“So, no annulment?”
“Absolutely fucking not.”
Chapter 39
I slip out of bed the morning after Elena comes back to the island, trying to reacquaint myself with the parts of the house I avoided while she was gone. The beach, where I showed her my physical, visible scars. The library where she spent so much of her time upon her initial arrival curled up, reading books she’d already been through a dozen times, desperate for something to do.
After giving Marcelline the morning off, I toast a bagel, slather it in cream cheese, and split open a pomegranate, arranging the food on a tray and bringing it to bed before she’s even close to waking up.
Setting it on the nightstand, I perch on the mattress beside her sleeping form, running my hand over her side like I have repeatedly since last night, just reminding myself that she’s real.
That she came back to me.
The beast’s beauty.
Hades and Persephone.
She finally stretches awake, blinking those soft golden eyes up at me, giggling when I lean down and cover her mouth with mine. Pushing me away, she lets out a half groan that makes my cock jolt to life.
“Morning breath,” she says, rolling away from me.
Grabbing her shoulder, I pull her to her back, pinching her chin between my two fingers. “After every bodily fluid we’ve shared, that’s where you draw the line?”
Sticking her tongue out, she notices the food from the corner of her eyes, squealing excitedly. “You made me breakfast?”
I shrug, picking the tray up and settling it over her waist. “It’s nothing special, and it’s probably cold by now.”
Rolling her eyes, she ignores the bagel and immediately starts in for the pomegranate, chewing thoughtfully as she studies me. “You know,” she says, “I didn’t really think about how the downfall of Ricci Inc. might affect you when I was sending all that evidence to Channel Ten.”
“It won’t,” I say, waving my hand. “I already took care of my official involvement with your father and his business. As long as my security team did what they were supposed to, I won’t even exist to the Riccis.”
“Will that affect your medical degree?”
My forehead wrinkles, the reserved, almost shy look on her face creating a little wave of unease inside me. “My degree, other than the fact that my work helped fund it, has nothing to do with your father, or anyone else, for that matter. I earned it, and it can’t just be taken away.”
“But... you don’t practice, and you don’t really ever even talk about being a doctor.”
Sitting back slightly, I consider this, folding my hands in my lap. Stripping myself of the last secret I have from her makes me feel like I’m cracking my heart open and shoving it into her hands, praying she doesn’t leave again. But it also feels necessary, like the beginning of us.
“I have this… condition. Misophonia. It’s a psychological aversion to certain sounds. Have you ever heard of it?”
She shakes her head.
“Most of the time, I keep it in check, but other times… it’s a lot. Sometimes, it’s downright debilitating, and I can’t focus on anything but the sound or the anxiety it gives me. Even after it dissipates, I’m still reeling from the episode, and I just… want to work from home, where I can regulate the stimuli I’m encountering. Not because I’m trying to avoid it, but if I can make my life easier, then I’m going to.”
Nodding, she shrugs. “That makes sense.”
“My decision to retire from medicine was made separate from my decision to retire from Ricci business. I just... aside from the sound stuff, I don’t have the same passion for being a doctor that I once did, and I’d begun to suspect that I was trying to complete the fantasy for a kid who only ever wanted to help his mom get better.”
She chews on a pomegranate seed as she listens, pursing her lips. “What would you say if I wanted to go back to school?”
“I’d say that’s great—”
“But I want to learn the craft.” Her gaze dips to my chest, running over the Band-Aid covering the shallow wound she made last night, then back up. “I don’t want to teach writing, I want to do it.”
My heartbeat speeds up, swelling to the point where it’s knocking painfully against my ribs. “Then I say I can’t wait to have a library full of your books.”
Later, after she’s finished eating and I’ve finished my breakfast, I drag myself from between her thighs and slump onto the bed beside her, hooking an arm behind my head as she lays hers on my chest.
“You know what brought me back to you?” she asks after a comfortable silence, raising her chin to look up at me.
“What?”
“It was the pomegranate syrup on the jet.” She smirks, shaking her head. “One taste, and I knew... that was the syrup for me. Too good to live the rest of my life without.”
And as she leans up on her elbow, capturing my lips with hers and shifting so she’s straddling my hips, sliding down my cock before I even have much of a chance to process what’s going on, I chuckle to myself at the fucking irony.
Persephone eating the seed, tying her to the Underworld indefinitely.
My version is a little different, a little skewed and bloody and downright agonizing at times, but the result remains the same.
She’s here to stay, and the darkness inside me starts to feel a little less heavy.
