Chapter 18
Chapter
Eighteen
H ades
She looks so small as she peers through thick golden lashes up at me. Her lips tremble even as she bites down on her plump bottom lip. With her fingertips dipping into the band of my shorts, she is the definition of temptation and innocence.
I want to be her ruin. I want to be the destruction that has her transforming from girl to Goddess. I hunger for it. For the wreckage of her innocence that will pave the way for her final transformation.
I wanted her heart and soul before I allowed for this moment, but as I gaze down at her now, all I feel is burning hunger. Vicious need.
My muscles are strained as I drop my hold around the back of her neck, fisting my hands at my sides. She waits, imploring me with warm emerald eyes I am helpless to deny.
“Hades…” My name on her lips shakes. “Please.”
“Take me out of my shorts,” I rasp.
She doesn’t hesitate, and I nearly groan aloud as she pulls the material down to expose my aching length. Every inch pulses for her, throbbing with need.
I watch, fascinated, as two pink spots spill into her cheeks as her eyes fix on my growing length that is level with her face, her lips. A shuddering inhale precedes a soft, shaken, “Oh, wow.”
Let me pleasure you. Her siren’s plea echoes in my mind, and I hear myself instructing her firmly, huskily, “Touch me.”
She swallows. A flash of uncertainty is there and gone in her eyes, swept away by a stubbornness that nearly has me grinning as she touches the tips of her fingers along my shaft. It jumps at the contact, and she gasps.
So innocent.
I stand before her, aching under the featherlight touch of her fingertips as she trails them over my swollen shaft, up and down, exploring. When her middle finger runs along the tip of my shaft to the mushroom of my head and over the slit in my tip, I growl low in my chest. Her eyes bounce to mine, uncertainty and concern flashing there.
I instruct, “Wrap your hands around my cock.” She does as I bid with an innocent eagerness that has need rushing inside my veins. Surging like the seas toward land when Poseidon rages. Like magma in the marrow of my bones. Bent on destruction. On claiming.
Her breaths are coming in quick little pants now. Slender fingers pulse around me as she wets her lips. The flush in her cheeks is in her chest now, too. Under the white fabric of her bikini, I can see the tight pebbles of her nipples as they stretch toward me.
I want to taste them. To nip and suck and lick and sooth.
“It’s so soft,” she marvels. “And so hard .”
She is so exquisitely innocent. So mine.
“Stroke me.” She does, but her motions are endearingly awkward. Covering her fist with my own, I guide her pumps, murmuring, “Don’t neglect the tip.” She strokes the sensitive tip with the pad of her thumb. I groan. “That’s it.”
My eyes shift between her slender hands around my thick dick, and her face, where her eyes are fixed on watching as she works me. She’s so beautiful.
I clench my back teeth as the ancient God beneath my flesh simmers under the surface to be let free. To steal her innocence as we did once long ago. I cling to restraint as he rages inside me, demanding access to that which has always been his. Been ours .
She tightens her fist around me, stroking my tip once again, calling pleasure to the surface of my skin as white beads my tip.
Her pink lips part in shock, and arousal, and dare I say, pride. Her eyes lift to mine and her lips pull into a smile I want to nip and devour.
Then she shocks me as she swipes her thumb through the precum on my tip. She stares at her thumb for a moment before she brings it to her lips and sucks it into her mouth.
My balls contract. The growl that spills from deep inside me holds the echo of an ancient God, a hungry beast, as I tell her, “I want to feel your mouth on me.”
She doesn’t hesitate as she leans forward, flicking the tip of my dick with a pretty pink tongue.
Is she teasing me? No, she just doesn’t know what she’s doing.
And I’m nearing the limits of my control.
“Take me into your mouth, Persephone.” She does as she’s bid, pulling my length into the hot, wet heat of her mouth. Pleasure and pain erupt like an ancient volcano inside me. I’ve waited so long for this. Too long. “All the way into the back of your throat.” My voice is rough, containing all that I am holding back from her. “I want to feel you swallow my cock.” She dips her head, impaling my tip into the back of her throat and swallowing around me. I groan. “Like that. Just like that. Look at me, little goddess.” She gives me her emerald eyes and I purr, “Yes. That’s a good girl. Good little goddess.” I twist my hand into the mass of her hair, guiding my throbbing cock from the warmth of her hot little mouth until her swollen lips circle the mushroom of my tip. I hold myself there as I gaze down at the most exquisite of all creations. “I want to fuck your mouth, Persephone. Do you think you can take it? Take me?”
