Persephone #2
“You were already afraid of the Morningstar.” His voice fractured beneath what could only be guilt.
“And I was afraid of taking away the one sanctuary you had.” Hecate snorted.
Hades shot her an exhausted look. “When you finish, call on the Olympians for a council meeting. Tell them everything. Insist on the urgency.” Hecate bowed stiffly before turning her eyes to me with more empathy than I’d ever seen her display.
She disappeared as quickly as she came, in a storm of shadows and crackling winds that made my hair flutter about my face. And then she was gone.
“This is the new God’s doing?” I asked, my heart galloping in my chest. He nodded, making all sound disappear into the hum of white noise.
Panic joined with my mounting dread as they crept up my spine like a rising frost. “He’s after me.
” My words were stiff, brittle. “He’s tearing the realm apart to get to me. ”
Hades froze, pained. He reached out his hand. “Persephone—”
I shirked his touch, my chest rising and falling too fast. Realization was sharp like jagged glass, cutting me from the inside out. Nausea curled low in my gut, an entirely unwelcome tide threatening to rise, slow insistent.
Deserved.
Now I understood why Hades had been working so long of late. He wasn’t just dedicated to the job. He was dedicated to getting as many souls out of House Hades as possible. He was saving as many souls as he could. Though if the realm opened, was there even a point?
They’d all be at risk to the Morningstar’s whims—whatever those were.
“Don’t,” I snarled. “Don’t soften it. He’s breaking wards older than us all. For me. How is that not my fault? My bearing?” I turned the brunt of my anger on him, “And you didn’t even tell me. If I hadn’t witnessed any of this, would I still be in the dark about this?”
At first, Hades did nothing but look grim. A beat passed, giving me my answer.
“I didn’t tell you because I thought we could fix it without you having to be afraid.
Gods above, you shouldn’t have to feel afraid.
You did nothing wrong.” Hades stepped closer, slowly, like I was a cornered animal that might as soon bite him as spook.
“His ambition is not of your making. The conflicts between he and I are old, older even than you. You are an opportunity, a spark, a prize for him.” He hesitated once. “An excuse he’s long desired.”
The words landed like a stone sinking into water.
“So, because of someone’s ambition, you pay the price? And all of the souls here?” My voice wavered, “The Underworld itself?”
“It isn’t your burden to carry,” Hades insisted, his hands finding my face and forcing me to look at him, to see him.
“It is,” I insisted, grappling with my fragile resolve. “I won’t be a threat to those that rest here. Take me to the mortal realm and let him claim me so this madness may end.”
“Out of the question,” he seethed, his shadows flaring around him until we were alone in our own realm of night at its highest. “For two reasons: one, even if he had you in hand, his assault would not stop. He wants the Underworld for his own, has long coveted it from his echo realm.” His thumbs wiped the string of tears falling from my eyes.
“And the second is because I would suffer a thousand lifetimes before I let you take blame that doesn’t belong to you. ”
“You are suffering,” I whispered as his forehead rested helplessly against mine. “This realm is a realm I’ve come to love. I’m so sorry.”
Silence stretched between us, heavy, and expansive.
“Don’t you dare say that again.” His voice was low and every bit as brutal as his hands as he dragged me to him. “I’d suffer far more if he had you in his grasp,” Hades whispered. “The Morningstar tears at my gates because of power, greed, and obsession. These are his flaws, not yours.”
“But—”
He cut me off with a searing kiss that chased some of the frost from my veins.
“No.” His grip on me tightened and our breaths tangled.
“He reaches for you because you are all the light he cannot have. Because you are everything he isn’t.
You think he hunts you because you’re weak.
You couldn’t be further from the truth. He hunts you because you are remarkable.
Powerful. Beautiful. A beacon in the darkness.
” He simmered, his voice dropping to a growl. “But you’re mine.”
I swallowed hard in the wake of his admission. The world shrank, pausing, silence pressing in as intimate as breath against a throat.
“You think the Underworld trembles because of your proximity. Trembles in fear. You misunderstand, little shadow. The Underworld calls for vengeance, for the blood of the one who calls himself the new god. It trembles with rage on your behalf and on mine—because even the realm knows I love you and will not yield to him. I can’t bring myself to let you go.
I won’t do it. I’ve never, in all my existence, felt so alive as the day you began wandering my halls.
Even if I wanted to let you go, I couldn’t.
I will follow you anywhere, haunt your every step, your very existence,” he loosed a long breath, raking his hands through his hair before returning the full force of his gaze upon me. “But I will not let you go.”
The truth behind his words tore from him like an animal that had been caged for eons, starving and feral.
Every word punctuated like it were its own weighted sentence.
Hades didn’t stop, even as my breathing halted in my chest. “I love you, little shadow. I love you the way shadow loves flame—irrationally. Possessively. Unfailingly. From the moment I saw you that day in Olympus, I had no doubt you’d be my ruin.
If the Morningstar insists on ripping realms apart to find you, he will only find me and my bident in front of you. And he will find his true death.”
“It feels wrong to be elated by your words when your world is fracturing.” I trembled as my hands found his shirt.
Tears came with uneven breaths; small, disquieted sounds caught between broken and healing, equal parts ache and sweetness.
Like my heart couldn’t decide which way to shatter. “Selfish.”
“No,” he murmured, his lips ghosting over mine. “It’s neither selfish nor selfless. It simply is.”
Something shifted between us once more, irrevocably. Painfully. He had wormed his way beneath my skin, burrowed into every facet of who I am. And I knew in that moment, that even when I was the dust between stars, every part of me would belong to him still. In every era. Every lifetime.
I was his.
For the first time since we heard the wards cleave open, I drew breath without drowning.
“I should lie to you and tell you I don’t want you.
That would be the selfless thing to do. After all I’ve wrought here, I don’t deserve you.
The realm doesn’t deserve the devastation awaiting it.
” My eyes lifted to his, see the raw vulnerability there, making my breath shatter in the quiet “I can’t lie to you and I say I don’t love you.
The world is falling apart around us, and I can’t die without you knowing. ”
A reverent pause. One where hope broke through the miasma of tension and grief and despair. Like the space between a prayer offered and a prayer heard—too sacred to even breath.
“Say it again,” Hades whispered, broken and grave, with the sweetness of hope, of tenderness dwelling beneath it. The way the living begged the ghosts of their dearly departed to stay.
I leaned closer, my lips twisting into a weak smile, surrendering to him entirely. I’d fall in line like the mortals above and worship at his altar if that’s what it took. I’d take him up as my new religion if I thought it might help anything aside from his ego. “I love you.”
His breath hitched—hungry, almost pained before his lips dragged against mine at last, all restraint forgotten.
It landed raw, a cosmic collision of the bitter ache and the threat of never looming over us both.
A desperation that had my knees softening, the taste of him warm, familiar, needed.
He pulled me against him like he was trying to meld us into one flesh, until we didn’t know where one ended and the other began.
His hands roamed me, cloying, clinging, possessing, claiming.
On some level, I hated that my chest eased. I didn’t deserve the peace, the calm he gave me. But all my thoughts were stolen by the god of the dead, who already held my heart.