Ivers International is a company for criminals, by criminals.
Who better to help keep illegal activity safe than people who did it and got away with it?
Based in the seedy shit stain town of King’s Trace, Maine, it’s not a place I like to frequent. When I can conduct meetings virtually, I do.
Frankly, if they weren’t typically so damn good at their job, and I didn’t have a personal connection to the owner, I likely wouldn’t still be using them based on location alone.
Still, I decide to drop by a few weeks after Elena shows back up on the island, checking in to see if the team’s broken any new ground on the identity of my blackmailer yet.
I haven’t heard from either of them since before Carmen’s arrest and Rafe went AWOL, so I can only imagine what’s going on on that front. After squaring away a meeting with Boyd Kelly, the lead cybersecurity engineer, I touch down in Portland and make the short drive up to King’s Trace, trying not to let its darkness pull me in like usual.
There’s a reason I only ever came to town to do a job. An invisible slime practically coats the small streets, an evil presence haunting every person who steps inside the city limits.
I don’t stop anywhere on my way in, parking outside Ivers International and heading inside immediately.
The glossy floors in the lobby look as though they’ve recently been buffed, and a short-haired receptionist greets me at the front desk, giving me an elevator key after I confirm my appointment. Walking across the lobby to where the silver, sliding doors are, I glance around, observing how disturbingly normal the place seems.
I’m not sure what I was expecting from a security firm, but cubicles and cushioned bench seats certainly wasn’t it.
Stepping out when the elevator dings on my floor, I immediately tense up at the emptiness of the top floor. Executive names are listed on a plaque right above the reception desk, and I can plainly see several doors lining the hallway, chairs to sit and wait in, and yet... there appears to be no sign of life, anywhere.
Clearing my throat, I ring the bell sitting on the desk, rocking back on my heels as I wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
Growing agitated with each passing second, knowing this is keeping me from relaxing at home, I lean forward, squinting at the plaque. Boyd’s office number is the second one down, and so I push past the glass partition separating the office doors from the upstairs lobby, and head right for his slot.
“I don’t appreciate having to wait—”
Cutting off abruptly when I open the door, I freeze in my tracks,
more than a little stunned by the petite blonde sitting behind the large oak desk, black Converse propped up on the wooden surface.
Surprised, mostly because the last time I saw her, she’d been in a coma, broken and bloody and struggling to find the subconscious will to wake up.
“Riley,” I breathe, my knees buckling at the girl in front of me.
The sister of Boyd Kelly, head of Ivers International’s security team.
Her honey-colored hair is cropped close around her head, her blue eyes as deep and disturbed as the uncharted parts of the ocean. A scar slashes across the corner of her mouth, the mangled skin on her cheek from a thigh graft healed but still a little more raised and pinker than the rest of her face.
She looks hollow, the dark circles around her eyes more like craters, the sweater she has on about three sizes too big. I shut the door slowly, and she grins when I come over to the desk.
“You sure know how to make a girl wait,” she says, gesturing for me to have a seat.
I do, but only because I’m confused.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, glancing around the office to see if anyone’s hiding in the corner. “Where’s your brother?”
“Boyd’s having an extended lunch with his girlfriend. I was the one who asked you to meet.”
My eyebrows shoot up. “What?”
“You wanted to know who your blackmailer was,” she says, leaning forward and sliding a familiar flash drive across the desk, tapping it as it reaches me.
I stare at the drive, then look up at her. “You?”
A smile widens on her face, but it looks strained. “Kind of crazy how much I’ve picked up in such a short time, but I guess that’s the perk of being around hackers and IT people all the time now. Amazing what you can find out about a person, just by doing a little digging. Even one as private as you, Doctor.”
I narrow my eyes. “Is that so?”
She nods, producing another flash drive—this one slightly different from the one she just handed me.
It’s the same one I gave Rafe the day I convinced him to give me Elena.
My flash drive.
I look up at her, taking the drive and slipping it into my breast pocket, aware that this makes her the only other person in the world to know my dirtiest secret.
Initially, there was no one blackmailing Ricci Inc. at all.
It was just me.
My mind whirls, trying to process what she’s saying. How an eighteen-year-old girl’s held me by the fucking balls these last few months, but more importantly, why?
She gulps when I ask that, sitting up in her seat. “I could ask my brother, but you specialize in secrecy, right? Well, I did something... bad, and I need to disappear.”
Epilogue
In most versions of the myth, Hades is the villain.
