by Amelia Wilde
20
Hades
Demeter is out of control.
Her daughter has barely been gone a week, and the reports come in fast and furious. She’s stormed into the city, looking for Zeus. She’s hired a man to search the city underground for her.
She’s lighting her fields on fire, one by one.
“Oliver. Tell me you’re fucking kidding. Tell me this is one of your jokes.”
Oliver shifts his weight from foot to foot, hands in his pockets. He’d rather not be out in the relative openness of the office. He’s a man who’d rather cling to the shadows. That’s where all the real work gets done.
“I don’t tell jokes.”
“Then tell me which field she started with.” It’s the information that means the most to me now. I have to know. Lives depend on it, mine included.
He shakes his head.
“Find out.”
Oliver leaves without another word. I wait until he’s gone and then leave the office, too. Silence expands around me as I go. It’s earlier than I’d normally leave, but fuck—the news has made me want to tear down all the glass just to hear it shatter.
Fucking Demeter. There was once a time I could admire how ruthless she is, but if she thinks this is the way to smoke out who has Persephone?
She’s probably fucking right.
Because as much as Demeter likes to pretend that she’s in the bridal business, that’s only a front. It’s always been a front. Her real business is far more lucrative and far more dangerous than bouquets wrapped in white ribbon. And if she’s become so unhinged that she’s burning her business to the ground to force someone’s hand…
To force my hand.
I can see it now—Demeter with lighter fluid in the dry evening of early summer. Demeter lowering a match to the ground. Flames swallowing the fields whole.
The woman is going to kill me. She’ll kill me, and then what will happen to Persephone? If I’m dead, this place will riot. They’ll come for Persephone first. They’ll come for Demeter second. We’ll all end up under the ground, but it’ll be me first. And then who will protect Persephone? No one.
My skin feels too tight, my mood too thunderous to be contained in this body. I have been containing it for years. I have been denying myself for years. I have kept everything so close to my chest that my biggest secret is a throbbing dagger through my heart. I can’t take a single fucking step without feeling it there, lodged in deep. Not a single step. Conor shoves against my legs, hard. He wants me the fuck out of here—away from the factory’s bright lights. Not even the tinted windows of my office can mitigate them fully.
I have to clear my head.
The easiest way, the path of least resistance, would be to go down to the mines and find some criminal fucker who’s been sentenced here as a cheap alternative to a prison sentence and squeeze the life out of him. But the easiest way won’t be enough. Not tonight. Not when Demeter’s fields burn and Oliver takes the train at top speed to see whether it’s my life or someone else’s that’s rising into the sky like so much ash.
I don’t know that I’ve gone to find her until I’m pushing open the door to Persephone’s suite. Conor stays to guard the door. He’s learned.
The lights are down low, but they’re on. No sign of her in the bed. Her dinner tray, with a ruby red pomegranate in a silver dish, sits nearly untouched on a table by the window.
Where the fuck is she?
I don’t call her name. She’ll learn soon enough that hiding from me like this—it’s not a fucking option. She’ll pay for this. She will. I strip off my jacket and let it fall to the floor. If I have to search the entire mountain myself to find her, I will. She’d better pray I don’t have to search the mountain.
Every sense is jacked up to its maximum sensitivity as I make my way down the narrow hall, shoving open doors as I go. She’s not in the bathroom. The shower is dry. She’s not in the closet, with all the white nightgowns that double as dresses. I put them in here to embarrass her. It’s been worth it to see her face every time I scan a hemline.
For a heart-stopping moment, the library looks empty, too. Rage squeezes at the muscle in the center of my chest until my blood flows backward. Then her foot, curled up at the edge of the overstuffed chair by the fireplace, catches my attention. She’s here. My eyes burn, but not from tears. Never from tears. I don’t bother to take quiet footsteps on my way to the side table. The lamp in here—I must’ve missed it.
