by Kennedy Fox
“Look.” She has huge, silver eyes and a mess of bronze curls and honestly, if I saw her outside this mountain I would look twice, three times. There’s something very striking and unconventional about her face. That, and she’s small. Petite. Hades could crush her in one hand. “Holidays are hard. You don’t have to sit at the dinner if it’s too much for you. We can have something sent to your apartment. It’s no problem. I’m happy to do it.”
“I—”
A rueful smile. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t go to the dinner. Really. That probably sounded like I want you to eat by yourself, which is not—”
“Are you bothering our guests?” How did I not see him coming? Persephone is a bright star, but Hades is the night sky. He should have been obvious, but he wasn’t, and now he’s towering over the both of us, his hand on the small of her back. Guests. We’re not guests, but I almost believe it when he says it. “Leave the poor girl to her dinner.” The possessive curl in his voice makes my face heat but Persephone blushes, obvious and pink, and I’m so jealous of her I could die. She looks like she wants to press herself right inside his skin, but not in a creepy way, and ugh, ugh, I have to get out of here. Two sentences. He says two sentences to her, and there’s such suggestion in the words that I half want to fan my face.
“It’s not a bother.” I sound like a dumb, squeaking thing. “It’s a good party,” I tell him, and that sounds even worse, so I mumble a goodbye and turn away. Then—stop, and turn back. This is the man who owns this place and all of us in it. “Thank you so much for throwing it. I’m so—I’m so happy to be here, on the mountain. Thank you for throwing the party.” My cheeks feel molten and I choke out another thank you and back up a few steps, not wanting to turn away but doing it nonetheless.
“My pleasure,” Hades says, bemused. Is it a cruel bemusement? I can’t bring myself to look.
“Wait.” Persephone is a red flash at the corner of my vision. “Don’t leave without your gift.” She presses the little velvet bag into my palm. “And if you need anything...”
“Persephone,” calls Hades, and there’s a laughing command in the way he calls her that makes me want to die. Honestly.
“Anything,” she sings, and then she’s gone, and I’m turning, walking, running headlong into Cole.
Chapter Three
He catches me with one hand as our bodies collide, as my balance goes haywire, and naturally. Naturally this would happen now, in this moment, when I’ve made a general ass of myself in front of the man who owns the entire mountain. “Leona—you look like you’re in a hurry.”
His deep voice, set to match dark hair and dark eyes and a crisp white shirt, pulls goose bumps from my skin. This isn’t his mining coverall, not even the work pants I’ve usually seen him in, and for some reason, for some stupid reason, it surprises me that he knows my name. Still knows my name. “I was in a little bit of a hurry, yeah.”
“Does Hades make you nervous?”
“That’s—that’s a pretty bold question, considering he’s throwing this party.” I finally get up the nerve to look at Cole’s face, but he’s not laughing—not at me, and not at anything. He just looks...thoughtful.
“I wondered if it was that, or something else that bothered you.”
This is already the longest conversation we’ve ever had. In the mountain, you can avoid someone if you want to. I haven’t wanted to avoid Cole, not exactly, but I was busy, and then he was hot, and then...
Yes. Then I was obsessed with him, very slightly, in an abstract way. In the way you are obsessed with a person who can never be yours. There wasn’t time to daydream, even. What would a life with him be like? Would we just stay in the mountain forever?
“You—” Jesus Christ, I can’t catch my breath. “You wondered about me?”
What’s wrong with me? Why am I stripped so bare and raw by this holiday, this holiday that my mother and I never really celebrated, not in the way that someone like Hades would celebrate? Not that Hades, cold, cruel Hades, is the kind of guy who loves the holidays. I can’t imagine it. All I can imagine is the way he looks at Persephone, who seemed to genuinely enjoy passing out gifts from her basket.
“Of course I wondered about you.” Cole sticks his hands in his pockets, and I’m stricken, actually stricken, by how well he’s cleaned up. He’s gone from workman to Christmas party casual and he looks good. So good. A smile curves the corner of his lips. “I’ve been wondering about you for three years.”
