Chapter 26

Chapter

Twenty-Six

H ades

"Oh my God, Hades!" Persephone's cry is one of complete distress. Shock fills her emerald eyes and her pretty lips leech of the rose petal pink that has taunted my every thought since the moment I met her.

I want to taste her mouth. I'm so close.

I place the blade now stained with the deep red of my blood onto the table, curling my hand into a fist as blood drips into the bowl filled with ash. She's too horrified by the fact I'm spilling my own blood to ask questions about the ash rock I'm pouring my blood into. There is a slight sizzle as my blood meets the ash. It's a reaction, a repelling of my blood mixing with the parts of Uranus' flesh that remain, fueling the Underworld and the prisons in which I contain him and the beasts he spawned.

Persephone misses the sizzle too. Her eyes haven't left my hand as her own far more shaky hands search the table for the rag I dropped. She finds it, and I squeeze my fist of the last of my blood.

I can already feel my flesh closing. The wound sealing. The only thing the rag will do is wipe my hand clean of the blood.

She grabs my hand between her trembling ones. Prying my fingers back from the fist I've curled them into, she presses the towel down on my palm. She's trying to stay the bleed by putting pressure on the wound. The only thing she's putting pressure on is the ugly raised scar that scores across my hand.

As a God, scars are a rare thing. I wouldn't have this one at all if it weren't for the fact I've reopened this wound thousands of times over the centuries.

"I can't believe you did that." Her voice rattles. Her entire body rattles.

I've shaken her.

I find it interesting that this woman who harbours the soul of an immensely powerful Goddess is shaken by a little blood.

"It's nothing. Just a little blood."

She scoffs. "There's almost enough blood here to fill the bowl. I can't believe you're still standing."

She's being dramatic. She's adorable when she's being dramatic.

I don't tell her it's an illusion. A result when my blood mixes with the ash rock spit from the boiling river Phlegethon. I also don't tell her the bowl she's referenced isn't a bowl at all, but the skull of one the Primordial Gods—the creators—and, in human terms, my grandfather.

"You do this every time you paint, don't you?" I want to push away the white blonde fall of her hair so that I can see her face. I want to look into gems of emerald and lose myself in them. I want to mine every crevice of her human heart and etch my name into her eternal soul.

"Yes." I want to possess her soul. I need it.

Heat surges inside me, rising to the surface of my flesh. In my mouth, my gums swell, desperate for a taste. I feel the burn of flames in my eyes and am grateful her focus is entirely on the towel she pushes into my palm.

Today, I am God and man. In ancient times, I was all God. In ancient times, I lacked the desire to walk the realm above my own and therefore I forfeit humanity. One of the very few times I ventured from the darkness of the Underworld; I had abducted Persephone. It was the lack of human emotions, human empathy, that resulted in the baser instincts of the powerful God who stole her innocence and manipulated the loss of her power to flee.

In all the centuries that passed, I've never understood how she came to love me. I put her through so much. I gave her reason, time and again, to mistrust me. But she loved me still. Even as she loved others—my eternal punishment—she loved me. Even as she loved the sun above, she loved my darkness.

"I don't understand why you would do this." I'm not sure if she's talking to me or to herself. "You don't even sell your art. Yet you spill your literal blood into your pieces." Definitely talking to herself. "Why?"

Oh, she does want a reply. Too bad it's not a truth I can share. Not yet.

"It is my process." It's as truthful as I can be. I don't relish the idea of outright lying to her.

"It's barbaric. Do you advertise this?" Her eyes flicker to mine. She adds a little more pressure to where she believes the wound is on my palm. "Is this why you're so popular?"

"I can't say why I am so popular. To answer your question, no. I don't advertise that I put my literal blood into my paintings." Doing something so foolish as advertising my blood in my art would pull suspicion from the Olympians.

Her eyes narrow, but her voice is exasperated. "You're being funny?"

"I wouldn't dare."

"You are." She looks utterly dumbfounded. "You sliced your hand so deep I'm confident we're going for stitches, and you think it's funny."

"I don't need stitches."

