Descent

by Knight, Natasha

  “What did he do?” I ask so quietly I’m not sure he hears me.

  He steps closer, eyes intent on me but not hard. Not like earlier. This is the other Hayden. This is my Hades.

  “What did he do?” I ask again, my face wet with tears.

  His gaze shifts momentarily to what I’m holding and when thunder claps too near the church, I stumble backward, startled.

  “Have you been drinking, Persephone?”

  “What did he do?” I demand.

  I know, though. I don’t need it spoken out loud, do I? Spoken words have power.

  It’s not yours…

  The implication of those words. No. It can’t be true.

  “Why are you out here? It’s freezing.” He goes to touch me, but I move just out of reach.

  “You know, don’t you?” I say. “You’ve known all along. That’s what this is about.” We all have secrets.

  He reaches me this time, touching my hair, my face, cupping it in his warm hands. “You’re wet. Freezing. Let’s go inside.”

  He shifts his gaze to the papers again, takes them from me, bends to pick up the envelope. He scans the letter and when he looks at me, I see his confusion.

  I look at the altar. See the years-old blood. “He was sleeping with her?” My voice breaks as I hear those words aloud. “Was my dad...”

  I knew, didn’t I? I saw how he looked at her. If I’m honest, I knew.

  “Hayden?”

  He’s watching me when I turn to him, everything blurry from tears.

  Lightning strikes, electrifying the sky.

  “Let’s go to the house,” he says.

  I shake my head, push against him when he tries to move me. “Tell me.”

  “We’ll talk at the house.”

  I turn to the altar. I reach out my hand and I touch the blood along the edge of it. I don’t know what I expect but I only feel cold stone.

  “Persephone.”

  “She was pregnant, wasn’t she?” I remember my stepmom gleefully spreading what I’d then thought a rumor. I remember the rage with which my father told her to shut her mouth. I’d never heard him talk to her like that before. I’d never heard him raise his voice ever. And I’d never seen him slam his fist so hard into the dining room table that it dented.

  I’d also never heard him cry but he did the night of her funeral. In his office. He sobbed. It was three in the morning. I’d come downstairs because I couldn’t sleep, and I’d heard him.

  “Persephone.”

  I turn to Hayden. I don’t know if he’s even blinked, he’s watching me so closely.

  “Do you remember that Halloween?” I ask.

  His reply, after a long pause, is a nod.

  “It wasn’t Jonas who drugged me.” I look away, look at the altar, things starting to fall into place. “It was Nora who gave me the drink. The only drink I had that night.”

  I sit down on one of the remaining pews, suddenly feeling the weight of it all, the vodka only blurring the very edges of each vivid memory.

  “Nora who made sure I drank it.”

  I watch rain pour in from the empty window frame.

  “I’m right, aren’t I? She was pregnant?” I ask, looking up to find his eyes still on me. “I wasn’t sure it was true. I thought it was my stepmom being ugly.”

  This letter explains why dad kept the photo. Why he hid it.

  I love him.

  Not my father. She didn’t love my father. But I think he loved her.

  I’m going to be sick.

  A gust of wind blows in through the empty windows and the candles go out, leaving us stranded in the dark. Lightning shatters that darkness and I see it again, the three of us that last Halloween when it stormed like it is tonight.

  Jonas, Nora and me. Me on the altar. Me with my skirt pushed up to my waist.

  Nora holding me down. Nora telling him to do it.

  To rape me?

  She was playing a game. A sick game.

  “We’re going back to the house,” Hayden says and before I can protest, before I can say a word, he lifts me in his arms and we’re moving fast through the heavy rain as lightning strikes again and I cling to him, holding tight, remembering. Remembering that night.

  The thunderstorm had been as wild as this one. He’d carried me home then too. Just like now.

  And in my room, he’d stripped off my wet clothes and laid me on my bed and I still remember looking up at him, how he’d looked so big, so dark, his hair soaked, clothes soaked.

  I remember his beautiful face when I’d opened my legs to him.

  I remember the hunger in his dark eyes when he’d knelt beside the bed and looked at me and then, finally, touched me. I remember how soft his tongue had felt when he’d kissed me there.

  It was our first kiss.

  His mouth on my sex.

  Then his tongue on me. Inside me. Me bucking, fisting handfuls of his hair as I came.

  His lips glistened after and I remember how he’d left. Wordless. There, then gone, like a ghost. Like he hadn’t been there at all.

  My memories of that night had been fragmented, scattered. I’d been unable to collect the events together. Unwilling to face her betrayal. Unable to face Hayden. Because he lied too. After.

  “Do it again,” I say, realizing we’re inside and he’s laying me on my bed. “Kiss me again, like that night. Kiss me there.”

  He looms over me, like he had then, and then he’s stripping off my clothes and I’m naked and I open my legs for him, and history repeats as his eyes darken with a familiar hunger as he looks at me.

  “Put your mouth on me,” I beg. “I need you to put your mouth on me.”