Three years, and my face gets hotter at the memory of the last time I spoke to Cole. It was my first holiday season on the mountain and there was another dinner. Like Thanksgiving but not Thanksgiving, all the traditional foods but on a Sunday, no mention of pilgrims. It seems Hades does not give a fuck about pilgrims. The same long tables had been set out in the street and I was so nervous. Homesick. Pining for my mom and alone, alone, alone.
I’d been hovering at the side of the table, trying to get up the nerve to take a seat, and he’d brushed past me smelling like soap and hard work.
Just sit, he’d told me then. There aren’t assigned seats.
I’d whirled around to find him standing there in his workman’s coverall, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows to display the kind of forearms you can only get from days and weeks and months of vicious work. He had a smear of dirt on his right cheekbone, mountain dust, and I reached for it without thinking. Like I was going to wipe it off. And I did. I touched his face, rubbing at it with my thumb, but the dust settled in. I didn’t know, back then, how deeply it settles onto the skin. You have to scrub, and that’s clearly where Cole was headed. He wasn’t about to sit down at dinner with black on his face.
He’d frozen still at the touch of my fingertips, his dark eyes opening wide, and my brain caught up with me a slow minute later—you are touching a man you don’t know, on this mountain, and there’s no way, there’s no way this is allowed, that this can continue, what are you thinking—
Sarah, my next-door-neighbor, brought me a plate later on that evening. Obviously, I didn’t sit down at the dinner. I bolted back to the spare apartment with its neatly made bed and blank walls.
And I have thought about touching Cole’s face every single day since.
Every single day.
Three years echoes in my head until I’m nothing but three years inside an empty brain, still standing on the street, still standing in front of him like a frozen animatronic with a software glitch. Dry mouth, dry hands that I wipe on my pants anyway. I was going somewhere. For the second time in three years, I was fleeing a holiday party. If I’m not careful, I’ll become known on the mountain for being a holiday runaway. Grief pinches my heart in my chest—I’d take the train whenever I could, but I didn’t think my mother would die so soon, I didn’t think I would only have to take the train for Christmas three times. It’s the longest break of the year, depending on your contract, and, and, and—
“It was so nice to see you again,” I say, drowning in my own embarrassment. Everyone’s got to be watching. Pinpricks in my back. Eyes boring in. Watching me, a nobody, talk to Cole, who shouldn’t waste his time. “Enjoy the party.”
I make to step past him.
He stops me, a gentle hand on my elbow.
“You did this three years ago,” he says, his voice low and edged in something soft and coaxing, like I’m also a runaway horse in addition to being a runaway employee. “Where are you going?”
“My apartment.”
“For what?”
“For—for nothing.” I straighten up and try not to feel the burn of his palm through the silver-edged tunic Sarah convinced me to wear. It skims my breasts and my waist and flows down over matching leggings and I want to take it all off and wrap my naked, sad body in the new comforter I got in the spring and never come out again. “I can’t sit here.”
He frowns, dropping his hand. “Okay.”
“Okay.” Last time I touched his face. This time, it’s worse. This time, I flee f
rom his touch and back toward the entryway to our building, intending to sprint my ass up the narrow stairs and slam the door behind me and cry for open skies and holidays when my mother was still alive.
I’m a foot away from the first step when a sighing breath catches my attention and I whirl, cheeks already hot, tears ready to spill. “You followed me?”
Cole shoots me a look. “Yeah. It’s thirty feet and you’re sprinting out of here like something’s terribly wrong. Did you think I was going to let you go alone?”
Chapter Four
I blink the tears out of my eyes. No point, really, no point in breaking down in front of him now. “Why wouldn’t you let me go alone? Do unto others.”
He laughs, and it’s the brightest, most genuine sound I’ve ever heard on the mountain, except for one time when I heard Hades’ dog bark in a chase after a ball. “Do unto others? Are you serious?”
