by Amelia Wilde
They’re both upright and Zeus takes a big step toward Hades.
And Hades doesn’t react.
My nerves fray, splitting, ripping. And I know, with a horrible certainty, that this is it. This is the moment when I watch Hades die. Because he can’t see.
It doesn’t show on his face. He would never let it. But Zeus takes another step and he does nothing, he just stands there, his hands at his sides. It’s killing him already and his brother will finish the job. Zeus wears a lopsided smile, teeth red with his own blood. A fresh breeze ripples through the wildflowers at their feet. Conor pants, digging his nails into the grass. I feel every wretched heartbeat.
Zeus raises his hands.
I don’t know what comes out of my mouth. My chest is too tight and too flooded with fear and screams to tell one word from another. It’s a thousand prayers. Make me a human sacrifice, I don’t care.
Hades turns his head, only an inch, to face me, and there is no color left in his eyes. Nothing. But whatever I’m saying must get through to him because he draws back one of his huge fists and snaps it neatly into Zeus's face.
Zeus falls to his knees, hands against his nose, and this time he struggles to get back up. And then he does. It’s so horrible and lurching that I get up off the ground, tasting metal in my mouth, and cross the field, holding out one hand to each of them.
“Just—just wait.” My voice is thick with tears and terror. “Just stop.”
“You need a little girl to protect you now?” Zeus grins again, his face a landscape of bruises. “Come on, brother. Finish it.”
“Don’t.” I don’t know who I’m pleading with.
“Let him,” Zeus says. “He’ll kill me now, or the rest of his people will die.” A low, bubbling laugh. “I’ll cut off the supply chains to the mountains. I’ll blow up the trains. You’ll starve to death, every last one of you. Oh, wait. I guess they’ll die either way.” He pouts a little. “Poor Hades. Couldn’t save them after all.”
Hades straightens up, and all at once I become aware of the people in the valley. There are more than when we started. Far more. Workers from the mines. They outnumber the rest of Zeus's people by a lot, and they’re crowding in at the boundaries. Tension stiffens the air. Zeus takes it in. He has the luxury of counting all of them.
He sticks his hands back into his pockets.
Hades wipes at his face, and when his hands come down I’m looking at a king. A battered, broken king. A king nonetheless. Shivers trace down my spine. “Zeus.”
“Yes?”
“Get the fuck off my mountain.”
4
Hades
I can’t let them see.
The shadow that has become Zeus shrugs and strides away, like it was his decision to leave all along. If he weren’t leaving then Oliver would warn me. And if he did warn me then I would accept that, because this is it. This is all. There’s nothing left in my head except a searing, hot pressure that’s too great to withstand. My mind is buckling underneath the force of it. No fighting back. Something warm and strong slams into the side of my legs and I drop a hand down to make sure it’s Conor. It is, and he’s frantic, but it all seems to happen on some distant horizon, beyond the crushing, obliterating pain.
My vision has been mostly gone since I got Zeus's head to crack on that rock. Stubborn bastard. He should have died, but he didn’t. I should have died, but I didn’t. Both of us should be buried on that goddamn farm, alongside Rosie—but we aren’t. The valley is too full of shadows now and simultaneously too bright. I’d laugh if it didn’t hurt so much. So much. So shocking. A lifetime of this and it still surprises me.
Time to die, that nagging voice whispers. Time to be done with all this.
But no, no. Someone—there’s someone here I need. And more than that I need to get away before they all see. Witnesses to this would be the first shingle falling. All of them tumble down, no more house of cards. “They’re going,” someone says, close by. Oliver. “They’re leaving.”
For now, they’re leaving, but if I know Zeus, this isn’t over. And I know him. Fuck that guy and fuck knowing him. I never wanted to know him in the first place.
Definitely never wanted to call him brother.
It makes no difference now. It’s over for me. If I live through this my mind will helpfully wipe this from my memory later, unless it gets burned in by the sun.
Get out of the sun.
