by Vivian Wood
I have the distinct sensation of the sun going behind a cloud. It makes no sense, because if anyone was ever the opposite of the sun, it’s Hades. He’s not the sun, and he’s not the moon. He is total darkness, a place no light can touch.
He moves through the train car, stopping to pat Conor’s head, which gives me a moment to catch my breath. Then he stands at the edge of a desk that’s clearly been made to fit him—sturdy and gleaming polished wood, a deep, dark color with a hint of red. He removes one cufflink then the other and drops them both on the surface of the desk with a muffled metallic click. The desk must be bolted to the floor. Everything in here must be bolted to the floor, because it all sways with the movement of the train. Although... something is different. It would have been a different ride in the dusty interior of the next car up on that hard bench. This car must’ve been built to his specifications, so Hades, the man I’ve sworn to do anything for, moves in complete comfort. Every detail could have sprung from his bones fully formed. The rich paneling on the walls. Deep green-gray furniture, the hue of the summer grass at night. He turns from his desk and undoes the buttons of his jacket then slips it from his shoulders. My heart stops then stutters to a start.
Behind the desk is a door. Past the door is the corner of a bed, done up in sheets the color of his suit. My stomach clenches, and I dig one hand into the armrest on this—what is it? A small sofa.
Hades pauses by a set of built-in cabinets and touches one of the slats. It rolls up to reveal a full bar—glasses and bottles of alcohol. My mother only ever kept wine in the house, and this… this is not wine. The amber liquids are in unmarked bottles. I bet he has that specially made too.
He pours himself a glass like I’m not even there then turns around and watches me while he sips it.
“Still paying attention?”
“Yes.” I sit up straight. It’s sick how hard I’ve been trying to do what he said. How hard I’ve been paying attention to this man and his dog, both of whom could be the end of me right now. All it would take is one decision from him. A snap of his fingers.
I don’t want him to make me wish I was dead. I really don’t. I don’t want him to be the man I know he is. And some small part of me knows that even if I obey him flawlessly, it will never, ever change him. I didn’t come here to change him. I came here to pay what I owe. Tears fill my eyes again at the thought of Decker’s body dangling uselessly in the air, his feet kicking more slowly with every second.
“I’m paying attention,” I confirm.
“Good. Then we’ll begin.”
I lick at suddenly dry lips, folding my hands into my lap. Oh, God. Oh, God. I thought I talked myself down from the panic before but it rises again, thick and suffocating. A thousand questions come to mind and die on the tip of my tongue.
Hades sits on the wider sofa across the train car, feet planted on the ground, glass cupped in the palm of his hand. He takes a sip and surveys me, eyes cold. A shiver crawls down my spine. My heart kicks up, thrashing around inside my ribcage, screaming to get out. Just start already, please, please, please. I open my mouth to let the plea slip out into the air, but Hades speaks first.
“Come here.”
Already, the sofa has come to represent the safest place in the room. As if a piece of furniture could stop him from coming over here himself. A firework exploding, sending shards of shame through every part of me, and I get to my feet. My knees start up again, going loose and useless, and I have to lock them to stay upright. Don’t faint. I unlock them, rocking them forward an inch. Just move.
I take the first step, and Hades holds up a hand.
“Not like that, sweetheart.”
I don’t know what he means. There’s no other way to get across the floor except for walking.
Unless—
I don’t know what he means, and then suddenly, awfully, I do.
“I—I’m wearing a dress.”
A glint sparks in his eyes, and I want to clap a hand over my mouth. I’m already here because of my reckless words, and now I’m going to end up without a dress. He’ll see everything. The linen tank I have a hundred of. Had. The… the white panties. Oh, God, no. And on top of this—on top of it all—I have to crawl past the dog with the scariest teeth on the planet. Conor.
“So you do understand.” He laughs, that same sound that burns my cheeks. “Come here.”
