Page 51 of Apollo

Wen nodded again. “A most valid point.”

“Not as valid as the one you’ve got.” How the woman was ready with that not-so-small zinger, as well as the knowing head tip she tacked onto it? “And what do you mean, not your boyfriend? Have you consulted Apollo on that one? Don’t throw down with that side-eye, chica. You hunt people down, and I write stories about them. Behavioral study isn’t just a hobby for us. And my not-a-hobby instinct says that guy wants to get back to LA, put on a new fancy suit, and properly meet Papa Steed.”

Before she finished, Wen knew what spine of steel really felt like. The stiffness separated her from the pole and brought her back to standing, where she sucked down a rough breath while facing Lois like a doomed Kamen Rider.

“Let’s go ahead and tuck that into the never-going-to-happen file.”

Lois flew a hand over her lips. “Well, shit.” Just as fast, she let it fall to her thigh. “I’m so sorry. Here I was, considering myself the only kid in LA who grew up without a dad.”

“Oh, I had one,” Wen specified. “Well, probably still do have one. I mean, somewhere . . . ”

This time, Lois cocked her head the other way. “And you just misplaced him and don’t remember where?”

Color rushed her face, another involuntary reaction. She veered away, pacing toward the shadowed side road Apollo had taken to fetch the pizza.

“More like he set me away,” she confessed to the nooks and crannies between the buildings. Tiny spaces that somehow felt . . . alive. With someone there, ready to listen . . . “Well, us,” she clarified. “Genny and me.”

“Genny,” the woman behind her echoed. “That’s your sister, right? Whom you’re looking to grab back from Ito?”

She gave a narrow nod. “Our mom died a few months after she was born. She never left the hospital after the birth. Dad said it was because she was ‘sad’, but I hardly believed it then, and I don’t now. I was really young, but old enough to remember my mother as a strong, brave woman who’d do her best to fight postpartum depression, had she gotten proper support from the backwoods place she was in.”

“Wow.” Lois took a turn to haul in a long breath. “Where were you?”

“That part, I don’t remember,” she confessed. “We started in Detroit, where Dad bounced between jobs he never talked about, and Mom worked nights at a motel front desk, but we were on our way to settle in with my grandmother in Los Angeles when the car broke down. Mom’s water broke in the middle of nowhere. Apparently, it was a tough delivery. Genny finally made it, but the stress took its toll. The one and only time Dad took me to see her, I remember she couldn’t stop crying. She begged me to take her home. She was so distraught. I—” Her breath snagged as her voice caught. “I wanted to help her so badly, but I had no idea where home even was.”

“Shit,” Lois rasped. “How old were you?”

“Almost four,” she supplied. “We got on a video call with my grandma, and she promised a cake topped with the trendiest princess of the time.” After a heavy shrug and a stinging swallow, she whispered to the attentive shadows, “I don’t even remember which one it was. She had a purple dress, I think? Maybe blue? Didn’t matter. By the time we made it to LA after a few weeks, they didn’t have any more of her figurines at the grocery store. Dad had to spend the money on my school uniforms instead.”

“So you didn’t get a cake at all?”

She turned back around, plastering on a smile, since the poor woman gasped it as if learning her name was actually Matilda and she’d been forced to live a day in a spike-lined closet.

“It’s all right, girl. Obviously, I survived. Genny and I both did.”

Unnerved by the odd mix of emotions on Lois’s face, she debated between backing up to her trusty light pole or surrendering a few more inches of herself to the dimmer light. Option two finally won the coin toss.

“Dad never understood princess cakes. Or for that matter, any cake. Grandma seemed to understand that about him, and the two of us sure tried to, but some people just aren’t supposed to be parents, you know? By the time my seventh birthday rolled around, I think we all finally realized that. Then Dad did something about it. He was no longer around. Instead, there was a bigger deposit to Grandma’s bank account and a check for me inside a birthday card mailed from somewhere near Edwards Air Force Base. My dad the rocket nerd finally followed his joy, which simply wasn’t Genny and me.”

From a few feet behind her right shoulder, Lois spewed another harsh gasp. “Wait. No, that’s . . . just . . . ”

“What?” she quietly cut in. “Unbelievable? Unfair?” Then shook her head and dropped her stare to the rough cobblestones beneath her dingy boots. “Trite is sometimes right, my friend”—and part of her did hope that she and Lois Lance could keep being friends—“and life is unfair. You know that one as well as I do, don’t you?”

“Fine.” Lois huffed. “Yes. But—”

“Stop.”

She almost spun back around just to enforce the word. But a stronger force emerged to lock her feet and pull her head back up. A pair of crystalline green eyes, seeming to float on their own from between a couple of buildings. But she already knew better, because she already knew the face in which that riveting gaze belonged. All its chiseled edges. Every line of its aquiline nose. Every inch of its high, noble forehead. Even the ears with which the lucky strands of his long gold hair got to tease.

Her almost-assassin.

Her fucking Glow Worm.

Her gorgeous god.

But never really to be hers . . .

How long had he been hiding there? Long enough that he heard every word she’d exchanged with Lois?