Chapter 29 Goddess
Goddess
Ileft her there. Floating facedown. Her dress like dead skin, her hair like dead plants.
This time, the catacombs didn’t fuck with me. Perhaps they knew they had better not.
I navigated directly to the bathhouse. I found Hades’s prison room. I slammed the door open so hard I knocked over the brazier.
Hades surged to his feet like he was made of water.
He’d dried himself in my absence and donned his trousers, though not his shirt.
Ointment glistened on his bare chest and chiseled biceps like oil.
Elke had still not managed to bully him into using any bandages, though, the fucking idiot. He had tucked his hair behind his ears.
“Persephone? What —”
I strode forward and hit him in the chest. He barely startled, the motherfucker. “It didn’t work,” I hissed. “I ate your fucking fruit so the Monarch would bring my mother back from the dead, and it didn’t even fucking work.”
Hades’s face was rigid. “You what?”
I bared my teeth so he could see the pomegranate stains.
He reached out a trembling finger. He touched the enamel in my open mouth. He said, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Don’t you dare be angry. I get to be angry.”
“Every day,” he whispered, “I resisted feeding you. Every second of my life since I met you has been a battle not to pin you down and feed you those pomegranate seeds just to make sure you’d stay by my side.
Every moment that I knew you might escape from me was hell.
And now you have the audacity to walk into my prison cell and tell me that you did it to yourself? ”
My blood pounded. But my grief was like a wall. I would not have believed that I could hurt this much. It was worse than when I had found out my mother had died. “This isn’t about you!” I screamed. “This is about me!” My knees buckled; Hades caught me. “Get off me. Get off me!”
“Goddess.” Hades’s voice was hard, but gentle. “Persephone. Mütte. It’s okay. My mother’s dead, too. I understand. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay.” I was sobbing. I felt like someone was clawing my lungs out.
Hades drew me tighter into his wounded chest. “Okay, you’re right. It’s not okay. But I’m still here for you, okay? I’m not going to let you go.”
I sobbed so hard I couldn’t make words anymore. I clung to him, heedless of the way my fingers were digging into his bruises. I cried like that for what felt like an hour.
Unbelievably, though, I eventually found my sobs slowing down. I found my breath coming back. I had reached the point where I just couldn’t cry anymore.
Hades didn’t let me go, though, even though I had to be hurting him. And I didn’t let him go, either.
I felt embarrassed, all of a sudden. Embarrassed and stupid and childish and small. I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry I yelled at you,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m sorry I said I wanted to lock you up and force-feed you pomegranate seeds.”
I actually chuckled. The noise felt foreign in my mouth. Then I quieted. “You never did, though.”
“Of course I didn’t.”
“They did it to all the other girls.”
“I didn’t,” Hades protested. “I wasn’t even born yet. I never did it to anybody.”
I almost wished he had force-fed me. Then I wouldn’t have believed I could sacrifice myself to save my mother. The sacrifice already would have been made. “Why — why didn’t it work?”
“Why didn’t it work?”
“Me eating the seeds. Why didn’t the Monarch accept my eternal imprisonment in exchange for my mother’s resurrection?”
For a long moment, Hades was silent. Then almost too quiet to hear, he asked: “Are you sure it was a sacrifice?”
“What kind of a question is that?”
“I’m just saying. I’ve never been able to get you to do anything you didn’t want to do. You bullied me into submission even when you thought I was going to eat your bone marrow. Are you sure there’s not some part of you that…” He swallowed.
I had swallowed like that every morning of my mother’s waning life. It was what a person did when they did not dare to hope.
He finished, “…wants to stay?”
I sighed. “Of course I want to stay. Why on earth would I want to go back to Limer? There, I’m a cleaning lady in a one-room hut and I can’t afford beans.
Here, I have gorgeous lace ballgowns and fresh meat and an army of spider-people who build entire infrastructures at my command.
There, there’s been a drought on for eleven months.
Here, I get to take a bath in a clawfoot tub.
There, my best friend leaves me to run off to war-school, and he can’t even be bothered to write except to tell me how amazing his life is without me.
Here, I have a hot prince calling me goddess —”
Hades kissed me.
My heart soared.
It was like the kiss in front of the waterfall — totally impulsive, like he didn’t even have time to think about it, like every cell in his body was sucked onto mine.
