by Vivian Wood
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 perfect 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.”
Chapter Twenty-One
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 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 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. Yo
u’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 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.
There’s another way out of this situation, and it’s to become someone else. Someone who is not me. Someone who does not worry about what’s going to happen every moment of every day. Someone who has nothing left to lose.
I want it so badly it makes me cry.
All he needs to do is finish the job; that’s all. He’s taken me this far, and to hold back from pushing me off the precipice is more than cruel. It will be the death of me. And some small part of me thinks that Hades, for all his talk, wants me to be alive. What use would I be to him dead? No use. No use at all.
My legs start to tremble, to shake, and I lower myself down onto my heels. He huffs a laugh, and all of the bravado I’ve built up in the heat of the moment dissolves. I’m on the other side of that doorway. His face has shifted back into the beautiful cruelty he always wears. The cruelty that would allow him to let Decker dangle from his hands. The cruelty that let him push his fingers inside me in front of everyone on his factory floor. Something about him scared my mother enough that she spent my entire life warning me off of him.
This is it. This look, on his face, right now. Like I’m prey. Like he could dangle me from his hands and watch the life slowly leave me, unblinking, uncaring. But something shifts at the last moment. He wouldn’t kill me. He might hurt me. But that’s as far as he’ll go.
And then he moves.
The way he moves is nothing short of astounding, even in an undershirt and his custom slacks. He moves through the world as though he knows every inch of it as intimately as he’d know a lover. As if he’s spent hours running his hands over every available surface, memorizing it. A graceful killer.
My body responds while my mind tries frantically to convince me that this is fine, this is what I asked for, and this is what I wanted. The tears come first, totally unbidden. Hades stops at the edge of the bed, takes my face roughly in his hand, and pulls me toward him. He licks the salt from the side of my face and leans in close to scrape his teeth across my bottom lip, stinging.
His eyes rake across my face, studying, devouring. Not even Decker has looked at me like this—not once. I mistook the way Decker used to look at me for a hunger that could never be satisfied. Now, I’m not sure if anyone but Hades could be that ravenous.
Hades slams a hand down on the table. Does he even hit the switch? I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter; the light goes off, plunging us into darkness. My eyes adjust while I gasp for air. Moonlight. It streams through the windows on the opposite side of the room, bathing us in white and leaching all the color from the room. It doesn’t matter. He’s just as menacing—and just as breathtaking—without it.
“You’re ruined.”
I am.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Persephone
I’m not expecting tenderness of any kind.
In fact, I don’t want it.
It still takes me by surprise when Hades drags me off the bed and stands my feet on the floor. He kicks them apart and shoves me down over the bed, bent over, exposed. My breath comes fast and hard and hot. He catches one wrist in his hand then the other. I don’t know where the tie comes from, but I feel the slip and slide of it over my wrists. Hades tugs at them, the movement dispassionate.
“Move your wrists.”
I can do it, if only a little. Tenderness. Maybe this is just because he doesn’t want to cut off circulation in my hands, but the fact that he doesn’t want that… it means he feels something. Anything at all. Not that it’s part of the deal. His emotions are not on the table. They have never been on the table.
He stands up behind me and caresses my ass with one wide palm. I’ve almost let myself relax into the sensation when he spanks me, once, sharply. I lurch up from the bed, crying out, and he pushes me back down like I’m nothing. Spanks me again.
“I could do this all night.”
He could—I believe him. I don’t know what I’m being punished for, but it could be any number of things. Falling asleep. Keeping him waiting. Sneaking away to meet Decker. He could know about all of that. I’d deserve it. But the more he spanks me, the more I want it. A stinging heat spreads across my backside. Ten or fifte
en later—I’ve lost count in the haze—he shoves his fingers between my legs.
“What did I do?” I’ve been crying again, without knowing it. And I know I didn’t do anything. I know this is punishment for the sake of punishment. I also know that my questions wind him up. Coil him tight. I keep my feet firmly planted on the floor even as my thighs tremble. “Why are you doing this?”
It’s a plaintive question, and my voice sounds small, even to me.
“So it’s easier to fuck you.” He adds a few more for good measure, and I gasp every time. “This is your favorite thing, you twisted little slut.”
“Only for you. Only when you—”
“I’ve done things to you that made you so fucking wet you could hardly stand up straight. But I’ll give you this one, Persephone. You waited quite a while to beg me to fuck you. You’re an angel.”
Angel sounds worse than slut. Angel sounds like a woman who wears only white and sleeps with her hands above the covers, never getting pleasure out of anything. Angel sounds like the endgame. You can’t be an angel and be anything else. I want him to take my wings.
“Now shut your mouth.”
He spanks me to remind me, until my ass burns. It must be red. He can’t see how red it is, not in the moonlight, and that’s one saving grace. Hades rubs at my sore flesh absently. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see him watching me.
“Those tears.” He sucks in a breath. “Those, more than anything, make me want to keep you just how you are.”
He said to shut my mouth, but I can’t help myself. “Then you’re going to keep me?”
Hades pushes thick fingers into me, as deep as he can, before he answers. “You’d rather die than belong to me.”
“No.” One shuddering breath, then another. “I’m alive.”
He curls his fingers, and I am ended.
I don’t know what he’s touched or where, but he does it again and brings down all the lightning the world has ever seen in one massive bolt at the deep center of me. I can feel myself clenching on the fingers, tighter and tighter. He does it again. Again. Again. I lose count of how many times I jerk and come because of him. They blur together, one ending, another beginning, peaking constantly until the tears on my cheeks are from being completely overloaded by his hands. By his fingers.