Chapter 24 Kaira #2
I was crucifying him, but I didn't care. My anger didn't fucking care, because all these people were lying to me. They were fucking lying.
"Who am I to you, Hades?" I asked, barely containing the fury in my gut.
The power they spoke of, I could feel it now—fully.
It was a living, breathing thing, existing deep inside my soul, and now it was free.
It was out on the surface of my skin, crackling like fire, desperate to be released. "Who am I?!"
"Everything!" he roared, his own power flaring to the surface and that fucking thread I touched, lit up, illuminating between us. It traveled from his core, from his heart, all the way to me. It connected us in ways I didn't know was possible.
I wanted to fucking hate him for the nightmares and the dreams and the desperation clinging to both of us as we stood there in front of his home.
"You are everything to me," he said slowly, containing his own anger, or at least trying to.
"In this life and in the thousand other lives, you were always my everything.
My soul, my heart, my reason for existence and the reason I craved death more than life.
" He stood rooted to the spot, unmoving.
"From the first moment I saw you, I knew you were mine, just like I was yours.
But I didn't know why," he added quietly.
I wanted to hate him even more after those words erupted from him, but I couldn't. My soul recognized his even before my mind could catch up, but I wasn't the woman he loved. I wasn't the Persephone he knew.
We shared the soul, the tether to him, but I wasn't the soft-spoken Goddess they all mentioned.
I wasn't the Goddess of Spring, with a gentle smile and caring hands.
I was ruined, damaged, just a broken version of what she once was.
I was me, but I was also her, and my Gods, I didn't even know anymore.
I didn't know who I was anymore.
The presence on my left made me look toward the house, seeing the three dogs standing there. And then it dawned on me.
The pomegranate, the night of the accident—Grimm knew.
"He was always there, wasn't he?" I asked. Even when I didn't believe it, even when I couldn't see the truth my mother was so desperately hiding from me, I could feel him.
Grimm was almost always there. Always on October 31st. I thought I was imagining things. I thought I had watched one too many horror movies, but this guardian of the Underworld was always there, watching over me. That's how he saved me. That's how he came so quickly.
"He found you on your tenth birthday," Hades said, but my eyes stayed focused on the massive dog that was slowly walking toward us.
"He didn't tell me, and I didn't ask." He continued talking.
"I couldn't ask because the pain of losing you over and over again was too much to bear.
So I ignored it. I ignored his disappearances every time the veil thinned, unable to allow myself to hope that one day you'd be back in my arms."
My head swiveled back to the God that lied. The God that held the piece of my soul attached to his own, and I wished I was anywhere but here.
Everything I was, everything I at least thought I was, belonged to the woman that lived thousands of years ago. Every single decision, every single word—were they really mine or were they the projection of a Goddess that died?
"You're not her," Hades suddenly said when my throat refused to work.
"You don't look like her, Kaira. You don't speak like her.
You don't behave like the version I knew," he continued.
"But you are her. The moment you stepped on the island, I could feel you, just like the others could.
The moment you looked at me, I knew. I knew you were connected to me, but I didn't know how. I didn't want to believe it."
"So you let me spiral even after I asked you," I pushed out. "You stood there, letting me think I was crazy because I felt this pull." My feet carried me farther back, away from him.
Away from the pain his silence had caused.
"You weren't ready," he sighed, as if that would miraculously explain the secrecy. "Even now you're not ready for everything."
"You don't know that!" I cried out, trying to make sense of everything. "I was just a placeholder for her, wasn't I?" I asked, needing to hear it from him. "So what now, if I remember everything, the Persephone you knew would just come back and you would get your beloved darling?"
Am I just a vessel, carrying a soul that doesn't belong to me?
"No," he replied. "Fuck. This isn't how I wanted this to play out." That's one thing we could agree on. "I don't know what will happen, Kaira. But I know you're not separate people. You're not just someone who's carrying a body that would host Persephone's soul. You. Are. Her."
But how could I be her when the woman I saw in my visions was nothing like me?
"But you're also different. You're supposed to be different.
" But was I really? Just like her, or me in another life, I was ready to give this God pieces of myself without truly understanding what that meant.
I was ready to trust him without really knowing him.
I was also trusting all these other immortals without actually stopping to think about the possible consequences.
My mind reeled through every single interaction, every single reaction, not just since I came on the island.
I couldn't stop myself from thinking that every one of those were premeditated.
I couldn't help myself but compare my ideas, my reactions, my goals to those of a Goddess that lived more than five millennia before me.
"But I don't belong to myself," I mumbled, refusing to look at him anymore. I refused to look at the man who managed to destroy my heart in mere seconds.
Whatever it was the other version of me felt for him, was gone. The only thing that connected us was this fucking tether attached to our souls.
Bound together. Forced by fate. Yet never farther away.
And it wasn't fury that swallowed the hope in my chest. It was the sadness, the pain, the grief over everything I had lost. It was the last memory of my mother and the knowledge that she probably knew about this. She must have.
And she didn't warn me.
My feet created more distance between Hades and me just as Grimm approached us, but I couldn't stand there with them. I couldn't look at them and see that they were seeing her—Persephone—and not me. I couldn't stay where the ghosts of the past still lived.
So I ran.
I ran from the God who lied and the creatures that used to be friends. I fucking ran from my own destiny and into the forest surrounding Hades's home.
His voice boomed after me. The sound of his feet moving in the same rhythm as mine broke through the silence of the night. Until they didn't.
Until silence was the only thing wrapping around my bones.
The willowing trees connected at the tops, wrapping their branches around each other, hiding the path from the moonlight.
My lungs seized, and my muscles screamed as I pushed through the tears spilling down my cheeks.
I never cried this much, not before everything happened, but it was as if the dam opened, letting everything out.
My hand drifted up, rubbing the wetness from my face, but my lack of attention cost me more than I would ever know. My leg got stuck on something, making me fall knees-first to the ground, feeling pain ricocheting through the rest of my body.
"Well, well, well," a sinister voice came somewhere from behind. "What do we have here?"