“Dead serious. Do unto others what you want to do to yourself.”
Another laugh, and Cole puts a hand out to steady himself on the staircase wall. He’s so tall, and so muscular, and now that I’m seeing him dressed up for dinner I can’t believe I ever thought he existed only in the mines.
“I mean, do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
His eyes meet mine, and it’s—it’s—
It’s a cliché, but it’s everything I’ve wanted for any of the holidays since I’ve been here. For him to look at me. “You’d rather me leave you alone?”
There is no wind inside the street, inside the mountain, but I swear a cold breeze sweeps into the hall and carries a breath of his scent to my nose. Clean, so clean, nothing like the dark mines beneath our feet, the sweat and grime. He smells like a holiday, like woodsmoke and something vaguely alcoholic, something sharp, like snow.
“No, I don’t want you to leave me alone.”
I dream of open skies, sitting on the edge of a high hill. Sun cresting over snow-capped peaks. The cloud of his breath next to mine, early sunrise, the rest of the world sleeping.
“I don’t want to be alone,” I admit, realizing it in full for the first time. “I don’t know where to go, but I don’t want to be alone.”
His dark eyes narrow. “Then why are you always running away?”
I shrug. “Competing priorities? Cowardice? Lots of reasons, really.”
Cole takes another step toward me, closing off the only way out, and a deep part of my chest untwists. If there’s nowhere to run, then the only choice is to go up to my apartment with him. I can tell, from the look in his eyes, that he would let me go if I really wanted to leave, but...
I don’t really want to leave.
“Cowardice,” he muses. “Does that mean you’d rather someone else be in charge?”
The hard edge of his voice reminds me of Hades, and the realization comes over me like ice, sending a shiver down my spine. Surely, surely, Cole can’t be that kind of person. That kind of person would never work for someone else, unless...
Unless.
“Yes,” I whisper. There’s no one else to hear me, and why not say it? Why not let it be out in the open after all these years of pining and sleeping alone and wishing there was someone else, anyone else, to tell me how to get on with my life?
Cole straightens up, and oh god, oh yes, I didn’t see it before. I didn’t see it, and I’m not sure how I missed it. Hiding in plain sight—that’s what he was doing. Hiding in plain sight. There’s more than one way to have power, and it’s in his body, in his muscles. In his eyes. “Be sure,” he says simply.
“I am sure.” My heart rockets into my throat, my body belatedly realizing that this is Cole standing in front of me and blocking the way to the street. Cole’s eyes hot on mine. Cole who followed me away from the dinner in full sight of everyone else. He knew what he was doing.
He raises one hand in front of him, eyes still on mine. It’s a slow, deliberate movement, and—oh—he’s giving me one last chance to get away. If I put my fingertips on his chest and pushed, his solid body would move away from mine, clearing a path to the street. It’s not real freedom, not here on the mountain. I’d have to run through the entire space to get to the train, then wait for the train, climb aboard...
But it’s something.
I don’t take the chance. I leave my hands down by my side until a smile quirks his mouth and then he reaches for my wrist like he was born to do it, like he’s been waiting all his life to do it, and takes it in his firm grasp. The touch makes me gasp, delighted and terrified all at once, and honestly, honestly, it doesn’t seem like such a light touch should be able to do that.
And yet it does.
It sends shivers and goosebumps rocketing through each of my limbs, pinpricks all over my skin.
“Get upstairs.”
Now the warm softness is gone from his voice, replaced by a confident edge that makes me dizzy with how certain he is. You would have to be certain, I guess, to work in the mines, to go below ground with all that rock above you. You’d have to know the very limits of your strength. Sometimes, I’ve heard, the lights go out down there. Total darkness. A pitch-black nothing for as far as the eye can see, which is not far, which—you get it.
Cole turns us in the hall so he’s two steps above me and tugs, heading toward my apartment the way he would if he owned it. I know this like I know the small dish of diamonds will appear at my work station each morning. I know it like I know the little velvet pouch crushed in my fist will appear each Christmas.
