Midnight Kingdom

by Amelia Wilde

  He’s prepared me with his fingers but the first thrust knocks the rest of the air from the room and the world, so viscous I try to crawl away from it. But I’m stopped, as always, by big hands, hard on my hips. The pleasure of pain—of making room for him, of having to take him—arcs through me like a shock or a bolt of lightning and I’m transformed again. A queen can be crowned and still scrabble at the carpet, still have her back arched in an obscene angle, still struggle for breath while her king demands entrance again and again and again with punishing strokes.

  It’s so dirty. I’m knocked off balance and my nipples scrape against the carpet. I’ve never seen him like this before, with the shield dropped away from his face. An old fear tightens my muscles around him and he laughs, the sound twisting into a groan.

  “I love when your eyes get wide like that.” He digs his fingers into my skin while he says it. “You look like prey.”

  “I am.” It’s work to get the words out, too much work, and I focus on not melting into the floor. “You caught me.”

  Hades slows his pace. His hand drops down to work between my legs, coaxing out the orgasm that’s been waiting since he first put his hands on me. “Watch,” he commands.

  So I watch while my mouth drops open and my eyes flutter halfway shut and I come while he’s deep inside me. I don’t look like myself. I look like a fallen queen and—oh. Oh. That’s what I am. That’s what I am now. I watch while the first cries escape me and then I watch while I get lost in the curling, pulsing pleasure of being fucked by the one man I was supposed to stay away from.

  When he’s finished he gives me a desultory kiss on the neck and lets me collapse to the floor. His footsteps recede, and far away, the shower starts. I’m trying to catch my breath. A trip. He’s leaving. My heart tumbles down into my gut. He made a deal with Poseidon for the supplies. And now he wanted me to see us together, to witness it in a way I haven’t before.

  I thought the deal only involved money. But maybe it’s worse. Maybe it’s so much worse.

  15

  Hades

  “This isn’t a favor, you piece of shit, this is a robbery.”

  Poseidon claps a hand on my shoulder on the deck of his ship, which is as lethal as it is enormous. Weapons fucking everywhere. Too many weapons for the skeleton crew he’s brought with him. Some of them look like actual skeletons, all bone with a thin layer of skin. He’s sent the best of his people to guard the mountain, and now he wants payment in kind. “Of course it’s a favor. You’re here helping me like a good brother.”

  “Oh, so we’re brothers now.”

  “Brothers in arms.” Poseidon grins, because for some reason this is what he lives for. Rain-soaked missions in the middle of the night. “You’ve seen my crew. They’re not up for this.”

  I’m not fucking up for this, but in this instance I don’t have a choice. Poseidon and I signed an agreement. He’s keeping the mountain supplied and in exchange he wants this other ship. A smaller ship. I’m not a connoisseur of maritime laws but I’d bet that pulling your ship up to another one and scattering high-powered bullets at the waterline is run-of-the-mill piracy. Probably kidnapping.

  “You should feed them,” I tell him lightly. “You can’t expect anyone to work for you if they’re starving.”

  Poseidon ruffles my hair, sending droplets to mix with the rain on the deck. I won’t snap his wrist, but only because I’m out here on his fucking boat with him and drowning isn’t high on my priorities. The urge is strong, however. It’s a good thing I fucked Persephone before I left. Otherwise I might not have so much control. Spitting rain beads on our slickers and heavy boots. “You’ve gone soft. And stupid, if you think I’m not feeding them.”

  The moonlight is broken up in the oil-black sea and down on the deck of the other ship, chaos reigns. “How long do you think you’ll toy with them?”

  “Long enough that they know it’s a personal matter.” I throw a glare into his face but Poseidon is too busy fucking the side of the ship with his eyes. “This captain...” A smile curves the side of his mouth. “The captain needs to be relived of his post.”

  “Is that why you shot holes in the side of his ship?”

  Poseidon holds up a finger and a boom rings out from the side of our ship. I don’t see the ammunition but it punches a larger hole in the ship below. Men shout over one another. “No. That was for fun. Time to go.”

