Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
P ersephone
An unusual feeling of warmth pulls me from sleep. I see Hades sitting against the headboard, staring down at me. Sun beats down on the ceiling of the wood pergola. It spills in through the wisps of gauzy white fabric that Hades has pulled from the pillar. The warmth is a warmth I haven’t basked in since I entered the Underworld weeks ago. I missed it. Deeply.
A grin pulls at Hades’ lips as he watches me stretch, before rolling onto my side. The deep red of my hair is now a strawberry blonde that shines against the bright white of his pillow. For a moment, I just stare down at it. I have a feeling it’s going to take some getting used to.
“How do you feel?”
“Good.” I roll onto my back, stretching again as I do. There’s an ache deep in my core, but it’s the good kind of ache.
I don’t tell him that.
Hades pushes off the headboard to lower to me. With a hand dipping under the curtain of my hair, he palms my neck. His eyes peer into mine as though he’s hunting for a lie.
When I hold his eyes with my own, he looses a little huff. A reluctant grin tugs at his lips that I really want to kiss. That want only burns into need. His dark eyes shift to my mouth when I part my lips.
When the wick of that want ignites in flame deep in my core, I can’t miss the way his head shifts just slightly and his nostrils flare. He’s scenting me. Scenting my arousal.
“You’re insatiable.” Hades straightens to sit, and at the same time I push up from the mattress so that I am facing him.
“Only for you.”
The wounded flash in his eyes has been there so many times before. So many times, I’ve seen it and wondered, with no explanation, why it was there. Now, I know.
I’ve put together the final pieces of this missing puzzle, and I grieve for all that we lost in my past life, and even in this life, to the innocence of a girl who trusted a woman who never deserved her trust.
“I was manipulated, Hades.”
His eyes pin mine. “What?”
“What Uranus said—about Demeter and her lessons—I didn’t—” I can hardly look into his eyes through the shame that eats me. “I didn’t know.”
“How could you have known?”
I dip my chin, worrying my lip. “Are you upset with me?”
His finger slides under my chin to tip my eyes to his. “How could I be upset with you?”
A glassy sheen shines in my eyes. I feel it and I know he sees it.
I shrug, shaking my head. “I know you’re upset.”
“I am upset that I never put the pieces together. That I allowed?—”
“Why did you allow it, Hades? So many lovers. Even you took lovers?—”
“Only those you brought to our bed. Only for you.”
“I don’t understand why you would allow it—if it hurt your soul so much. I mean, clearly it hurt you. It destroyed me. I know it did. I know there was pain with every lover I took. A piece of my own soul splintering each time.”
“Persephone—”
“No.” I shift on my knees, agitated. “No, don’t do that.”
Darkness smothers the flames in his eyes. “I thought I made you that way.”
“How could you…” My words drift off. Horror is a lash that strikes my heart. I need to hear him say it, though. “How could you think you made me that way, Hades?”
“The way I took you, claimed you—the way I invaded you.” He shakes his head sadly. “It was dark and violent and such things can spark dark needs. I thought your need to claim lovers was part of that dark need. In my mind, I was to blame for your cravings, and they were my burden to bear. I could never—would never allow you to see the pain I carried—would never allow you to carry the weight of my pain. The guilt for my act.”
“Hades…”
“The penance for my barbaric actions was an eternity of sharing you. Of supporting you and loving you through the pain. Of keeping that pain concealed away from you so that it would never, never touch you. Never feast on you.”
“I thought you didn’t love me enough to claim me for yourself,” I whisper. “I thought if I made you jealous enough, pleased you enough—you would one day react. I don’t recall Demeter’s teachings with Zeus. With the lovers she took. But I do know that she gave me instruction on taking lovers. On playing the strings of your jealousy.” I look away from his dark eyes as I admit, “She was so disappointed with me that last day in the Garden of Silence that I had not yet brought you to your knees with jealousy.”
“She knew you never would. That I would suffer any pain for you.”
I nod, agreeing, “She knew. But I just don’t know how she knew.”
“Monogamy is not something the Gods practice. Although jealousy has always been our way.”
“If monogamy isn’t something the Gods practice, how could Demeter have known it would hurt you so much to share me?”
“Monogamy is reserved for the souls who find their true mates.” Hades shifts, appearing almost uncomfortable. “A true soul mate is split in the very beginning, when they are first created. When a true soul mate finds each other, it is the coming together of two souls that were always intended to be one. They do not long for any other. In fact, we have observed great pain between soul mates when one strays, pain that is so debilitating, it can reap death not only for one, but both. It is not like the way of the souls today, who are so plentiful it’s nearly impossible to find one’s true other half. It is why so many today stray with very little long-lasting consequences. They may love their partner, but their partner is simply a mate, like the mates Gods take. The rare few who truly find their soul mates—they don’t stray.”