I drop to my knees onto the plush carpeting, which still carries the scent of a lightly perfumed cleaner, something meant to evoke clean laundry. It works, and before I can stop myself, I’ve dug my hands into it, eyes burning.
“Don’t hide your tears.” I look up into Hades’ face, and his intense gaze is changed, brightened. He’s enjoying this. “I want to see them all. Keep that pretty chin up while you crawl to me.”
My hands are cement blocks, my knees totally ineffectual, but I put one palm after the other, one knee after the other, while hot tears slip down. At the last moment, he points between his legs. I’ll never make it. I’ll never be able to make myself do this, not with humiliation sloshing against every last inch of me.
And the most humiliating thing of all?
It’s not every last inch.
Because between my legs, desire builds with every sway of my hips and every press of my palms into the carpet.
I stop between his wide legs, looking up at him, trying to keep my breathing even. Hades reaches down and puts a hand under my chin, jerking my head up another inch, peering down at me. That filthy, hidden part of me sighs with relief even as the rest of me recoils. I have to let him do this—for Decker. But I cannot feel this way about it. I can’t.
Hades looks down at me and smiles, and I can’t tell which parts of me have gone cold and which parts have gone hot. All I know is I want him to let go, to let me go. Yes. That’s what I want. That’s what I need, and I don’t need anything else.
“You took too long, but you get extra points for crying. I fucking love that.” His teeth scrape at his bottom lip.
“Can I go back to the sofa now?” Another tear works its way free, my heart throbbing. This is enough for now. It has to be enough for now.
“Do you really think I’m done with you? Tell the truth.” The simple words might as well be curses. He leans down, the scent of him surrounding me. “Tell me now.”
“No,” I choke out. “I didn’t think…. I only thought, since—”
“Shut your pretty little mouth.”
I snap my lips closed.
“I’m not done with you now, and I’ll never be done with you. Those are the terms in exchange for your piece-of-shit boyfriend’s life. You did it, Persephone. You saved him. But you’ll never save yourself.” He lifts me up by the chin, quickly enough that I have to scramble to my feet. He holds me off-balance, leaning close, and I want to collapse into him and sob against his shirt. It’s sick. It’s wrong. I want it.
The train carries me away from my mother’s house, away from everything I’ve ever known, at a breakneck pace. My mind breaks away, going back to those fields. I hated the fences. I might love them now.
He snaps his fingers in front of my eyes again, the sound startling me.
“Now.” It’s all I can do to stay upright, even with his hand gripping my chin. “Let’s find out what else you’ll do.”
Chapter Seven
Persephone
I tremble in his hands, and Hades watches this as dispassionately as you’d watch a flower grow. Unlike my mother, he wouldn’t think twice about crushing them under his heel or in his hands. He’d just as soon tear out the petals and spit on them.
“The crawling was fine.” A cold assessment. The way you’d talk about a thing. “The tears are delicious, but you’ll have to do better than that.”
He rises to his feet, towering over me. I just can’t move. I can’t anticipate what he’ll do or what he’ll say, so I stand there, rooted to the spot, staring at the buttons on his dress shirt. It’s the nicest dress shirt I’ve ever seen. S
ome of the other girls at school had spare clothes aside from the uniforms, and I could tell those dresses cost a lot. But this? It’s nicer than all of them combined.
“Mmm. I have to say, Persephone, the sight of you scared....” He makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “You were such a courageous little thing out there, offering yourself up.” He laughs again, and I want to sink down to the floor and hide my face. Even more than that, I want to hook my fingers in the space between the buttons of his shirt and hold on for dear life.
“I’m not afraid of you. I’ve known you were dangerous all my life. Th-that doesn’t make me afraid.” I have never been so terrified. It’s become the air I breathe and the rise and fall of my lungs.
“It’s strange that you didn’t warn your boyfriend about me, given all that you know about me.” His eyes rake across my face. My lips. My neck.
“He’s not my boyfriend. I said that before.”
