waters as they sank beneath the coolness with ghosts and tears in their eyes and coming back up with nothing but a void, empty gazes staring back at me.
I needed peace, but was this really the way?
That same sense of disquieting “something” held me back, and even as I damned my inability to make any sort of decision, I was also strangely comforted that there was an escape for me, as long as I could work up the nerve to go take it.
*
Aphrodite
Marching up to Hades’s throne, I shook my head and gathered my teal-colored chiton in my hands with barely checked rage at the Lord of the Underworld.
His gaze flickered briefly to my face before he began shaking his head. “And so you’ve returned?” he said, voice sounding as dead as the souls surrounding him.
Angry, frustrated, I shoved at the tendrils of amber hair curling prettily around my face. “I found her,” I spat without preamble.
A dark brow twitched, slowly rising on his broad forehead before lowering. “And so you have. You are fortunate I do not toss you out on your pretty little arse for continuing to interfere in the lives of my—”
“Your what!” I snapped, my frustration over the entire situation taking over. “You ignore them all. You sit here on your throne day in and day out and you shut out the world around you. Those people”—I shot my hand out—“need to feel your presence. They need to know you’re real, that you love them, that you—”