“But I am your soul mate.” My fingertips touch between my breasts, and Hades’ eyes follow the movement. There is something there in his eyes. As though they are a mirror of the pain I feel deep in my chest.
“Gods do not have soul mates, Persephone. They’ve never had them before. If they had, a great number of problems we’ve suffered, problems we’ve extended to humanity, would have been eased.” He pulls in a sharp breath but speaks with a calmness that is entirely deceptive of the rage that flickers in the deep of his eyes.
“Demeter knew I would not realize that you were my true soul mate. Knew I would never understand that the agony I suffered would extend to you. Knew that I would not understand the pain of your straying. And she knew this because she knew I knew that there had never been Gods who truly shared souls. Not before us.”
“But I am your soul mate?” I say desperately, needing to hear him say it. Admit the thing that he does not believe is truth, can in fact, be real.
His eyes settle on mine, peering deep into the green. So deep, I think I feel the stroke of his gaze on my very soul. “Yes, little goddess. You are my soul mate.”
The relief I feel is so heavy, and yet so relieving. I struggle to just catch my breath, taking a moment to focus on breathing. “And the Fates did this to us?”
“They did.” A muscle ticks in his jaw.
I frown, taking into consideration for the first time that he may not want this. That it might not mean the same thing to him as it means to me. “Are you unhappy?”
“No. You are mine. Entirely mine, little goddess. And you will be for eternity. How could that ever make me unhappy?”
“You seem tense.” The words are a whisper that leak my insecurity.
Hades responds. He catches me around the back of my neck. This time it’s him who rises onto his knees. Like this, he towers over me. The broad width of his shoulders curve in as though to conceal me in the breadth of him .
The simple act has a flutter of needy quickening spilling into my belly. I know he catches the scent of that need when his face darkens, nostrils flaring.
His voice is pitched low, revealing centuries of his own insecurities in the words he speaks. “I always thought this need that lived within you, this demand to be filled, was a demand born of darkness. The darkness I planted inside you when I took you for my own, against your tears and pleading.” A sigh of pain and regret washes over my face, even as I inch closer to him, aching to ease the blade of that guilt he’s carried for far too long in the deep of his heart. “I don’t understand how, if it’s not a response to that darkness, your body still hungers so ravenously now as it did then to be filled.”
I shake my head slightly. I understand this need no more than he understands it.
“I don’t understand this hunger—this need,” I tell him. “And I can’t remember all of the life I lived before. But I do know that I never wanted anyone but you. In all the times I ached for—” I pause, searching for a gentler word than the crude reality I can’t seem to speak aloud, and settle on, “Connection—I only ever wanted to connect with you, Hades. That much, I know with certainty.”
Sex is too baseless a word, too simple for the need that grows inside me. Sure, sex is, technically the word. But it’s so much more. I feel, deep down even though I can’t make sense of it, that it’s more than simply fucking. I think my soul knows that in submitting to this baser need, it’s the closest it will ever come to touching his soul.
After a long moment where he doesn’t move at all, Hades rests his forehead against mine. He draws in the breath that I breathe before lowering his mouth to mine to steal some more. When I feel dizzy with lack of air, he pulls back to gaze into my eyes.
His voice is deep and rough when he says, “I lived an eternity before you, but my life didn’t begin until the moment I had you in my arms. I loved you even when I believed you couldn’t love me. You have been my queen, my other half, far longer than I knew the Moirai crafted mates of our souls. You will be my mate, my other half, until the end of time.” His lips touch mine again, whisper soft. “You are my everything, Persephone.”
Holding his face between trembling hands, I tell him, “I love you too, Hades.”
He laughs, but there’s a ring of something darker to it. Something I’m not certain I understand. It’s sad and longing and yet so happy all at once.
“Hades?”
He chuckles. “So perceptive for a human.”
“I’m not just a human.”
“Your body is human. Your mind is human.”
His eyes chase my tongue as I wet my lips. “My soul is goddess.”
“Yes.” Darkness pours from him, threatening to defeat even the light of the sun that sits high in the sky. A shiver rises on my flesh. He kisses me again. “But you are still vulnerable. Your mind is still fragile.” He drags his lips along the line of my jaw, drawing yet another shiver of need from the depths of me. “Tell me, Persephone, do you remember how you came to be in the Underworld?”
Sharp teeth graze the lobe of my ear and I shudder as I breathe, “No.”
“Try,” Hades encourages in that decadently dark rumble.