“Don’t let her,” I tell him. What am I saying? It sounds so cool, so practiced, but I’m on fire, I’m burning alive. Knives in my eyes and a throbbing pain along one cheekbone. Broken? The world narrows. Oliver’s face swims in and out of view. “The people upstairs. Someone should be with them. Send Persephone.” Get her away from this, so she doesn’t see.
Where is she now?
“She went to make sure Zeus is out of the halls,” he says. “But I can’t stop her from coming back.”
“Well, do it.”
Good. This is the optimal outcome. Zeus is gone and I have not yet fallen down. Eleanor’s cottage is a hundred miles away but there’s some old bullshit saying about a single step. I take one toward it. Fuck, it hurts. Something happened to one of my knees. Conor pushes me again, another step. I hook my fingers through his collar and let him lead.
Every time my feet make contact with the ground, another piece of bone crumbles. Soon I’ll be nothing but shards of calcium scattered through the grass, bloody scraps of clothing. And a heart that beats in a rhythm that sounds like Persephone’s name. It’s almost a melody, or maybe a hallucination. My hand scrapes against the infinitely soft petals of a flower—I didn’t know I was so close to the ground.
Who is making that noise?
Not on my fucking mountain. It’s killing me.
A doorframe sprouts up underneath my hand and I fall through an open door. Eleanor’s house. It’s the same as it was, only more plants. They smell green and fresh. An explosion blooms and dulls behind my eye sockets. Another one.
God, I loved her. Persephone. Bring her to me. What was I thinking?
Someone’s singing, far off. A lullaby. An old song about a train car. My stomach turns itself inside out and I’m sick on the ground, but what ground? What floor? I don’t know. What’s it matter? Hands on the back of my neck, on my forehead, the hem of a skirt down by my knuckles. “It’s all right,” she says.
“Eleanor, it hurts,” someone else answers, the words garbled. Me, I think. I could be six, I could be sixteen, but my own body is too huge for all that, too unwieldy, too difficult to move. Not young then. Someone tell me the year. “My brother.”
“Gone,” she says simply. “Not here anymore.”
I grab at a table and my fingers meet dirt—her plants. The whole thing turns over but there’s enough leverage to get off the ground. Rosie won’t back off. Always so insistent and pushing. Wouldn’t want me to get a sunburn, God no, that would be the worst thing to happen, wouldn’t it? A shout from the house. Father’s home. Oh, he won’t be happy about this, that I’ve beaten Zeus to shit, his favorite son. Too late now. Take me off to juvie if I can only lay down where nobody can see.
My shins hit first, something flimsy but hard, and it comes up to meet me. A bed. Conor’s snout nuzzles my palm. Thanks to the pain in my head for tearing me down the middle so I can clearly feel the pain in my side. Cracked rib? Maybe. I put a hand to it and that makes it worse. Get up. No good. It doesn’t work. Something cool and damp covers my eyes. Oh, finally, I’ve taken them out. That’s why it’s so dark in here, so black. Can’t see anything this way. Fine, fine.
Quick footsteps, each one cracking off the ceiling like a gunshot and putting spikes down into my brain. A strangled gasp. Words run together like paint spilled across a canvas. IshegoingtodieEleanortellmerightnowishegoingtodie? More hands, touching. Everywhere they touch the pain is less but not gone. Not nearly gone enough. Say goodnight. Shut it down for repair, do it quick before you lose anything else.
A r
aindrop makes contact with raw skin on my cheek. “Eleanor,” Persephone pleads. Desperate. Don’t be, this has happened so many times before. Don’t look. You don’t want to see. One small hand slips into mine, soothing busted-up knuckles. “Answer me.”
“I don’t know,” Eleanor answers, and there’s the sound of a rag in a bucket. It echoes so many times it loses its form. Can’t stay. “I don’t know.”
5
Persephone
Eventually Eleanor makes me go back to the mountain. To my closet. To the bathroom, with its pristine shower. To hot water and shampoo in my hair. She won’t take no for an answer. She promises to send someone for me if he wakes up. When he wakes up. It’s been two days, or three, and nobody else has attacked the mountain. I keep waiting for my mother to jump out from behind one of the planters in Eleanor’s house and try to drag me back home, but she doesn’t. I take myself inside and strip off my clothes and let the water run through my hair. Still nobody.