She nods eagerly around me, her lips clinging to my tip as though her very life depends on it. Pride surges inside me, riding a wave of searing heat.
I purr, “Good girl.” Fisting my hand in her thick hair, I hold her head back and angled just slightly, so that I can watch every pump as I invade her sweet mouth.
I start slow, reveling in the glistening wet that coats my length as I pull it out to slide it back inside. Her throat convulses around me, but her eyes remain fixed on mine. The God hums his pleasure inside me as flashes of an ancient past bleed into this moment. There had been tears in her eyes that first time so long ago. It strikes me now, the difference between the girl I’d claimed for my own, stolen to an unformed realm of darkness, and this Goddess before me now.
Persephone has invited me inside willingly now, but that hadn’t been the way so long ago. Like my realm, I’d been an unformed God before I stole her. I took without thought of repercussions, and there were repercussions to the rape of Persephone. The innocence that had clung to her, drawn me to her like moth to flame, had incinerated in the aftermath of my brutal possession. She was like scorched earth—the evidence of the fire lingering even as new growth blossomed. She became a thing of need, a force of sexual hunger I could not sate.
In the brutal possession of my single greatest regret, the being who would steal my whole heart and soul would be unsatisfied by my touch alone. For in the viciousness of my claiming, a beast had awoken within the Goddess. Something insatiable and dark. Something I could not tame or feed, no matter how I tried. And I had tried.
Oh, how I’d tried.
My penance, I had accepted, was to share my wife with numerous lovers. Loving her as she let them love her. Feast on her.
For a long while, I told myself I was happy with that arrangement. With giving into her need to explore and take from those around her. With the life and love we shared so openly, and with so many others.
Now, as I slide my cock in and out of her sweet mouth, a feeling of possession I’ve never felt before swells inside me like a flame. It’s ready to destroy anything that threatens it. Anything that threatens to touch her.
I will not share her. Not this time. Not in this life or any life that dares come after, if I fail to secure her eternal soul .
I will possess her eternal soul, even if I have to scheme and trick and steal to make it mine. Try as I might to do things different this time, nature is not easily changed, and it is my nature to take. To possess. To claim that which I desire. I may possess the strength to woo her now, to take the time to invade the space inside her heart, but I am not foolish enough to think for even a moment, that if danger presented, I wouldn’t steal her away to the Underworld where she would be safe. I would think only once about the repercussions of my taking her from this realm, from the only world her human life has ever known.
My gaze burns as she hollows her cheeks, sucking me deep. I groan a thick, long growl of pleasure as I tighten my hand in her hair, my thrusts picking up speed and intensity. Emerald eyes glisten as they lock on mine, but not a single tear falls. She takes every vicious pump of my cock in her mouth, the tip hitting the back, with a talent only my Goddess could possess, drawing my release from me with a force that nearly brings me to my knees. I watch as she swallows every drop of my seed, hunger still burning in my veins. It will always burn in my veins for her. For the woman made to stand as mine. My Queen. My Goddess. My mate .
But not my soul mate. For Gods, there is no such thing. It is a reality that I mourn in this moment, a reality I’ve never mourned in all the millennia I’ve lived. A chance to find the one whose soul would fit with the missing piece of my own, not simply a soul to stand with mine. A soul connected, woven.
Legend tells the tale that Zeus splits all whole souls in half, cutting through them with searing bolts of lightning as they scream their agony and sorrow to the sky. He threw them to the earth so violently, the land shook with the collision, the thunder of it echoing in the sky. Scattered in the fall, they are forced to spend lifetimes in desperate search for their other half.
But the truth of the story goes much deeper. Yes, Zeus did such a thing, sadistic monster that he is. But it was in ire for the nerve of the Moirai, the three Fates who dared to carve out chunks of the Olympian’s souls, casting the fragments to a vulnerable eternity within the bubbling depths of their wicked cauldron. For after the Primordial God and Goddess, and the Titans they birthed ruled in selfish power, the Moirai learned.
The all-seeing Fates watched the Titans rule and fall to the Olympian Gods they birthed—Gods even more powerful, with the potential to be far crueller. More disassociated from the souls they craft to worship them. The souls they were intended to care for. To protect.
It was in response to the potential of that cruelness that the Moirai acted.