“I—” The memory is there but wrapped in a shrouded shadow of dark mist and smoke. Fragments slip through the stitches to taunt recognition with images that make little sense.
I remember feeling itchy in my skin, staring up at the ceiling as Willa snored. I couldn’t sleep. There’s darkness and stars and Addison at my side.
The memory of Addison like that, moving close—it sparks something else inside me. Something far, far darker than I am ready to feel.
I am jolted by grief .
“Hades,” I cry out as yet another memory, hazy as though I’m watching through a sheet of ebony gauze, plays out like a video on a screen.
Addison—crawling toward me over ancient stone as blood dripped from his eyes, his nose, and mouth. Ribbons of liquid red veined over his neck, dripping from his ears. He was screaming, but I couldn’t hear him over the shriek—the same shriek I’d heard in the memory of a past life. The shriek of Demeter, and the terrible beastly thing she morphs into in her rage.
My fingertips curl into the flesh of Hades’ chest, nails biting into skin as I gasp.
“What happened?”
“Do you remember?”
“No.” I shake my head, still gasping. I feel as though I’ve ran a marathon.
“You and Addison visited the dig site together in the middle of the night.” His words jog the memory, as though they are the key to unlock it all. “Demeter found you there with him.”
“She—” I can see it now. The curtain of black gauze has been pulled to the side. The memory rushes toward me—through me like a tidal wave. “Oh, my God. Is he—is he okay?”
“No, little goddess,” Hades says softly. There is concern and worry in his eyes. “He died that night.”
My hands tremble now against his chest. My entire body trembles. “Is he—is he in the Underworld?” Hades nods slowly. My eyes close against the sting of tears, because Addison was so bright and so beautiful.
He was always so sunny, so loving and happy, like a puppy.
And now he’s just gone .
“Addison was Adonis reincarnated,” Hades tells me gently. “He will have another chance at life, if he chooses it.”
I’m really not surprised. All the visions I’d had of Addison in a time well before the one we lived—it makes sense now. It makes so much tragic sense, but that sense doesn’t make it better. Knowing that he will live again, if he chooses to, doesn’t make it better that those who loved him in this life, his parents—they will mourn him for the rest of their time in this life.
“I feel like I’m going to puke.” Pushing away from Hades, I pull the sheet higher to cover my nakedness. “I need—I need to call my parents.”
“That’s not possible, Persephone.”
My head snaps in his direction. “Why not?”
“Persephone,” he begins, but I interrupt him with frantic words.
“You said I wasn’t dead.”
“You’re not.”
“Then why can’t I call my parents?” Even I can hear the fear in my voice. The frantic terror of a reality I’m not ready to accept.
“The temple you and Addison were in collapsed. They were able to excavate enough to find his body, but the rubble has since been deemed unstable. Minthe testified that she saw you and Addison leave the house together. Security cameras near the dig site confirm you were there, and you have been declared dead.” Dread sweeps through my body, threatening to consume me. “The archaeology program has been suspended. All students have returned home. There has already been a funeral for you in Alberta. Your parents have accepted your death, even as they continue to grieve.”
The sob that caught in my throat in the beginning of his speech breaks loose. Grief and pain spill into the space between us as my mind shuts down. Proving itself to be the fragile thing that Hades claims it has always been. So human.
“But I’m not dead.” The protest is weak.
Hades gathers me into his arms, even as I try to push away. He doesn’t let me, and I am not strong enough to break free. “Shhh, Persephone.”
“I’m not dead.” I don’t realize I’m crying until now.
But I am crying. I’m crying hard. I’m mourning the life I lost as I may have mourned it if I really were dead. Because even though my heart continues to beat, I have lost my life. I’ve lost everything I’ve ever known—everyone I’ve ever loved.
It’s all just gone.
“You are not dead, but you can’t continue in this life.” His words confirm what I already know but hearing them aloud only serves to shove the blade of this painful reality that much deeper. “You must let those you loved go. You must let them live their life. You must let them heal from the grief of losing you.”
I don’t know how long I cry in his arms, mourning a life I never really got the chance to live. It’s a while, though. Perhaps I slip in and out of sleep. Perhaps I simply lose consciousness.
Before I know it, it’s night, and the stars are bright in a dark sky.
I feel beaten and bruised by a grief I never expected to feel, but I also feel acceptance.
I may not be dead, but I’m not of this world anymore.
Tipping my head back, I look up into dark eyes that are filled with worry. My throat feels raw, and my heart is still achy with pain, but I’ve made my peace with my reality.
“Take me home, Hades.”
“Home?”
Wrapping my arms around his torso, I cling tightly to him as I listen to the rapid melody of his pulse. “Home is wherever you are, Hades. Home is the Underworld.”