Persephone doesn’t stir at the crack of the switch. She doesn’t seem to feel me looming over her, and I breathe in that innocence. She doesn’t know how much I need her. She doesn’t know. For this one final moment, she doesn’t know. She’s nothing but flowing fabric and bare ankles, a small heap in the chair with a book held tight to her chest. Asleep in the glow of the fireplace.
I can see echoes of Demeter in her face.
I can see Persephone doing the same thing, laughing as she burns down the world.
My pulse pounds in my ears.
But I make myself wait.
Even now, I make myself wait.
I unbutton my shirt and roll the sleeves up to my elbows. I loosen the top button. I watch her breathing, slow and even.
What does she dream about?
Not this.
“Get up.”
Persephone’s eyes snap open at the sound of my voice, wide and terrified. The energy in a tight ball at the base of my gut bursts apart, all static and lightning and anger. She doesn’t know where she is, and now it’s dark. I can see her in the kind of stark detail that makes her panting fucking mouthwatering.
“Does get up mean keep lying there to you? Get up.”
She scrambles to get up, but her arm is asleep or else I’ve scared her so badly she can’t move. “I’m trying.” Her cry reverberates off the glass statue on the top bookshelf. “I’m trying.”
“Get. Up.”
“Why?”
Her gasp blows apart the very last shred of my restraint. It’s been weakened by the drumbeat of my own heart in my ears, by the flames in the fields, and having to touch her sweet body and not fuck her for what seems like an eternity.
I haul her up from the seat by her clothes, the seams ripping in my hands. Straight into the air. Straight up until she’s level with my face, her lips opening and closing. “Because I fucking need you,” I growl into her mouth, and then I kiss her.
Because I want to.
Because I’ve waited.
Because last night, when she turned over in my arms and flung herself into me and kissed me like that, it almost killed me.
And I’d rather die this way than any other.
She tastes sweet and clean and soft and the panicked little noises at the back of her throat drive me wild, then wilder, until there’s not much man left at all. Do I pull her into my arms, or does she climb up, her legs wrapped around my waist? Does she cry before I yank her head back by the hair and lick up the length of her neck or is it only after? I bite down on her bottom lip until the moment she starts to scream, and then I pull back. “You didn’t eat your dinner.”
Persephone is the picture of confusion. “I wasn’t hungry”
“Liar.” It’s nothing to carry her back out to the main room, put her on her feet, and bend her over the tray. “You’re starving. You just don’t know it.”
“I was reading.” Her voice shakes. “I meant to come finish it.”
“When I tell you to finish something, you do it first, sweetheart, or you’ll suffer the consequences.”
A shiver rocks her under my hand, electric, and she murmurs something into the pomegranate.
“I can’t fucking hear you.”
“Please.”
Her voice rings like a bell through the room and that’s all it takes. I thought I was undone before. That was nothing compared to now. I force her down onto her knees and rip her clothing to shreds. Indiscriminate. It doesn’t matter what it is, I want her skin exposed to me now. Her p
erfect pink nipples are already peaked, her thighs spread—she wants this. Fuck me. She wants it as much as she hates it.
The pomegranate next.
I rip it apart in my hands, the two halves glistening in my palms, and drop most of it back to the table. Persephone’s chest heaves with every breath. She has relatively small tits, but they’re a nice shape, and they’ll be even nicer covered in the juice from the pomegranate. It shears apart easily in my hands.
She doesn’t struggle when I take her chin in my hand and tip her head back. She looks up at me with her huge, depthless gaze. Her lips are slightly parted. I work a thumb between her teeth and force them open farther.
“Eat.”
It’s awkward for her because I make it awkward. I make it mortifying. I make it awful, and it drives me to the very edge of my own sanity. One by one, I lift each piece of the fruit to her lips and make her scrape the seeds out with her teeth. After the second section she tries to lift her hands to wipe the juice away from her chest.
“Put your hands behind your back. Move them again, and I’ll put you over my knee and spank you until you can’t sit down.”