He captured my mouth in his, swallowing the word goddess, swallowing my breath.
His hands wrapped in my hair, his body pressing mine into the wall like he wanted to absorb it.
Heat flared in my stomach — desire? Shock?
My mouth was open against his tongue and teeth, the whole heat of him filling me, before I even had time to think what the fuck —
And then he broke away.
He ran his hands through his hair. “I’m sorry,” he panted. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “I shouldn’t have done that. I couldn’t help myself. You’re just so —”
“Shut up.” Fuck this. I had wanted him, if I was being honest with myself, since he’d given me that earthenware bowl of water.
Since before that, probably — since I’d seen him looking at that illustration in the library, with light and curiosity on his handsome face.
Since he’d bundled his fists in my skirt on the grass.
I had nothing to lose anymore.
I clawed after him. I grabbed his belt and jerked him forward into my hips.
His mouth on mine was better than the pomegranate. The way he panted directly into my lungs was better than breathing. He worked his hands up under my negligée, his fingers digging into the meat of my thighs. He groaned deep in his throat, into my mouth. He broke away again, just an inch —
“Get back here,” I panted.
“If I don’t stop now,” he whispered, his gaze fixed on my lips, “I won’t be able to stop at all.”
I wrapped myself around him, pressing my mouth into his again while he gasped, almost clambering up his enormous muscled body.
He hoisted me up and locked my thighs around his waist, stumbling backward.
I barely knew what I was doing. I only sensed, vaguely, that seeing Calix and the Vizeking — oh, gods, I had to tell Hades, but not now, not while he was licking my teeth, nngh — had cracked something terrible open in me.
Failing to resurrect my mother had cracked it open wider still.
And now Hades’s kiss had split me open all the way.
I was like the pomegranate, and my seeds were tumbling into Hades’s hands.
Hades knocked into the rim of the metal tub. He fell backward. We both splashed into the hot water, still dressed. But we couldn’t stop kissing. I still had my boots on.
Hades’s hands slid further up my thighs.
I wanted him to keep moving up, up, up. I wanted it more desperately, more acutely, than I’d ever wanted anything.
His soaked body on mine was perfect. I broke from his lips and breathed, shuddering, half a millimeter from his perfect face.
His eyes were half-closed. His lips were parted.
He kneaded his fingers into the muscle of my ass and tipped his head back.
He breathed, “Say it again, goddess. Say you want to stay.”
“I want to stay,” I repeated, hopelessly.
I would have said anything to make him keep touching me.
I kissed him again while he worked my ass, my thighs.
The core between my legs was throbbing. I ground against his hard torso, humiliatingly, truly unable to help myself, but Hades only groaned and licked the inside of my mouth.
I gripped his biceps and shoulders like I was hanging on for dear life. Gods, he was so fucking strong.
We had landed against the back wall of the tub, my thighs hooked around his hips, his shoulderblades braced against the tub’s rim.
My stupid tiny white dress floated in the thick, opaque water.
With his eyes still closed, Hades moved his hands up to the silky soaked fabric that clung to my stomach and my breasts.
The heat of his hands through the wet fabric made my clitoris pulse.
“Hades,” I whispered, and then, “Your Lordship.”
Hades moaned almost inaudibly. I shuddered.
My hands fell to his sides, where I gripped him as he stroked, so gently, so sweetly, the tops of my breasts through the fabric.
I sighed and closed my eyes. Almost disbelievingly, he brushed his fingertips down the curves of my breasts.
Tracing the round, heavy undersides, hefting the weight of them.
He cupped my breasts the way he’d cupped the pomegranate when he’d lifted it to my lips.
He circled his thumb over my right nipple.
I gasped. It was almost a sob. “Your Lordship —”
A noise like a growl issued from Hades’s throat.
He touched my nipple again. He squeezed my breasts, gently, lifting them, kneading them.
I kept still, so still I was vibrating, desperate for him to keep touching me.
I knew without opening my eyes that he was staring at me, staring at my breasts through the fabric, the shadows and swells of my flesh, my dark nipples hardening at his touch.
I was afraid to open my eyes, to see the expression on his face as he drank me in.
When I finally dared to, he was gazing at my breasts, my neck, my stomach, my mouth, my face, devouring me with his gaze like he could never get enough.
The look on his face was dark and vulnerable and hungry. It was the look of a starving animal.