The captor, the thief, the vile being cast from Olympus and forced to live in solitude in the Underworld, among the souls of the dead.
It’s his cruelty they speak of, his past crimes they hold against him.
No one ever talks about how he saved Persephone.
Dragged her to Hell as his queen, curated an entire realm just to make her happy.
Plied her with love and affection, signed his soul over to her the second he laid his eyes on her form, overtaken by her beauty and purity.
They only see him as the bad guy, because they want to see him that way. Need someone to place their bad luck on, or to blame when shit goes down.
None of them sees the man I do.
Who right now, sits with his ass firmly planted in wet sand, waiting for the next wave to slap against the shore. His hands are so large, they wrap completely around our daughter’s waist, and he bounces her up and down each time the water laps at them, their laughter carrying down the beach to where I’m sitting, working on my query letter.
I didn’t end up going back to school; in the months following my return to Aplana, I watched the life I knew in Boston crumble to ashes, my sisters suddenly finding themselves displaced and having to come stay with us on the island for a while. Kal was busy throwing himself into investments, trying not to let the fact that he hadn’t heard from Violet since the spring bother him, even though I could tell it did.
Still does.
Then, even though I was dutiful about taking my birth control, I got pregnant, and while Kal was hesitant at first to show excitement because of his past, he was amazing about holding my hand through the entire pregnancy, relying on his own medical knowledge to reassure any questions or concerns I had.
I was hesitant, too, because of the way he’d once said he didn’t want to bring children into the world, but when I told him we’d be having a little girl, I learned it wasn’t that he didn’t want kids, it was that he didn’t think he deserved them.
He’d been punishing himself for what my parents did to him. My mother especially.
But when Quincy was born, any doubt I had about his ability to love her or abandon violence disappeared the second he looked into those big, brown eyes.
Not that he’s given it up completely. I sometimes find him in the old outbuilding late at night, “tying up loose ends” from the life he has never gone back to. When he left Ricci Inc., he left it for real.
Or, as much as one can leave the mafia.
Sometimes, when he nicks my skin while we fuck, or he reopens the initials carved on the inside of my thigh, lapping at me like he needs it to survive, I wonder if that’s his way of keeping that part of him in check. If he cures his bloodlust by tasting mine.
Not that I’m complaining.
Their laughter draws my attention from my letter again, and I sigh, slipping the page into my notebook and setting it off to the side, wrapping my arms around myself as I start down the beach toward them.
I finished my first book, a fictionalized account of how I fell in love, a few weeks before Quincy was born, and I’ve been trying to draft queries to agents ever since, but part of me kind of likes just having the book sitting in my office, a collection of my words and imagination where only I can see it.
Sometimes I sit on the back patio and read through, looking out at the flower garden, which finally bloomed after my return to Aplana. Like spring had just been waiting for me to get on board all along.
Eventually, I’ll write the letter. But right now, this life feels more important.
Kal whistles as I approach, his gaze hooding as he rakes over my form, lingering on my legs.
“Q,” he says to our daughter, nuzzling her dark curls, “you might have the most beautiful mom on the planet. I’m just letting you know now, your guy friends are going to want to hang out at our place all the time just so they can catch a glimpse of her.”
I scoff, splashing water at him with my foot. “Please, like they’d even be allowed in the house.”
He grins, his handsome face lighting up with the gesture. “I’m more evolved than that, little one. She can have friends, even guy friends. Who knows, maybe she’ll like girls and I’ll have to worry about them breaking her heart instead.”
Threading my fingers through his hair, I look down at the two of them, my heart aching inside my chest, knowing that regardless of who breaks hers in the future, I don’t have to worry about it being this man.
Bending down, I snuggle myself into their little cocoon, inhaling deeply, trying to commit the smell of happiness to my memory; potential and sweetness wrapped in a tender little package, sometimes full of anguish and stains that muddy the journey, but bring you out whole on the other side.
It’s springtime in the middle of winter, a sliver of light shining on your soul that somehow makes you feel less alone.
Because that’s what happiness is. The people you find along the way who make life a little more bearable.
And once you find them, you don’t let them go.
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Acknowledgments
Jesus, y’all. I was beginning to think I’d never be able to write these words. Five months of struggling against massive imposter syndrome and procrastination, and I finally finished. I want to say I’ve learned my lesson, but let’s be honest: this is just who I am. I like the rush.
Promises and Pomegranates: A Dark Contemporary Romance (Monsters & Muses Book 1) Page 29