I can see the tremor in her muscles. It’s a dead giveaway. She thinks about doing it, but I shove her mouth full of the fruit. Again, and again, and again. Until her mouth is full, and then I make her chew. Swallow. Again. Again. Again.
I have to get down on one knee to kiss her, to lick some of the juice out of her mouth. A surge of life hits my blood like the world’s best painkiller. The ever-present burn in my eyes subsides, at least for the moment.
This time, I can’t stop.
I’m fucking exhausted and I’m wide awake, and reality shears away from what’s happening with Persephone. This reality, with her mouth on mine, is the only one that matters.
The floor, the chair, the bed. I can’t say how we get to either place, only that it must be me. I’m holding her hands pinned behind her back. I’m kissing her. Scraping my teeth over her nipples. Biting the sensitive skin at the curve of her neck.
I can’t stop.
I have to stop.
If I cross that bright line, then everything else that matters is going to burn.
Maybe it already has.
But on the off-chance that it hasn’t, I shove her away, back onto the bed. Persephone falls hard, not bothering to put her hands out to catch herself. I’m halfway to the door when she gets herself up.
“Don’t go.” Her voice is wobbly but clear. “Please, don’t go.”
“Why not.”
“Because I need it.”
21
Persephone
He stops. Turns. Looks.
I am destroyed already. I am nothing but a throbbing bundle of nerves on the verge of an even more drastic destruction. If he leaves me here now, with every sense on edge, on fire, then I’ll scream and never stop screaming. I hate him. I need him. I need so many dark and twisted things that I can’t even fathom how depraved I’ve become. His necklace has twisted around and hangs down my back—I can feel it between my shoulder blades.
I am destroyed, and I’m looking at a man on the verge of his own destruction.
I know it without quite knowing it. There’s no way I can know it for sure. I’ve never met a man like Hades but I know him. I’ve only met a few men in my life, and I’ve always been ushered quickly away by my mother. There was never time. There was never a chance. Except for Decker. And I never saw him like this—not even when Hades was killing him.
His blue eyes catch every available bit of light, making him look otherworldly, like something out of a dream or a nightmare. It’s so beautiful it hurts. He is so flawless it cuts me in some place I didn’t know existed. The wanting—the wanting could turn me inside out, all on its own. If I couldn’t see him breathing I would think he wasn’t a man at all. Something more. Something darker. Something that could consume me.
Something that already has.
“You don’t know what you need.”
His words hit me like one stone after another, connecting with all my softest places. I get up onto my knees on the bed. I’m already naked. There’s nothing else he can take from me, except this.
And is it taking if I’m the one who’s giving it?
Power surges through me like I’ve grabbed an electric fence. I thought I’d never have this feeling, not ever in my life. I thought it would always belong to my mother, and then to Hades. I thought, I thought, I thought. All those things are meaningless now. Worthless.
“I do.”
Hades hasn’t moved. He stands sideways, the long lines of him illuminated by the lamp on my bedside table. His face has never been so open to me before, so readable. Hades, the most powerful man I have ever known, wears the expression of someone who has known incredible pain.
I wait for the door to slam shut between us. For him to turn on his heel and walk away, leaving me here to writhe under the covers all night and into the morning. For the wall he builds every day to close over this new knowledge of him like a prison gate, hiding him from me once and for all.
“You have no fucking idea.”
“I want you.” My voice falls to a whisper and I clear my throat, desperate to keep talking, desperate to keep him here. “I want this.”
“What’s this, Persephone?” His lip curls, a sneer if I’ve ever seen one, but I see through it, beneath it. He’s trying to rebuild the distance between us. It’s too late. I’ve kissed him and I’ve tasted him and I need to see this through to the bitter end. “You want me to fuck you like the useless slut that you are?”
My heart absorbs the blow, then rejects it, spitting it out like poison.