  He meets my eyes and crouches between my legs and I watch him, watch him watching me and when he closes his mouth over my sex, I close my eyes and arch my back and I feel him. I only feel him. His hands on my thighs, his mouth on my sex, his tongue licking me, lips closing around my clit to suck and I come fast, my hips jerking as I grip handfuls of hair and for a moment, I don’t think about any of it. Not Nora. Not Jonas. Not my father. Not anything but Hades. Not anything but his mouth on me.

  And when he rises moments later and I open my eyes, his hands are on either side of my head trapping me as he pushes into me and I’m filled with him, his cock inside me, his body on top of mine, his eyes watching me and I think he knows too now. He knows what they did. He must.

  But it doesn’t matter. Not right now.

  Nothing matters but this, him inside me, and when I feel him come, I hear the sounds he makes when he doesn’t utter a word, and I watch him and I take those final, punishing thrusts as he empties inside me and I think how fucked up everything is. How fucked up everything but this is.

  27

  Hayden

  I stay inside her for a long time afterward just looking at her. She watches me, too, and I think about her in all of this and I can’t think about what I read in that letter. What it means. I just look at her and she’s so fucking beautiful and I think I’ll never get close enough to her.

  “I didn’t mean what I said earlier,” she says. “At your office.”

  “I know.”

  Silence descends again.

  “Why did you go to the chapel and not the cemetery?” I ask.

  Her gaze drifts past me to the papers from inside that blood-red envelope that have fallen off the bed and onto the floor.

  “I don’t know. I always go to the chapel. Every year since she...” She furrows her brow, quiet again, then returns her gaze to mine. “Nora gave me the drink that night. Told me to finish it. It wasn’t Jonas.”

  She said that earlier too. At the chapel.

  “You don’t remember right,” I tell her. “You were drugged.”

  She shakes her head, rubs her face with both hands. “She told him to do it, Hayden. When he hesitated. When you found us.”

  “No.” I feel the lump in my throat.

  “It’s true.”

  “She told him t
o rape you?”

  Her forehead wrinkles. “I don’t know.”

  “Think!”

  “Blood on the stone. Virgin blood on the altar. Mine.”

  Blood on the stone. Except in the end, it was Nora’s.

  “She’s dead.” I get up out of the bed. “In the ground. You’re not going to do this to her.” I don’t look at the envelope or its contents on the floor as I head into the bathroom to shower.

  “You saw the letter.”

  I stop at the door between the two rooms but only momentarily. I walk into the bathroom and close the door behind me but before I’m even in the shower, the door opens, and Persephone is inside.

  I switch on the shower.

  “I think he loved her,” she says.

  My jaw tightens and my hands fist. “You don’t want to do this,” I warn without looking at her.

  “I think they both did.”

  At that, I spin around, put my hand on her chest and walk her backward to the wall.

  Her hands wrap around my forearm but I’m not hurting her, just keeping her there. Warning her.

  “Your father raped my sister. Even if she didn’t say no, she was fifteen.”

  “I don’t know what he did. I hope he wakes up so I can ask him. But you read her letter. You know there was someone else. Someone she loved.”

  I swallow, grit my teeth. I let her go, turning, running my hand through my hair still wet with rain. I spin to face her. “Who?”

  She cowers back and I wonder what I look like. How crazed I must appear.

  “Tell me who.” She’s mute. “There’s no one else. No one!” I snap. Fuck. “Get in the shower.”

  Obediently, she walks into the shower and I follow. She stands beneath the flow looking at me, studying me. Pitying me?

  I watch her. My brain is going a thousand miles a minute. I pour shower gel into my hands and lather them up. I scrub her shoulders, her arms, her breasts then turn her, and I wash her back. I slide my hand between her legs to clean her then set both forearms against the wall on either side of her face.

  She turns her head, shifts her gaze so our eyes meet.

  We stay like this for a minute. I want to be sure she hears what I say.

  “You are not my enemy, Persephone. I’m warning you to keep it that way.”

  I mean what I’m saying. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want her hurt even if there’s no ending I see where she will walk away unscathed.

  You know there was someone else. Someone she loved.

  I shake my head, dislodge the thought as I switch off the water and step out, grabbing a towel for myself without looking back as I wrap it around my hips and walk back into the bedroom. There, I go into the closet to find the clothes I’d brought neatly folded and put on a pair of jeans.

  A phone rings inside and I try to remember where my cell phone is. I’d left it in the SUV. This must be Persephone’s.

  I pull a sweater over my head as I walk back into the bedroom to watch Persephone dig into the pocket of her coat to retrieve the phone.

  It starts to ring again, and she looks at it, her face a little paler.

  “Who is it?” I ask, coming up behind her.

  She glances at me as I read the screen. Unknown caller.

  I take the phone from her hands and swipe the green bar to answer.

  “Hello.”

  A girl sniffles on the other end of the line. Persephone is watching me, eyes wide.

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “Is…Where’s Percy?”

  “Who is this?” I repeat.

  “Where’s my sister?” the voice breaks.

  It’s Lizzie.

  I put the call on speaker. “Persephone’s here. You’re on speaker phone.”

  “Percy?” Lizzie asks meekly.

  “Lizzie!” Persephone grabs the phone and puts it to her ear. “Lizzie, are you okay? Where are you?”

  Silence as she listens to her sister.