His bristling silence tells me I’ve stepped in the direction of defiance, and the air crackles with a warning. “So you don’t really care whether he lives or dies?”
I look up into his face as best as I can from this distance.
“That’s not true. I—I love him.” It’s not true, and a flash in Hades’ eyes tells me he believes it as much as I do. “We weren’t together like that. My mother would never have let me be with him. It was something we were going to discuss when we got to the city.”
“Oh isn’t that sweet.” He clicks his tongue. “You should be thanking me. I’ve saved you from a lifetime of cooking his dinners and pretending to be interested.”
I press my lips closed. Terror mixes with confusion, all of it wrapped in the overpowering need to survive. I did love Decker. I loved him enough to try to save him from Hades. But something rings terribly true in Hades’ words, all of it shaking the foundations of me like a two-ton bomb. Is he right, or am I just so afraid that I’m taking his word for it? Why would I take Luther Hades’ word for anything? And yet that’s exactly what I’ve done.
“I wasn’t pretending.” Some part of me was pretending, but which part? The girl who never had a boyfriend before, pretending to know what she was doing? Or the woman who had fallen in love, pretending it wasn’t happening?
“Good. Prove it to me.” He takes me by the arm and turns me to face the desk. “Bend over the desk.” He puts a hand on the back of my neck. “You had so much trouble understanding my instructions before, so I’ll make it easy. Bend.”
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can only obey. I thought crawling was the worst of it. I thought the nightmarish images that came to mind about what men do to women were the worst of it. I never… I never—
The desk meets my hips, a hard, unforgiving line. I’m painfully aware of the curve of my back and my ass and then the press of my breasts against the unyielding surface.
“What are you going to do?” I whisper. “Please, tell me.”
He gives my neck a shake, and my cheek makes contact with the desk.
“A summary of my plans for you isn’t part of the terms.” Another shake, harder. “In fact, I’ve already held up my end of the deal.” Hades rubs a thumb absently up and down the side of my neck, underneath my hair, then lets go. “I didn’t kill that disgusting worm of a man. I didn’t kill you… though, I could.” My body fights between tensing up and giving in to the slow slide of his thumb. Why, why, would I ever want to let that relax me? It’s not me wanting it, I decide. It’s my traitor of a body. “You’re so small. It would be nothing.”
The heat of my cheek has already warmed up the desk beneath it.
“I thought you wanted me alive.” I keep my eyes firmly focused on the shuttered window on the opposite side of the train. The thought of him seeing me like this, bent like this, it can’t get any worse.
It gets worse.
“I’ll get considerably more enjoyment out of a live woman than a dead one.” The hand lifts from the back of my neck, but I stay pressed flat against the desk. He hasn’t said to get up. Hades makes a satisfied clicking sound. “Look at you, trying to anticipate my wishes. Can you anticipate what will happen to you next?”
My breath stops, and there it is, that damn chin going again. A million images run through my mind. A million horrible, filthy images, snapshots of things depraved people would do. I—I know that not all sex is bad, but most of it must be. My mother kept all of it from me for a reason. And the things the other girls talked about at school were nothing like this. They involved soccer players and football captains and coaches, not bending over a desk, ass lifted up toward a man who’d just as soon kill me as—
“No,” I breathe. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.” He kicks my legs apart, and it’s only then that I realize I’ve pinned them together as tightly as the muscles will allow. “You might wear a white dress and live on your mother’s farm, but she’ll have told you things.”
“No.” Desperation rises in another round of tears, and they drip down onto the polished surface below my face. “She’s never told me anything… anything about this, about… about any of that.”
His hand slips down my spine, counting each ridge, until he stops just above the swell of my ass.
“You bleed every month without knowing why?”
“I know why.” I’m incandescent with shame. How can he say all this out into the open air? “I know about... getting pregnant.” The warm air from the train car slips underneath the hem of my dress and strokes me between my legs, where all that separates me from Hades is a thin layer of cotton.