“That’s not what you really think.” A tear slips out of the corner of my eye and I see how it affects him—see his eyes widen, his lips part. He does love it. He needs it, too. “I know it’s not.”
Hades turns toward me, and once again I’m struck by how big he is. I don’t know what kind of fate I’m tempting by fighting with him. Wait—I do know. I’m tempting death itself.
Death in a white dress shirt. Death in pants that hug the muscles of his legs like the fabric was grown while it hung on his body. Death in his eyes—a warning, a promise. Violence, all wrapped up in expensive cloth.
“If I come over there, I will ruin you.” This, delivered so lightly I can almost feel his breath on my lips. “I will ruin you. You’ll never be the same.”
“Then ruin me. Do it. I’m not afraid.” I am afraid. I’ve never been more afraid of reaching this moment and what comes after.
His face is a firestorm. “What if I want you to be the same, you little fool? What if I want to keep you exactly as innocent as you are until you go mad from it?”
“I’m almost there.” I’m there. I am there anyway. No matter how innocent he wants me. Being near him has made me dirty, made me filthy. A dam breaks, bursting. “I can’t take it much longer—the waiting. Waiting for you to come back and touch me.”
“Don’t waste your energy. I’ll touch you when I please. I’ll bend you over when I please. I’ll destroy you when I please.”
“But you won’t.” I eke out the words on a breath. Another crack in his armor, quickly disguised. “Maybe you’ll destroy the person I was, but I’m already gone. You can never get that girl back. And I don’t want to get her back. I want you to finish the job.”
“What makes you think I owe you anything?”
“Because I belong to you.” My teeth clench and heat spills over my skin. A hundred degrees. A thousand degrees. Hotter. “And I need more.”
He’s silent. Still.
“It will be the end of you,” he says simply. He means it. His face settles into a cautious expression, watching me. “It will be the fucking end.”
“We both know you don’t care.” I deliver this blow like a knife slipped gently through soft flesh. It’s what he’s been saying to me all along. Hades glances down at his shirt like I’ve actually stabbed him. When he lifts his head
again, his eyes don’t just burn. They blaze.
I’m frozen.
This is the moment where everything comes together or everything comes apart, and if he walks away now, I don’t think I’ll be able to stand it. I think I’ll sink into the softest, most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in, pull the covers over my head, and die. The anticipation is too much. It’s killing me. But he’s killing me just as much, by taking me in such small increments. If I’m going to belong to him then he needs to make the final move. He needs to make it now. Otherwise I’ll always wonder what would have happened if Decker had walked into a different train car.
Once he does what he’s planning to do—and I know he’s planning to do it, I saw it in his eyes the first day we met—then all the wondering will stop. I know it will. This is the last mountaintop to scale. This is the last submission. There is nothing else after this.
“You’re right, sweetheart.” A wicked, twisting smile crosses his face. He reaches for one of the arms of his shirt, shoved up near his elbows. I have never seen forearms like his—not even on men like Decker. Not even from far away. Perversely I want to lick them. Bite them, the way he’s bitten me. “I don’t care.”
It’s comforting, in a way—that he says it before he yanks his sleeves down one by one and strips off his shirt to reveal a pristine white undershirt. His clothes are always so clean, even when he’s going to choke a man to death.
“You do,” I whisper. Too soft for him to hear. He hears it anyway.
And slowly, wearing that smile that twists my stomach into a thousand knots, he shakes his head.
“You’ve begged so prettily,” he comments, the way a person would comment on the weather or the arrival of the mail. “I almost believe, Persephone—I almost believe that you want this.”
“I do want this.”
Maybe I don’t. Maybe I don’t want him to fuck me, to ruin me, to destroy me. But what else is there to want, other than to have it over with? What else am I supposed to feel about it? The thudding in my ears, my own heartbeat, never goes away. Not even when I sleep. I am always on edge, even in my dreams. I need this from him, even if I don’t exactly want it. Even if I don’t know what I’m wanting, no matter how much I insist that I do.