Aphrodite Kensington is a lot of things.
She's a princess, the life of the party, most skilled in combat, she's the strongest . . .
She's a liar.
Not only had she convinced herself that her lie was true, she convinced her family of it too. She nev...
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When you get away with the lies I got away with, you don't think you'll ever get caught. Because when you're as good as I am at it, you won't ever be caught unless you want to be.
I didn't want to be caught in this lie, this secret. And I wasn't caught, but everyone would find out anyway. I had no choice but to come clean.
It took me two weeks to build up the courage to tell them about our mom. I knew it would only do harm if I waited any longer since it's more than obvious that she has it out for us. If I didn't tell them I knew mom was the real one moving against us, the one that shot me, they would have, number 1, hated me, and number 2, driven themselves mad trying to figure out.
I waited so long to tell them because I had assumed the conversation was going to go bad, but it wasn't.
Horrible is the word I would use.
"Why would you do that?" Ocean asks, his eyes glossing a bit. "You know how I feel about her and you continued to lie." The tears are freely falling from his eyes now. His voice was broken the whole time he was speaking, and it hurt me to know that I was the cause of it.
"You could've been honest with us. I thought we trusted each other, what happened to that?" Ares asked. His tone wasn't angry or upset when he spoke, just genuinely confused.
"I'm sorry." I apologized. "It's not that I didn't trust you, I trust you guys more than anyone. I guess I just thought that everything would be better if I just said she was dead. She left us in Russia. It wasn't like she was coming back to get us." I explained. My intention was never to hurt them. I just didn't want our entire lives to be consumed by a woman who never cared about us in the first place.
Why should we care that she's alive if she never cared about us. I wasn't going to allow any of us to care for her.
"I asked you." Atlas starts. "I asked you straight up that day after they had gone to sleep if what you said was the truth." He motions the Percy, Ares, and Ocean.
"I know, okay. Believe me I know. I just— what did it matter if she was dead or alive? She left us, she never cared for us. I just said she was dead to spare us. How was I supposed to know that she was going to come back?"
"All this lost time—" Ocean speaks.
"Absolutely not. There is no 'lost time'. She left us. And she certainly doesn't care about us or else she wouldn't have left us behind. She actually tried to kill me, Ocean. Get that through your head." I start to raise my voice, trying my best to refrain from yelling for Atlas' sake.
He puts his head down avoiding my eyes. He knows I'm right, but he's having an internal battle in what he knows is the truth and what he wants to be the truth. He wants a mom. And sometimes for him, I wish we had a better one.