"Uh, I think you might, Hades, it was dee—" Her words cut off as she pulls the towel from my palm to stare in shock at the closed wound. She sputters, "H—how?"

"I told you it wasn't deep." Alright, well, that's a lie. It was deep. It's always deep.

Her eyes flicker from my palm to mine and back to the now closed wound. Her lips part, close, and part again. She whispers, "I don't understand."

I pull my palm from between her hands, even though the loss of her touch—any touch she gives me—is physically painful. The last weeks with her have been damn near torture. After centuries without her, all I want to do is lose myself inside her.

My instinct is to take her. To claim her.

I've been fighting the most basic instincts I have since the moment I saw her standing in that room, lost in my art. The war that has raged inside me is a war I fear I may soon lose.

Lifting the black-boned skull, I mix the blood and ash as Persephone grapples with the impossibility she's witnessed, desperate to shed reason on the impossible.

Finally, after a moment, she says what anyone would say. "I suppose I misjudged."

I'm thankful the wound isn't clean, still crusted with blood. If she saw a fully healed scar at this moment, I think her understanding of the world as she knows it would shatter.

Humans don't deal well with the fabric of their reality being unravelled. It tends to result in a fracturing of the brain in such a way they never fully recover .

Of course, Persephone currently possesses a human body, but she has the soul of a Goddess. I am confident that she would rise above her human fragilities—confident, but not certain. Therefore, I don't intend to test her. Not yet.

I do not wish to break her.

I say nothing as I lift my brush, and begin to swipe angrily at the enchanted canvas. I'll soon have to return to the Underworld so that I may retrieve more enchanted canvases from Hecate. Her refusal to travel to Earth grows more tiresome with every century that passes. I'm not sure, with her depleted strength, that she would make the pass through the portal anyway. The Underworld is a hungry beast who feeds on all with Godly powers.

As I work, I feel Persephone standing close, watching. Weakness I loathe spreads like poison in my veins. My power, my strength , is syphoned to feed my realm. Every day, I grow weaker. I am forced to paint the prisons in which I keep the Titans more and more frequently, the wards that bind them splintering faster than the time before.

It's only a matter of time now that I have her back. The Underworld will remember the Goddess who breathed life into her darkness as the God remembers the Goddess who bloomed life in the wake of his rage. She will feed us all.

I don't know when I did it, but I stripped of my shirt as I always do when I paint. The touch of her small, soft hand on my shoulder bleeds power I devour deep into the marrow of my black bones.

Inhaling through my nose, flames burst in my eyes. I blink them away before I twist on the stool I perch on. Concern paints darkness over the shining emerald of her eyes, and her rose petal lips are parted enough that I taste the sweet wine she sipped with dinner on her breath.

I fight the shudder that rolls through my body on the wake of an intense desire to claim her. Invade her.

Fuck her.

"You look—" She shakes her head and pulls her hand from my shoulder. Her brows knit. "Hades, are you well?"

At the loss of her touch, the spike of power I'd felt inside me dulls. Interesting .

"Will you do something for me, Persephone?"

She considers. I watch her pink tongue slip out to wet her lips. Something flares in her eyes a moment before she agrees, "Anything."

She doesn't know what she's saying. If she knew what I was, she wouldn't make such liberal promises.

"Come." Hooking her around the waist, I pull her between myself and the canvas dripping with shades of black, red, and gold. She looses a tiny gasp when I pull her plump behind between my legs to perch on the stool. The swell of her ass is fitted tight to my groin, and I can't help it, I harden.

"Hades."

Fuck me, when she says my name like that. I'm already on the edge.

"Paint with me. "

Words shudder from her to fall into space that crackles with power and tension. "I can't paint."

"You can." Emotion and desire have ground my words to rough shards as they push from the depths of me. I want her like I want breath. It's more than want. Deeper than need.

Focusing, I lift her hand in mine. I abandon the brush as I dip her finger into the paint I've mixed with the ash and blood.

She gasps. "It's warm."

