In a body much too numb to be her own, the hero watched her mother rush toward her, face pale, clutching her housecoat tight to her frame.
“Oh, sweetie.” First a touch to the livid bruise on her cheek, and then another to the wound on her shoulder, her arm. “What h—”
“Dad sent in more reinforcements than I expected tonight.” A wince as her mother attended to her shoulder injury, with antiseptic and Band-Aid she couldn’t recall her fetching. Must be the concussion. “It took me a little longer than usual to fend them all off.”
Meaning: she’d absolutely gotten her ass handed to her. It was a miracle the mask hadn’t torn off, exposing her identity to her father—otherwise known as the city’s most infamous villain.
Although, there was a moment when—
“I can’t take this.”
The hero looked up. Her mother’s eyes had gone glassy, hands suspended halfway through dressing up her once-bloodied arm.
“You know I can’t take watching the both of you go at it like this. I can barely handle deceiving your father every d—”
The hero scoffed. “You seemed to handle deceiving the world for the entire time you were married just fine.”
Harsh words, but harsh didn’t always mean untrue. When the hero had found out her parents had been colluding in covering her father’s identity, she’d been shocked. All those crimes, the carnage and the bloodshed, and her mousy, kindhearted mother hadn’t turned him in once. In fact, she’d helped him. Helped him uphold the guise of their picket-fence family, him a lawyer and her a nurse, him a doting husband and her his loving wife.
And to an extent, the hero couldn’t even tell where the guise began. She’d had a childhood like no other. Her father at her first tournament and her mother at her school meetings. Summers on the coast and surprise birthday parties never to be forgotten. She was the perfect combination of them: her mother’s heart-shaped face and her father’s left-sided dimple, her wit and his goofiness.
But not their selfishness. Never their selfishness.
At some point during her reverie her mother had drawn back, wearing a hurt that, somehow, still managed to make the hero feel guilty. “That’s not fair.”
Because, in the end, her mother was just a victim.
“You know I played along so that you’d have the best life,” said her mother.
Forced into her father’s schemes on discovering his murky history by accident. Forced into keeping her daughter’s secret from her husband, that she was the hero he so passionately wanted to eradicate.
“So that you wouldn’t be forced to live without a father.”
The hero yanked her arm back from her mother’s gentle fingers.
“Really, Mom?” The onset of anger was as spontaneous as it was deadly. “Not for his golden parachute? Not because you couldn’t give up all his blood money?”
Silence like static. Or maybe it was the rematerializing headache.
The hero’s nails dug into her palms. Yes, she was angry. Enraged, furious, disbelieving of the fact that she should hail from the very thing she’d taken it upon herself to liberate the city from. Still she couldn’t bring herself to add the fuel to the fire, because her mother was little more than a pawn in her father’s game, and because her mother was her mother. It was as much her duty to rescue her as it was to rescue the rest of the city’s denizens, complicit though her mother had been in all the time her father—her father, the villain, the damned, despicable villain—had exacted his horrific crimes.
Complicit but innocent. She hadn’t had a choice. She’d been scared.
I forgive her, I forgive her, I forgive her . . .
Ring!
Her mother had yet to speak. When the hero braved her next glance, it was to her mother sucking in a deep breath, summoning her composure, and answering her phone. “Hi, honey.”
Dad.
“I’m still—no, I haven’t seen her yet . . . I don’t think so . . . Yes, I . . .” Then a pause. “What? What do you mean that she’s—slow down, please.”
Now her mother was looking frightened. The hero tensed up.
“What do you mean, you saw her face? Are you sure it wasn’t just a trick of the eye?”
Shit.
That slip. One of his lackeys had gotten so close to snatching her mask clean off. Had he succeeded? No, but maybe he’d gotten just close enough that—
“It can’t be,” her mother gasped. Even in knowing decade-long lies had made a perfect actress of her mother, the hero couldn’t help being impressed by the show she was putting on. Then again, the fear was likely far less orchestrated this time. “Our sweet little girl. What . . . what are you going to do?”
A second. Two. Thirty. A minute.
The hero’s heart started pounding too fast for a proper assessment.
The hero tugged at her mother’s sleeve. Her eyes begged the question her lips could not form, whether her father was listening or not.
Right then, her mother ended the call. Her expression, the paragon of terrified, told the hero all she needed to know.