It is not so easy to split the soul of a God or Goddess, since we are simply who we are, birthed of ether and power. Whole. But stealing chunks of our eternal souls in bargains for the fates they weaved to be woven in our favor, had been a practice of our earlier time. An ancient, nearly prehistoric ceremony we foolishly succumbed to with the dangerous, cunning Moirai.
Legend whispered that Zeus held power over the Moirai, but there is no governing the power that is the Fates.
They are primordial judge, jury, and godly executioner. For it is from the Moirai in which a God can face an eternity of misery, longing for an end that simply won’t come, for our souls are eternal. I would know. I suffered an eternity in the aftermath of my wife’s vicious murder—an act sanctioned by the Moirai.
Never in the history of the Olympians has a God ever connected with his true soul mate. For our souls are complete, but for the fragment bargained to the Moirai, and contained in a cauldron of magic deep within the caverns of Mount Olympus, where ancient power surged, predating even the Titans. Its derivation spanned somewhere with the primordial Gods of Origin, predating even Uranus and Gaea in favor of Chaos. For the Fates’ lineage has never been traced. Human legend is muddled, accusing Nyx of birthing the ancient deities only to turn and claim they were fathered by Zeus.
They are wrong. Not even the Olympians know the seed from which the Moirai sprouted. We only know their tyrannical rule over balance, the scales of justice they weigh, the fates they weave—and the fates they cast into an eternity of searching for that bargained piece of our souls we once thought we wouldn’t miss. But the holes in our soul’s fester like an untreated wound, growing larger with every passing century.
It is a yawning hunger I’ve experienced for so long; it has become a part of me.
But it is as I pull Persephone from where she sits in the tub, her breasts connecting with my chest—the human heart in her chest thundering—that I feel something stir somewhere deep inside me where that missing chunk of my soul once belonged.
I am frozen, robbed of all breath. I stare into the pools of her emerald eyes, to the eternal soul that flickers deep within. The soul that is woven with—something other . Something familiar. Impossible recognition for the piece of my stolen soul snaps into place, like a band stretched too far and released. I nearly flinch, the pinching shock of it so great.
Tethered souls birth eternal mates. Balance and justice spin the thread of knotted fates. The thought is unbidden in my mind—not my own. Spoken in the unforgettable tones of the tongueless Moirai. Two souls paired by divine recognition, now stitched together for eternal salvation, over lands scorched in treachery.
Persephone whimpers softly as her hand pushes between our bodies to press her palm into her chest in a mirror of where I had felt the snap. She pushes back from me, wide eyes dipping to the space between us where her hand is now twisting, as though toying with something tangible even as it is unseen. Her eyes snap up to mine, wide with a fear that cools the heat of arousal in my veins. In its wake, a rising tide of protection surges high.
“Are you okay?” The demand falls rougher than I intend. My mind is still racing with impossible questions even as my eyes sweep her face, now drained of color.
“Did you feel that?” she gasps, her words breathless with shock and disbelief.
“Feel what?” I need to know what she felt. Had she felt the band snapping into place, as well? The impossible sealing of our souls?
Her brows furrow, and her head tips back. Panic flashes in her eyes. She whispers, “You didn’t?” Her lips tremble. “I—I—” She shakes her head, and I hold her in place when she tries to push from me. She forces a fragile smile that splinters with shards of terror. “I’m imagining things again.”
“I felt something,” I tell her, needing her to know she isn’t losing her mind. That she can trust herself.
Her eyes snap to mine, sharp now. “You did?”
Breath stills in her lungs as she waits.
“I did.” I lift her hand in mine, placing her palm against my chest. “Here.”
“Me too.” She breathes breathlessly, green eyes searching mine for answers I can’t give. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I,” I tell her honestly. And I am rendered momentarily speechless as my mind races with the impossibility of my suspicions.
Had the Moirai began weaving the fragments of the souls they held prisoner, crafting soul mates just as Zeus split them apart? It would be divine manipulation at its finest.
I take in the woman in my arms once again. Her delicate, fine-boned features and the ancient strength that flashes deep within the depths of her youthfully innocent eyes.
I’ve always known Persephone was my mate. But my soul mate? A thing intended for humans alone, cursed upon them by their twisted God? Not possible.
Or is it?
No. It can’t be. The Fates are cunning, but to do something so extreme. To bind Gods —they wouldn’t. The consequences would be—they would be—catastrophic.
Even still, I am helpless to do anything but take her mouth prisoner in a kiss that tastes of souls fused by ancient magic.
By something far greater than us.
Something far older, even, than the Primordial Gods of Origin.