  We’re the only ones standing on the deck. “Nobody else is ready.”

  “Nobody else is coming. This is what you agreed to.”

  A few of his people jog out from the other side of the ship with a gangway that they hook onto the side of Poseidon’s ship and let fall until it crashes onto the deck of the other one. Poseidon starts down it and the whole thing tips sideways when an ocean swell lifts both of the ships.

  “Are you fucking with me?” I yell after him. This seems very like a thing he would do, but we aren’t seventeen anymore and he has to know now that we could both die.

  He is not fucking with me. He raises one hand in the air and beckons me after him.

  Fine. At the end of the gangway I hold out my hand for a gun. Poseidon cracks his knuckles instead. Even better.

  The ship is in dire straits, with a hole in its side and water coming in, but the upper deck is curiously silent. The chaos of a few minutes ago has been reduced to nothing but the patter of rain and the slosh of seawater against the sides.

  “One, two, three,” says Poseidon, and then he laughs, and all hell breaks loose.

  The entire ship’s crew has hidden themselves away for an ambush, a suicidal run, which is apparently their only plan. They burst out from the captain’s quarters. These people have been fed and clothed. They’re not the little wraiths to who around the corridors of Poseidon’s ship. The first one slips in the rain and falls. One of his hands gets crushed under a boot and then, because my brother-in-arms is a psychopath, they’re on top of us.

  “The ones that make it go up the gangplank,” Poseidon shouts, his fist connecting wetly with a man’s cheek. The guy falls to the deck in a beautiful, boneless arc. One of the other men rushes past him and overshoots, going overboard. This is how he runs his fucking business. And Demeter spent all those years warning Persephone about me. She should have taught her to fear the water.

  My muscles protest, still aching from the fight with Zeus. It’s taking too long to heal, but there’s nothing for it but to ball my hands into fist and swing. Old habits come back easily. I’ve had recently fucking practice. The first man to actually reach me goes down hard, a pool of blood spreading underneath his head, but the second and third pose more of a problem. They’ve seen what’s happening and determined, correctly, that they have nothing left to lose. One of them gets a hit in to the side of my head and it rattles my brain in my skull. I suck a breath through my teeth and the split second of confusion—why the fuck is my head suddenly so fragile, what the fuck—is long enough for the second one to land a punch to the face. Pain splinters beneath my eye but it doesn’t stop me from moving. Never stop moving. Never become a target. I am becoming a fucking target.

  They’re looking for big moves so I shoot the heel of my hand out and get one in the nose and the other across the throat. They both go down, one onto his knees and the other lurching for the side. A little reinforcement would be nice. But I turn to find Poseidon dragging a man by his leg up the gangplank. He picks him up by both ankles in the end and throws him onto the ship.

  It’s not an elegant plan but it gets the job done.

  In the meantime there are six other people to deal with. Judging by the splashes some of the other crew members have decided it’s better to chance the waves and jumped away, but the last ones stalk forward as the rain throws sharp pinpricks of icy cold into my face.

  Poseidon chooses that moment to wade into the fray. They’ve been reduced to clawing at us, one swinging wildly with a length of pipe, and I find myself back to back with Poseidon in the middle of a s
creaming clutch of desperate men.

  “A couple of pistols would’ve solved this,” I tell him. I fucking hate being cornered with him.

  He laughs, reaching out to block someone’s hand before it tears off my ear. As it stands, they get the hood off my head and water runs down the back of my neck. The cold shock of it makes me think of how warm Persephone was earlier. How tight.

  “Bullet holes are harder to repair than broken bones,” he says sagely. And yes, he is technically correct, which is why I keep them to a minimum in my mountain. Too many guns in plain sight and people get reckless ideas. There’s that, and the glass I had made for the windows can repel bullets and send them ricocheting back across the room. But I wish for a rifle now. Something I could use to jab these fuckers farther away. An arm reaches out with a knife and stabs through the side of my coat. Fuck—that’s a cut. Not deep enough to kill me but deep enough for a warm spill of blood. The man who did it has his head introduced to the side of a fiberglass lifeboat.