I know it like I know I’ll trade that diamond for cash, and send it—
No. Not to my mother.
Cole puts me in front of my own door and I reach for the handle. Locked. I must have locked it on the way out and I fumble for a key, fumble it into the slot, fumble the door open, relief and nervousness twisting their way through my nerves.
He steps in behind me and closes the door, and I face him because I can’t think of what else to do. I’ve never been on a boat before but I can imagine what it would be like to have the waves rocking under my feet. It feels like that now. I’m out in the middle of nowhere, hanging in space, my mouth open—no words coming out.
Cole doesn’t seem to mind this.
He puts his hands on my shoulders and draws me in close, and then he’s turning us again, graceful as a dancer, and it’s only when my back meets the hard wood of the door that my brain catches up and I know what he’s doing, I see him bending in, his mouth—
His mouth on mine.
He tastes like he smells, sharp and cold and clean, and a surprised cry escapes me, punctuating the most furious, desperate kiss of my lifetime. I’m not the only desperate one here. Cole tastes me like a drowning man drinks in air. “God,” he growls against my mouth. “I’ve wanted to do this for three years.”
“What?” My hands have come up all by themselves to rest against the front of his shirt. “I didn’t think—”
“You never thought,” he says, his low laugh punctuated by more searching kisses. “I wanted to talk to you that day, and you shut yourself away like a princess in a tower.”
“Well you—you—” It’s a struggle to find words, because he’s still licking, still biting, still kissing so intensely that I can’t catch my breath. “You hid in the mines.”
“Nowhere else to go,” he says, and of course not, of course there was nowhere else to go but to his job. That’s life on the mountain. “You ran from me. Were you scared of me, too?”
“I was scared that you’d think I was crazy,” I whisper against his lips. “I touched you.”
“I fucking remember.” His voice drops into a pained register. “Your fingertips burned my skin. I felt them there for weeks afterwards.” He sucks in a sharp breath. “I still feel them.”
I lift my hand to his face and rub a thumb over his now-pristine cheekbone. “You were dirty.” My hips buck toward his body without my permission. “You had just come from the mines.”
His hand skims the side of my brea
sts, my shoulder, and then his fingers are lightly around the front of my throat. It’s so possessive and filthy that it lights up my entire body, head to toe, nerve to nerve, all of that hot energy meeting at the apex of my legs. It’s like a thousand light switches being turned on one by one. I was asleep, drowning in grief, and now I’ve resurfaced under his touch. “You were dirty, too, weren’t you, Leona?”
The moment crystallizes, freezing in place so that the only sound is my own panting breath in my ears. How had I felt, looking at him that day?
Dirty.
Dirty, and hot, and it was so out of the ordinary that I hadn’t been able to take it.
“Yes,” I admit, and his hand tightens on my throat, tilting my chin up, up, up. “Yes. I was dirty for you.”
Chapter Five
Something happens, there with his hand at my throat and his lips on my lips and all my words subsumed into the fact of him.
I’m free.
I haven’t been free for a long, long time. Signing the contract was a sort of freedom, yes, but it was more for my mother. We sacrificed our time together so she could have the medicine she needed and now that’s over, it’s over, and what do I have to show for it? A diamond clenched in my fist and a man pressing me up against the doorway to the only home I have. Her house will have been sold by now. The executor of her will sent me a small box of her personal belongings, but the place I went home to doesn’t exist.
Nothing exists, except Cole. And one burning question.
“Why?” I breathe the question between gasps. “Why me?”
“You touched me and ran.” His voice stokes a fire at the pit of my belly. “I wanted more of your touch. I wanted to know what made you the kind of person who would touch me—”
Cole’s hands slip down, down, until he’s caressing my waist and hips, until my whole body moves into his touch like it’s desperate. Like I’m desperate. And I am. This whole holiday season, while the world outside gets cold and clear, has been torture. He doesn’t feel like torture.