I have to catch my breath.
I can’t breathe, looking at him. Seeing him like that. He would be so furious if he knew I was watching. Or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe we’re past that now.
We have to be past that now.
After my shower I choose a dress the color of red wine and pad through the halls of the mountain. There are more halls than I thought. More rooms blasted out of stone. Twice I catch Oliver following me, peeking around corners, but he doesn’t come close. Good. What am I going to do, other than float around like a ghost caught in purgatory? That’s what I am, until he wakes up. Or doesn’t. I don’t know how anyone survives this again and again. My heart is ready to wrench itself out of my ribs and run away.
There are plans to make. Of course there are. I just can’t make them until I know what’s going to happen. Not very queen-like of me. I should be able to figure it out with the information at hand, and yet.
And yet there is the ocean.
I stop at the end of a hallway, a long hallway I never knew existed, and look back into an octagonal room that’s mostly windows. It looks out onto the ocean. There is water here.
A laugh bursts out of me. The ocean. Of course, the ocean. I never thought about it because I only ever thought about the mountain. Who would bother to think past Hades? Turns out he’s hiding the sea back here, and I could have gone years without knowing. I go in and sit on one of the window seats. It’s not like him, this room. It’s strange. Maybe it was for someone else. A sad jealousy flickers across the back of my mind and disappears. I only just found out that Hades likes flowers. Maybe he likes the ocean, too. Or maybe he just wants to keep watch. That would make more sense.
A towering stack of clouds loom above the water, and I trace the outline of it with my fingertip. “A storm’s coming in.”
“Yes.”
The voice behind me shocks me out of the numb terror I’ve felt since the moment Zeus walked onto the factory floor, knocking me out of the window seat. I catch myself with one palm.
Hades leans against the doorframe in fresh clothes, his hair still wet from a shower. Purple bruises decorate his skin but he’s standing, he’s awake, his eyes have a thin line of blue. “You’re—” A sob interrupts me and the numb shell hardening around my heart cracks open. Relief so powerful it bruises me.
He’s across the room in a heartbeat, lifting me up onto the window seat, and Hades drinks me in with a breath that reaches its hands inside my chest and wraps fists around my heart. And then his mouth is on mine, ravaging, biting, taking.
“We can’t, we can’t.” His hands push up my dress and find panties, yanking them unceremoniously aside. “No, we can’t.”
“I’ve decided otherwise.” There’s a rough edge to his voice. “I’ve decided that you’ll come for me. Now.”
The door’s open, anyone could walk in, we’re in a room full of windows. “Shouldn’t you—? You were hurt.” I try to insist but he’s bigger and stronger and when I push at his shoulder he does not go anywhere. “You could have died. You could have died.” Another wave of tears comes and I swallow them all before they can break free.
“He’s still out there,” I wail. “We have to do something about it, we can’t be—we can’t get distracted by—” The argument falls apart beneath his thick fingers, stroking me in a heated place that I honestly thought might never be touched again. I’m already wet. So wet. I’ve missed this with a physical ache for all this time, knowing it was selfish to want. So selfish.
His hand slips up around my jaw, squeezing tight, and he forces my head back so he can kiss down my neck. The fingers push in, filling me. “Are you going to argue with me, or are you going to submit?” A pause. “I can always make you, if that’s what it takes.”
“Can you?” I sound stupid, panicked. “Because I thought—I was worried that—”
He turns me over his lap, the dress sliding up to my shoulders, a hand on my throat and the other between my legs. He delivers a stinging slap there and then presses his palm across the ache so I can’t fight him. I can’t fight him.
“Tell me,” he says casually, the way he might if we were sitting across from each other at his desk and not in a room open to the world. “Do you need another reminder?”
“No.” And I don’t, I don’t. He works three fingers into me and drives them deep, finding the place that makes my hips rock across his knees. He twists them, toying with me, hissing his approval. It’s been too long and every touch feels new and raw and right.
It feels like reassurance.