  We’re winning despite being outnumbered, but in the last throes of violence I take another hit to the rib on top of where Zeus kicked me and a strained growl escapes me. Two more down. Then three. Four, and five, and finally there’s only one left. Poseidon gets tired of him and throws him overboard. His head hits something on the way down.

  My brother wipes his hands like he’s just finished eating and takes two of them by the leg, dragging them toward the other boat. His crew comes down to pick up the pieces. They’re getting new members today, or prisoners. I don’t know which and I don’t care. The ship lists badly to the side beneath us now, but Poseidon stops me at the gangplank with a hand on my chest. “One more thing.”

  “The ship is sinking, motherfucker.”

  “It’s fast.”

  All those people on the mountain are counting on me. For this. So I follow Poseidon down to the lower deck. He tears through the mess we find, upending bunks and half the galley kitchen. Not a single knife comes out of the drawers. The guy who stabbed me must have been the cook. Right—one of them tried to fucking stab me. I put a hand to my side and it comes away bloody. This slicker is ruined.

  Poseidon rifles through a trunk tucked in at the bar. “There you are.” I barely catch the words above how fucking loud it is down here. The ship is sinking. We’re six feet above where the ocean pours in. The box looks small in his broad hands. Poseidon kisses it and tucks it gently into the pocket of his slicker. “Time to go,” he says to me. The ship’s lights are still on, and as he passes by he gets a good look. “They fucked you up,” he says as we climb the stairs. The angle is all wrong, terribly wrong.

  Is there even going to be a deck when we get up there?

  The deck still exists but the crew is having a hell of a time holding the gangplank in place. Poseidon, in a fit of being a fucking gentleman, lets me go up first. He’s two steps up when the other ship wails, metal screeching, shearing away, and the end of the gangplank plunges down into the water.

  Some instinct makes me stick my hand out toward him and he grabs it before his boots hit the water, the ocean nipping at his heels. I’m half on the deck, half off, and the weight of him does something remarkably unpleasant to my ribs. Poseidon scrambles up, boots coming down with a heavy blow on the deck. Then he pats his pocket to make sure his precious box is still there.

  Behind me, the other boat goes down, water filling in the space where it used to be. Poseidon surveys the deck of his own ship. Water and blood, salt and sea. “Good,” he says, and then he ambles off toward the bridge. Halfway there, he turns and grins at me. “You sure you don’t want to stay out here? Nice break from all that bullshit on land.”

  “Fuck you,” I tell him, and then I go the opposite direction in search of a fucking bandage. My knees almost give out at the piece of shit first aid station on the other side of the ship, but I stay standing.

  I thought this fucking ocean might take me away from Persephone.

  It’s not going to get another chance.

  16

  Persephone

  I’d never have made it as a sailor’s wife. Never. It would have eaten me alive, all the waiting. As it stands I can’t sleep, and neither can Conor. He whines at the door all day and then when the sun goes down he pads through all of Hades’ rooms in a sorrowful loop, looking and looking and looking.

  Oliver let slip that he’s with Poseidon and he’s supposed to be back by morning, but he won’t say anything else. I used my best threats, and still, nothing. That makes me think even Oliver doesn’t have the whole story. The secrecy scares me more than anything. Did he only have sex with me once this morning because he knew he’d be back, or because he thought spending a few hours in bed would give him away? What the hell are they doing? What could a man like Poseidon possibly need?

  I watch the ocean from the lookout with Conor curled into a tense half-circle on the floor. There’s no need to hide how dramatic I feel about it. If swimming after the ship were an option, I’d do it. Better than waiting here, doing nothing.

  Not nothing. Waiting for some other emergency in the mountain to happen so I can leap into action and tell everyone else how to fix it. That would be a worst-case scenario, I think, because crown or not, all I can think about is what will happen if Zeus comes back while Hades is gone.