  “Stay there. Lock the door and stay there and I’ll be there as soon as I can. I’m leaving right now.” It’s quiet again, and Persephone nods. “Yes, okay. It’s okay. I’m coming. Just don’t open the door for anyone but me.” She disconnects and turns to me. “I have to go.”

  She looks around wildly, then picks up her coat and begins to put it on.

  I grab her arm to stop her. “What’s going on?”

  “My sister’s in trouble. She’s at a hotel. I have to go, Hayden. She’s scared.”

  “Put some clothes on,” I tell her, taking the coat. “What hotel?”

  She tells me the name of the place and the town, which is almost a two-hour drive. She looks at the wet clothes discarded on the floor.

  I walk her into the closet, choose the first sweater and jeans I see, and she’s dressed in a few minutes. We’re about to walk out when she stops.

  “Wait. I need…she doesn’t have clothes.”

  I process but don’t ask the obvious question.

  She goes back into her closet to retrieve some things and while she does, I pick up the red envelope and the papers that were inside it and shove them all into my pocket.

  “My phone’s in the SUV. I’ll send some men—”

  She shakes her head. “She’ll think they’re with him.”

  “I’ll just make sure they watch the room.”

  She nods, distracted as I lead her out the door and down the stairs. “I should have checked on her. Pushed her to come home or at least tell me where she was.”

  We’re in the Range Rover a minute later and I’m driving to the hotel. I push a button to call Peter who answers on the second ring. He’s available 24/7. It’s why I pay him the amount I do.

  I tell him to get some men out to the property, a motel along Highway 87. I can imagine the kind of place knowing the area.

  “Make sure they just keep an eye on her room. Thirty-three, that’s right. No one goes in.” I disconnect the call and glance at Persephone who is staring straight ahead. “She’ll be fine.”

  “I didn’t get the phone number. I should have gotten the number.”

  “She wasn’t calling from her cell phone?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Did she tell you anything?”

  “That she made a mistake.” She looks at me. “She sounded terrified.”

  I nod, push on the accelerator. “My men will be there within the hour. We’ll be there in less than two. Don’t worry.”

  She leans back in her chair. “I hate Halloween. I hate it.”

  “It’s not Halloween anymore.” It’s past midnight now. Technicality.

  My mind wanders to the contents of that envelope which I stuffed into my pocket as Persephone picked up clothes for her sister. They’re burning a hole there now.

  You know there was someone else. Someone she loved.

  No. I can’t think about that right now. “Do you always take candles out there?” I ask, remembering the thick altar candles which looked brand new.

  She turns to me. “Sometimes. But I didn’t tonight.”

  “What do you mean? Who then?”

  “Someone called me, Hayden. A man. It was a little before midnight. They knew I would go out there.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I…I’d been drinking.” She pushes her hand into her hair. “It’s all so much now. Too much.”

  “What man?”

  “I don’t know. He called and said I was late. And he said,” she turns to me. “He said I’d better get down there before my boyfriend does.”

  “Another mystery man.” She doesn’t comment. “He called you on your cell phone?”

  She nods.

  “Give it to me.”

  “There was no caller ID.”

  “Give it to me.”

  She reaches into her coat pocket and hands me her cell phone.

  Keeping one hand on the steering wheel, I take it.

  “What’s your password?”

  “8789.�
�

  I punch it in and scroll through her calls. I see more than one without a caller ID in missed calls and the one she answered a few minutes before midnight.

  “You didn’t recognize the caller’s voice?”

  “No.”

  “Any idea who it could be?”

  “Someone who knew about my visits.”

  I look straight ahead absently reading the sign we pass. “Who knows you go out there?”

  “No one. Lizzie maybe, but no one else. My dad.”

  I’m thinking. Who would want her to have that letter?

  “My father was sleeping with her,” she says quietly. “That’s why you’re doing this.”

  I keep my gaze straight head, grip the steering wheel harder than I need to. I nod.

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How did you find out?”

  “Autopsy revealed she was fourteen weeks pregnant. I investigated.”

  “He was broken up over her death.”

  “Don’t talk to me about how he felt. I don’t care how he felt.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “She was fifteen,” I bark. “That’s all I need to know.”

  “I was going to say you don’t know the whole story.”

  “And you do?”

  She exhales, shifts her gaze to her lap.

  “You were close with her. You never suspected she was pregnant? Suicidal?”

  She shifts her gaze out the side window. “You said once that you don’t know people. That you never really know someone, not what’s really inside their head.” She returns her gaze to mine. “You were right because I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything about any of it.”

  The way she says that is strange, but before I can ask what she means, she continues.

  “She was sad, I knew that. Even when she tried to pretend she wasn’t. Especially at the end.”

  It’s silent for a long minute.

  “But the baby wasn’t my father’s. She said it herself. He was trying to help her.”

  “He was trying to cover up his mistake. Whether or not the baby was his doesn’t change the fact that he raped a fifteen-year-old girl.”

  She winces at my use of that word and I see that letter again like it’s tattooed into my brain.

  Dear Q,

  I can’t lie to you anymore. It’s not yours. And I can’t accept your money because I can’t get rid of it. I’m sorry. I love him.