If he can do this, then he’s not hurt as badly as I thought. Or at least he’s not going to die from it. He’s not dead. He’s not going to die. Not today, not in this minute.
He hauls me up from his lap and swipes his thumbs over my cheekbones, eyes on mine, eyes that don’t miss anything. “You were so afraid.”
I thought I had stopped crying. I was wrong. About that, and about everything else. Because a part of me had prepared for the fallout of his death. I was waiting for it to arrive and it didn’t. The empty space fills back in but I crave more of him.
A smile curves up one corner of his mouth, a split in the skin moving with it. It’s started to heal over the last few days. I think. I don’t know for sure because I saw him half-dead, and this man is anything but dead. The color is back in his cheeks and he smells like soap and crisp cologne, like none of him was ever cut or bleeding. I trace the path of the cut with a fingertip and he holds his breath. It still hurts then, just not enough to let go of me.
Enough to turn around and put my palms up on the glass. This way, all I can see is water. Water for miles, water for days. A turbulent ocean rising up into a black stormcloud. The fabric of my dress tenses across my shoulders and tears, and then Hades palms are running down over my sides, my hips, my thighs. He yanks my hips back from the window so I’m bent for him the way he likes. It’s instantly difficult, this position, instantly making my legs shake with the tension and the release. What’s the worst that happens? I fall and he catches me? Fine.
Panties. Bra. Everything, discarded like torn paper. A soft kiss on the bare skin of my shoulder. Another on my shoulder blade. Each one is a tiny firework with trails of smoke that move down my back like droplets of water and settle between my legs. There’s another flutter of cloth and the clink of a belt and then Hades's body is braced around mine, fingers testing the width of my wrists and settling over mine.
And then.
The reality of him.
Between my legs, thick and hard and insistent. He pushes in, shoves in several inches, and it’s like we’ve never done this before. On instinct I try to struggle away from him, not because I want to get away but because I want him to stop me.
And he does, a hand leaving my wrist and spreading out low on my belly, pinning me against him so he can take more of me. He makes a low humming sound, sheer satisfaction. I wriggle down onto him. It’s so hot, a real heat, a filthy wetness. It’s so bad of me to want him like this. To need him like
this. It’s so wrong. I’m wrong. I don’t care. Pleasure is a knife, a blade, and I need it to be tempered with...something else.
“Make it harder.” My hands try unsuccessfully to curl against the window. “Please.”
He stops fucking me for one single sentence and laughs. Laughs. It undoes a knot hiding behind my heart. And then Hades locks a hand around the back of my neck and levering me into a more obscene version of the same position. I hope my hands can stay still on the glass. He delves his fingers into the wetness between my legs and spreads up to where I’m still clenched tight, despite what I’ve asked for. He does it again, and again, long enough that I have time to be embarrassed about how wet I am. Then he’s back behind me, a hitch in his breath. His teeth meet the flesh of my neck and he bites like he could eat me alive. “Be good.”
And then.
And then.
There’s no coaxing this time, not at first, only an iron grip on my hips and a splitting pressure. My brain knows I begged for this but my body doesn’t and a cry tears loose from me, but he doesn’t give an inch. He takes one instead. Did I imagine that it would be easier? It’s not easy, and I don’t ever want it to be easy. Never, never.
He drops his head down on my shoulder and thrusts in again. “Fuck.” There’s a seismic tremor coming through his thighs. He’s holding back for me. Hades could do more, but he’s being almost kind.
In his way.
Which is not kind.
Which is possessive and territorial and cold, relentlessly cold, driving in and in and in no matter how much I thrash against him and sweat and curse. No matter how much he murmurs words of praise into my ear. Words like little slut and cry for me and good, so good, so fucking good. It hurts so much. I love it so much.
And because he’s Hades, because he’s alive and in control and not at all a dead man, he does not touch me where I want to be touched until he’s all the way inside me, until I’m throbbing around him and stretched to the limit, until I’ve begged. And begged again. And again. So when he does it’s like being pulled down into the ocean, swept away on a wave, scattered into the sky. He’s the sky. He’s the only sky that matters.