The only heat I can feel is the heat of her little body against mine. I move her gold dipped finger over strokes of black and red. A crown of splintered thorns and melted gold becomes the unending prison that will, eventually, contain Hyperion. The wards of his current prison will soon fail. The glint of a broken gold crown is a mockery of the sun he embodies. The sun I've stripped him of both in Tartarus and within the prisons of my art.

I continue to guide her finger over the canvas, dripping paint into swirls of torment I've ensnared within the power I've lured from the depths of her. She doesn't know it, but this prison is the strongest I've created in years. It's the first of many, because she is feeding the God she left ravaged in the wake of her loss.

For her, from her , he feasts.

For centuries, hunger has gnawed the flesh from my eternal soul. Tonight is the first night since the Lethe stole her from me, that I feel a bud of indulgence. The flame of burning hunger is drenched in the cool wave of her everlasting power.

Demeter tried to take her from me. She tried to steal back the power she birthed. She twisted the Fates into a web of deceit that would remain tangled and ugly for lifetimes.

She almost succeeded. Almost won.

But now that I know the game, now that I have her back, I won't be letting her go. I won't let Demeter steal her from me again.

My free hand circles her waist at the thought. My fear of losing her opens the dam of possession that has my fingers curling into the fabric that covers her belly, pulling her back flush to my chest. The scent of flowers and sun erupts like a burst of flavour on my tongue. A low growl of need rumbles from the pits of me where a ravenous God lurks.

I want to make her hunger for me in the way that I starve for her. Drawing her finger across the canvas, I drift my hand up her belly to twist the mass of white-blonde hair she's tied back in a ponytail around my fist. Tugging gently, I pull her head to the side to expose the pale flesh of her throat. Her flesh is petal soft like the inside of a freshly bloomed flower. She smells like a garden of narcissuses.

I inhale deeply. The scent of her goes to my head in a way that wine and drugs can't. I am immune to everything but her.

I dip my head, my lips a breath from her flesh as I watch pebbles rise across her skin. Her eyes are open and on the painting we craft together. Ancient power pulses between us like magic, crackling in the air and tasting of spring.

I can't refrain a moment longer. She's stripped me of control, my need to taste her more potent than an addicts need to bow to his addiction. She is my substance.

A sharp gasp spills from between lovely lips as I drop my mouth to the soft flesh between neck and shoulder. She tastes better than I imagined. Better than I remembered. I part my lips and suck at her skin, aching to nip. Her head falls back against the crook of my shoulder and she shudders as I kiss her, tasting her skin.

Over her shoulder, I watch the soft swell of her chest rise as she sucks in a sharp breath. The tip of my tongue teases the flesh of her neck before lingering to play at the skin below her ear. She's trembling against me now, even as I continue to guide her finger across the canvas.

"Hades," she breathes my name, igniting my need for more.

Releasing her hair, my hand moves to her throat, her jaw. I guide her face to the side as I curl my body around hers until I'm able to capture her lips with mine. There is a flash of fear in her eyes, a moment of hesitation I know I should heed. I don't.

I invade her mouth like I ache to invade her body. Against my lips, hers are beautifully soft and exquisitely untouched. At first, she doesn't kiss me back. Stilled by shock or uncertainty or perhaps both, she is frozen in my arms. It does nothing to stop me as I push through the surprised part between her lips to stroke her hot tongue with mine.

She moans and I devour it. I feast on the taste and sounds of her like a starved animal. The God inside me hums his pleasure and flames roll under my flesh. I let my eyes shutter closed to hide the flames that burn there. She's not ready to see them.

Not yet.

But I burn with barely contained control.

When she shifts in my arms, her body moving slightly away from mine, a little of that control just snaps. My hand comes to her throat, fingers curling around the slender column to hold her in place. Her pulse flutters erratically under my fingertips.

She whispers my name. "Hades."

I plunge my tongue deeper into her mouth, the tenderness I do my best to cling to for her slipping.

She resists me, her hand falling from the canvas. I could force her, I know. I could have her now. Take her and claim her. Mark her…

I've done it before.

She forgave me once…

I release her. The claws of the God shredding the insides of this body that contains him.

I won't take her like that again.