This conversation is beyond the pale. Every movement in the air, every movement of his hand—all of them are magnified, intensified. A whisper of air, of breath, and then… the hem of my dress lifts.
Every inch. I feel every inch of my legs as he exposes them, little by little, torturing me. The dress reaches up above my white underwear, and a sob rips from my lungs. I’ve had my thoughts, late at night, about someday lying down with a man, someone like Decker, somebody normal and gentle, probably fumbling. It never seemed like such a big deal, like something that would swamp me so completely with feeling. With humiliation and desire and the tug of linen up to the small of my back. The desk vibrates beneath me, the train vibrates beneath me, and I shake along with it, my body out of control.
Hades curses behind me, voice laden with something dark, edging on needy.
“You’re a fucking liar. These clothes are all for show, aren’t they? You want people to believe you’re as innocent as these panties say you are.”
“I didn’t think anyone would ever see them.” I don’t know what could possibly be a performance about what I’m doing now. If I had anything else to wear, I’d have worn that, but my mother threw out my school uniforms a long time ago.
“Except your boyfriend. You thought he might see them.” He puts one finger under the elastic and traces a fiery path underneath, and then it’s gone. “Did he like to play games with you, Persephone?” I’ve never heard a tone so deadly in my life. “Push you against a tree somewhere, let his hands creep up beneath your dress? Let other things beneath your dress?” One big hand caresses the back of my knee then slips upward, upward, another inch upward. And my own legs betray me. I’m completely frozen, hardly able to breathe, but at the touch of Hades’ hand, I move one thigh out another inch. He laughs, and I squeeze my eyes closed, which does nothing to keep the tears in. “You gave yourself to me all for the boy who taught you about getting pregnant?”
“No, he didn’t,” I finally manage. His fingertips play at the edge of my panties. He slips one underneath again, tugging it out, letting it snap back against me. He’s getting closer and closer to the softness between my legs and—and the dampness, and if he touches it, if he finds out, if he can see, I won’t survive. There’s no way I can live with the shame. But the moment comes anyway. Hades cups a hand over my panties, fitting it in between my widespread legs, and I can’t stop the cry that he forces out of
me. “Oh, God,” I sob, rising up on tiptoe.
He goes still but doesn’t move his hand, waiting. One moment bleeds into the next.
“That’s right,” he murmurs. “Push back into my hand.” My body obeys him, even if the rest of me wants to collapse to the floor. He fits his thumb into the cleft of my ass, and his fingertips… his fingertips brush a place only I’ve ever touched, and only secretly, only furtively. I would never have let Decker lift up my dress like this, not until we got married and moved into a house together. “You’re fucking wet,” he comments, a gravelly edge to his voice.
There’s no arguing with him. I can feel it too. And I can feel the tendrils of electric desire moving outward from that pressure. I grit my teeth. I will not move my hips to get him to make contact with my clit. I will not, I will not. But my hips betray me too. It’s hardly any movement, but it’s there. I hate myself. I hate him.
“Who taught you to play this game?” He’s searching for something, probing, and I don’t know what.
I never saw Decker inside the fence. We could never touch each other like this, even if I’d wanted to, and right now… I don’t think I wanted him to touch me like this. But you want Hades to touch you like this, says that horrible voice. But I don’t. I don’t.
“How many of the other farm boys did you fuck?”
As he asks it, he works his fingers into the waistband of my panties, and the entire world grinds to a halt on its axis. There’s only the vibration of the train beneath me, my hands somehow gripping the other side, and my toes trembling on the floor in my soft, ridiculous shoes. He’s going to take the panties off, and then he’ll be able to see everything. He’ll be able to do everything. He lowers the waistband, and the spiky edges of anticipation tear through me like a clawed beast. The words follow on a gasp, on a cry.
“I didn’t fuck anyone.” Tears, rain, there’s no difference. “I’m a virgin.”