Page 113 of Broken Obsession
Zar shrugged. “I may have set our fellow Black Hart Camren on the right path.”
“Because?”
“Because in several branches, you heal him. Do you know what it’s like to live day by day in a world you don’t believe in? It’s torture. As a species, we seek answers to all things, find comfort in the knowing. Mother’s work has been destroyed. Father’s notes turned to ash. They treat us like gods here, butthe majority still think we’re traumatized or making it up. Even you’re finding it hard to believe.”
“I’m the type of person who needs to experience something firsthand.” He shrugged, but then considered Zar’s first statement. Eden was getting pretty good at reading between the lines. “And in the branches I don’t heal him? I’m guessing I make him worse.”
“There’s a chance you’ll break him completely, and leave him more damaged than you found him, yes.”
“Is this the part where you threaten me?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t need to. In every single one of those branches, you end up just as miserable as he does.”
That gave him pause. “We can be happy together, or miserable apart? Is that what you want me to believe?”
“In some of those branches, you’re miserable together.” Zar stood, making it clear he was done with this conversation. “Believe what you wish, Starling. Creation will do his best to achieve the reality he desires. Word of advice? There’s only so much fighting against the current one can manage before they ultimately drown.”
It might not have been a direct threat.
But it certainly sounded like one.
“And the experiments?” Eden stopped him at the door.
Zar sighed. “NDE. Our parents stopped our hearts on the daily and recorded brain activity before bringing us back. They were trying to prove the existence of an afterlife at first. Creation’s mother died in a car accident. She was pronounced dead at the scene but was briefly revived in the ambulance on the way to the hospital. Father was there. She described the cliché tunnel leading to white light, mumbled somethingabout wanting to go back there, and died for good. He never recovered.”
So he’d used his kid as a guinea pig due to trauma caused by his dead wife? That was fucked up on so many levels.
“Creation doesn’t want to talk to you about it because he’s afraid he’ll lose you if you learn the extent of what we’ve been through,” Zar continued. “Normal people don’t come away from something like that fully intact, and he’s so desperate for you to believe that he’s not clinically insane, he won’t risk unloading the past on you. He’s afraid you’ll lose faith in his ability to provide and keep you safe if you end up pitying him.”
“Ares isn’t afraid of anything,” Eden said, only for Zar to snort at him.
“People don’t lose that instinct overnight. Ever stop to wonder why he doesn’t seem to have any fears? It’s because all his monsters have already been confronted and dealt with. I killed them myself. But of course he’s afraid. You’ve brought it out in him. What if talking about it, reliving it, shoves him back to that dark place? What if he fractures and this time it’s so bad not even you can bring him back? He’s finally close to solidifying his reality. Don’t let your curiosity take that from him. From you both.”
On the one hand, Eden understood what he was getting at. Did he really need all the sordid details about the experiments? Knowing they’d happened at all was enough to understand why Ares was the way he was.
Why Ares might actually need him after all.
“No one else has been able to stabilize him?” Eden questioned, allowing himself to be vulnerable for a moment.
“He’s been more like his old self these past weeks with you than he has for years.”
That aligned with what Nyoka had mentioned, didn’t it? Truthfully, Eden had noticed. Ares seemed…vibrant.
“He didn’t hate you for murdering his dad?” Eden asked the final thing weighing on him.
“He thanked me,” he stated. “With a smile on his face. Don’t believe me? Think of your own situation, Starling. Were you angry when he shot Galen Stone? Or when he snuffed out Zonnie Dephik? Sedos? Will you weep when he puts a bullet through Professor Inzer’s skull?”
“Of course not,” he replied. “But none of those men were my father.”
“Father was our jailor, our doctor, and our abuser,” Zar spelled out for him. “He hurt us. I stopped him. Making him pay the price, knowing he was gone and no longer existed in our same reality, was cathartic for the both of us. It’s because of his personal experience with revenge that Creation offered you this deal in the first place. He thinks he can heal you, just like how you’ve been healing him.”
Eden swallowed the sudden lump in his throat, feeling a swirl of anger and sadness for the younger version of Lucifer. Both grateful and irrationally jealous that he’d had Zar to protect him and lean on.
“Can he?” he forced himself to ask just as Zar opened the door.