Before I can do anything else, can shift to free her from my need, she spins in my arms to throw her own around my shoulders. Shock holds me prisoner as her hands dive into my hair, gold paint surely streaking the black. Her lips crash against mine and the fire her taste ignited blazes out of control.

Gripping her thigh, I lift her leg as I pull her into my lap. I devour the breath that falls from her lips as she wraps her legs around me, the warmth of her core connecting with the hard ridge of need I feel for her.

She gasps when she feels me, tension spreading through her body. Insecurity and hesitation leech into the hot spill of her desire, cooling the flame.

I'm not about to let her push away from me now. Not out of fear.

Pushing from the stool, I stand with her in my arms. Drying paint clings to the skin of my neck as she holds me tightly. I want to carry her from my office and take her to my bedroom. I want her body in my bed, the walls to collect the sighs I fail to absorb. I want her under me, around me.

I just want her.

I take her to my desk instead. I can't recall a time in my history where my legs trembled, the waves of want surging through my body rendering me weak. As soon as her ass connects with the surface of my desk, she drops her legs from around me. She tries to straighten, but I'm already shoving closer. My hands pin the desk on either side of her as I steal a kiss from her lips.

The flavor of hesitation and innocence linger under the taste of spring. When her hands lift to connect with either side of my face, a rumble of pleasure spills from the deep of me to echo in the vault of her. She's so deliciously warm, like the spill of the sun over the sand on a cloudless day. There is a ribbon of heat to the scent of spring that radiates from her. It comes with a nagging of familiarity I can't place, before it's washed away by the small exploration of the tip of her tongue against my lips.

I freeze for her, letting her kiss me even though I ache to take control of this moment.

I want to make her crumble for me. Shatter around me.

"Let me make you come." I'm not sure if it's a demand or plea. She doesn't seem to know either as her lovely green eyes widen. Her hands begin to fall from my face as blood rushes into her chest, her neck, her face. I catch her around the wrists, holding her hands in place. I pin her eyes with mine now that I've gotten the flames under moderate control.

"Hades, I?—"

"Please, Persephone." Well, fuck, I am begging. This is a first. "Let me show you how good it can be."

"I'm not—I haven't—" She sucks in air, giving her head a small shake. "Hades, I've never?—"

Fuck, but she's sweet. So damn sweet.

"I know." I lean in to nip the delicate skin under her jaw, soothing it with the tip of my tongue before I slide the bridge of my nose along her jawline to her ear. "Say yes, Persephone."

"God," she moans. I bury my grin in her skin. "Yes."

Yes. Her consent surges through me like wildfire. It's a thing I never took the care to possess before. I never thought it mattered. But now that I have it, I know there's nothing better. Nothing more precious.

She's offering herself to me and I— I am honored.

Slamming my eyes closed, I find her lips again as I release the cuff of my hands from around her wrists to grip her hips. I pull her to the edge of the desk, grinding into the warmth of her core. I've never hated the invention of clothing more than I do in this moment. I long to feel her skin. I ache to explore the slick wet of her sex.

She's going to drive me to the edge of madness.

My fingertips slip under her shirt and the sound of her breath hitching is music to my ears. I want to brand her untouched skin with my mark so that every man, every woman, human, God, nymph, and whatever else might crave her knows she belongs to me.

Sliding my lips from hers to her jaw, her head falls back and a moan topples from her lips. I nip a path down the length of her throat before soothing her skin with my tongue. She tastes like nectar and life and abundance. She is the embodiment of fertility, bestowing life into all that surrounds her.

Yet my seed never took root inside her when she was my wife. Demeter claimed it was because my seed was decayed, and even the Goddess of fertility couldn't grow life from damaged seed.

I wonder if, with her human body, I might succeed in filling her so full of my rotten seed that just one might take. Might spill roots into the earth of her. Might grow life .

Something more than desire swells inside me. It is a need I ache to see through with a violence I've never felt in all the years I've lived. Its focus is singular. Dangerous.

My fingers dip into the band of her shorts. Fire burns in my veins.