  Finally, finally, the ship appears on the horizon. Then it seems to move with an agonizing slowness. It’s like watching a flower grow. By the time it’s actually in bloom you’ve been forced to move on to other things from the sheer anxious boredom of it.

  It’s a long time later when Conor leaps and moves quickly for the hall, whining a bit for me to keep up. He’s close. At first I’m relieved but the closer we get to his rooms, the more worry weighs down the bottom of my stomach.

  The door to Hades’ office is open and Conor gets there before me, firelight landing on his dark fur. He moves faster and lets out a little bark, and then I throw myself through, heart racing.

  Hades is sprawled in his chair by the fire, hands resting on the wide arms, eyes closed. The warm glow of the fire illuminates everything that’s changed since he left this morning—or yesterday morning, since now it’s after midnight and the sun will be up soon. A new bruise decorates his cheek. All of his knuckles are red and swollen. And though he’s put on a new shirt a red patch is growing at his side.

  I drop the shawl I was wearing and rush to his side. “What happened?”

  He opens his eyes, regarding me with something that starts out as amusement and turns into a something dark and inward. “Poseidon asked a favor.”

  “What—” This is obviously not enough information, but also, he’d bleeding. I step out into the hall and summon one of the guards to bring antiseptic and bandages, then go back in and kneel between Hades’ knees, resting my arms gently on his thighs and looking up at him. He’s more likely to answer me if I’m not standing there, pretending to be in charge. “What kind of favor was it?”

  He shakes his head. “An involved one.”

  The guard returns with a tray that holds everything I asked for, along with two bowls of water and some towels. “You have blood on your shirt.”

  Hades leans forward and pulls it over his head. “I got stabbed.”

  I sit back on my heels. “You got stabbed? On this trip?”

  He settles back into his seat with a hiss of pain, and I take my eyes off the carved lines of his abs to scan him for the rest of the bruises. And they’re there, scattered over his skin in a constellation of beaten skin. Don’t just sit there, Persephone, do something.

  I lift some of the cloth from the tray and dip it into the water, then summon my courage and start with his face. There’s a cut on his hairline that’s dark with dried blood and sea salt. Hades closes his eyes and lets me dab it away, the warmth from the fire at my back. I keep breathing through the shock of it, the ragged intimacy of it. Something happened on this trip of his. Or it started happening a long time ago, and I’m just now noticing.


  “I know you were with Poseidon,” I tell him, then drop the cloth and trade it for a new one, which I soak with antiseptic.

  He looks at me then with a deep sigh. “It was part of the deal.” I press the cloth against the bloody wound in his side and Hades balls up a fist on the arm of the chair. “If you’re going to light my skin on fire, a warning might be appropriate.”

  “You don’t like warnings.” I hold it there until I feel like it’s clean. “Tell me about the deal. Is this what he wanted in exchange for the supplies? For you to be...like this?”

  “Not for the supplies. For defending the mountain.” Bandages. That’s what you put over a wound like this, so it doesn’t get infected and the person doesn’t die from something as reckless as going off with his unhinged brother. “I said I would help him with a favor, and he’s got his people standing between us and Zeus.”

  It doesn’t seem like a better option, but he’s already left and returned, so I don’t say anything until he puts a hand gingerly up to his eyes. I take the other one and start to clean the bloody grit out of his knuckles. The fact that he tolerates it makes me bold enough to ask him something else.

  “This thing with the light. Was it always so bad for you?”

  Hades leans forward, catches my chin in his fingers, and pulls me in for a kiss. He tastes like night air and battle, slightly metallic. No more questions, I think, but then he rests his head again and lets me sting his knuckles with antiseptic, too. “Not always.”

  “Then...when?” Asking this brings me back to the horrible aftermath of his fight with Zeus and I really, really don’t want to think about it. Too bad. I’ll always be thinking about it with a racing heart and nagging dread. “And what did my mother make for you? Do you even know?”