Tension floods her body as uncertainty sparks in her eyes, flaring caution. My fingertips graze a band of lace. A hiss escapes from between my teeth, calling pebbles of gooseflesh to the surface of every inch of her skin. My chest heaves as I stare down at her, filling with dangerous possession to claim every inch of her body, every crevice of her heart, every shard of her soul.

"Hades," she sighs my name.

Fuck it. I need this woman.

I pop the line of little gold buttons on her shorts faster than she's able to steal a breath, pushing them open to expose one pale hip and a band of blush pink lace that has my seed seeping from my tip. My hands shake with restraint. I don't want to frighten her by shredding the very clothes she wears in my haste to expose her delicate flesh to me. But I'm unpracticed in the art of denying myself that which I crave. And I crave her.

Gods, Titans, and all that came before and after, I crave this woman.

"I want you." Fire rages under my flesh, behind my eyes. Against her ear, I rumble, "I want to push inside you and never, never leave."

Her body shudders as I imagine it might when I bring her to orgasm. The idea that my words have affected her in such a way has something primal, something primitive, something ancient , roaring with life inside me.

"I want—" She pauses. I clench my teeth, grinding them in an effort to practice a patience I don't possess. "I'm not ready for that, Hades."

Fucking Tartarus. I want to tell her that I'll make her ready. I want to promise her that I'll flood her with a need unlike any other, so potent she won't be able to resist. I want to tug at the tiny core of darkness that dares to exist inside her—the thing buried deep in the abyss of life and golden light—that is capable of loving me. The God of Death.

I want to taunt that tiny core of darkness to the surface. I ache to push and pull at the fragile lines of right and wrong that dance inside her. To force her body beyond the consciousness of caution and hesitation, of innocence and uncertainty and fragility until she is nothing more than a being of sensation, driven by need.

I could do it. I could…

"You need to come," I say instead, nostrils flaring against the smooth skin of her throat. My eyes burn with a desperate need I won't sate. Not tonight.

She moans, but offers me no words.

I pull the lobe of her ear between my teeth. She shudders. I soothe my nip with the tip of my tongue, sucking her flesh between my lips and speaking through kisses against the hollow of her neck. "If I can't be inside you, tell me I can still make you come. Let me feel the way you shatter. Let me spill your cries and free your moans. Let me scatter the pieces of you." I kiss down the part of her shirt, over the swell of her breasts. She clings to me like I'm the only solid thing in the whole universe. "I promise I'll put all the pieces back together again." I beg, "I just need to watch you come apart for me."

"Oh my God." She can't know the way her words travel into the depths of me. The God inside me privy to her every prayer and plea.

Mine, I think. Ours, he growls.

I've lived too long separate from him, in a world far from my own. All the Gods and Goddesses have fallen to this easier life, concealed by the flesh of man. All the Gods except, perhaps, for Poseidon.

She makes me remember what it means to be me .

The urge to shift, to split from this second skin into the God of old is strong. I can't—won't.

She would never look at me the same.

This fragile human with the soul of a Goddess, the keeper of my heart and soul, would flee me. She is the keeper of sins, the oblivious warden who commands the master of death.

She is my Queen. My mate. Mine.

Ours.

I push the cups of her bra down to expose her breasts, reveling in the shocked gasp of need and the scent of primal hunger that spills between her legs. I want to taste the honey of her, but settle for pulling the rose pink of her nipple between my lips, twirling the peaked tip with my tongue.

Hunger, dangerous and deep, hooks me in the gut. I can feel the God so close to the surface now, I fear she will see him looking back at her through the flames in my eyes if I dare let my gaze slide to hers.

With a growl of frustration and need, I pull her from the desk and spin her around. Now that she's not facing me, the God is not at danger of discovery. It's only a matter of time, I know. But she's not ready yet.

With her feet on the floor, she wobbles. I catch her with one hand around her waist as the other presses firmly into her back between her shoulders. Sharp breaths rattle in her lungs, slipping over her tongue to sound in the splitting quiet of this room. I want to fill every crevice with the melody of her moans. I want to paint the walls with images of us.

I dip my hand into the part of her shorts, fingertips toying with lace. Roughly against her ear, I murmur, "Say yes."