Chapter 31

Chapter

Thirty-One

P ersephone

“Does he see you yet, my daughter?” The woman tips her head to the side, her wheat-colored hair twisted into a crown of braids high on her head.

“He sees me.” In my lap, I pluck the petals of the asphodel I picked from the meadow before I crossed the bridge to the Garden of Silence where nothing grows, surrounded by the forgetful waters of the Lethe.

It’s why I meet her here. It’s the only place in the Underworld where our words won’t be remembered, collected by the realm my husband, my King and God, rules.

“Last I heard, he invited Aphrodite’s golden boy into the Underworld.” When I dare to look at her, her expression is smug. She raises a single brow. “Am I wrong, daughter?”

“Who told you?” It hurts that she knows.

“Have you slept with the golden boy in front of him?” She leans in close. “Does he watch, calmly, as you share your body with another?”

I want to cry, but I lift my chin. “Yes.”

“And what did I tell you, dear daughter?”

“That if he could watch me with another, he did not love me.” My voice is so quiet, my heartbreak so acute. “That he will never love me.”

“Good girl.” Mother toes a pebble of blue apatite; the single crystal spit from the Lethe, and the only thing in the garden of silence. It’s harrowingly beautiful, this garden of forgotten dreams, frozen into little blue crystals for eternity.

When I say nothing, Mother turns to face me. Her hand on my face is gentle, her touch offering a warmth she does not offer often. I can’t help but lean into the touch, hungry for the rare love from the Goddess who birthed me.

“Hades will never love you, Persephone. He took you when you were innocent and beautiful.” Her hand falls from my face to lift the deep red of my hair, painted in the darkness of the Underworld. Her thin fingers, nails sharp as sheers, twist in the strands. “He took you because you were light and lovely. Now,” she tugs on my hair hard enough to pluck the strands from my scalp. I swallow my cry, choking on the devastation she builds within me with every word she speaks. “You were a flower in a garden ripe with life and now—” Her eyes drift over my face as her lip curls with a scowl. “Now you are used. He spilled your innocence and threw you away.”

“But he fought for me to return—he fed me the seeds of the Underworld,” I whisper.

“Male pride is a fickle thing, dear daughter.” She loosens my hair, brushing it over my shoulders to fall in long waves down my back. The act is not loving or tender, but instead done so that she doesn’t have to look at the fall of red—so different from the pure white strands she once twisted into braids adorned with pretty flowers.

Had that not been what I’d been doing that day Hades stole me, plucking wildflowers with friends? Wildflowers for Mother to twist into my hair when she braided it at night?

It seemed so long ago now. My abduction to the Underworld.

My eyes dip to the blue apatite. Sometimes, when I’m here in the Garden of Silence with Mother, I, too, long to forget. The siren-song the Lethe sings tempts me to take just one sip. The reprieve would be a blessing, even as it is undoubtedly a curse.

My heart hurts. I love my husband, God of the Underworld, Death, and, now, the Afterlife .

My eyes tip up to my mother. They shine with tears I will not shed. “What should I do, Mother? Tell me what I should do now? I’ve done everything you’ve said to make him love me. To show him that he wants me for his own.” I shake my head, my desperation bleeding from my very pores. Between us, heartbreak scents the air. “What do I do?”

“You have done all you can, Persephone.” Her face pinches tight with hatred for the man who owns every tattered piece of my shredded heart. “And I have done all I can do for you.”

“Please.” I fall to my knees at her feet. My hands disappear into the gauzy wheat-colored gown that is cinched by a rope of braided wheat around her waist. “Please, Mother.”

Disgust flares in her eyes as she spits down on me. “He does not love you, girl. He will never love you. He took those nymphs to your bed, and I acted. I took vengeance for your honor , and what did you do?”

I shake my head. My heart rages like a stormy sea, desperate to spill emotion into the wreckage of me. “Please.”

“You pulled her from the earth where I rooted her. She would have been little more than a mint plant. You saved her, foolish girl.”

“Minthe is good, Mother.” The thought of my friend—the terror in her eyes as the earth rose to capture all that she was and had ever been. The vines of green that still paint her skin in an eternal mark, the sweet scent of the plant Mother had nearly fated her to an eternity of misery leeching from her skin. I’d had to save her. I could never had lived with myself otherwise. “She is my friend.”

“He brought her into your bed.” Her tone is scathing, but it softens when a sob escapes. “And that other one, Leuce—her beauty far outweighs your own. If you think for one moment that he will not place the Crown of Souls upon her head, you are mistaken.”

My heart aches. “I’m his Queen.”

“You are nothing to him!” she shrieks, but the words don’t carry. The Lethe devours the sound before it can travel. “I tried to save you. To help you show him that he loves you. That you are worthy to stand as his Queen, but you fail me time and again. You befriend the nymphs he takes as lovers. You fail to ignite even a spark of jealousy when you spread yourself for another male,” she hisses. “You disgust me. You have failed me.”

I do sob now. It cuts from my core as though squeezed by a vine of thorns.

I’m not even sure I know what it means to be loved. To know love.

Even from my mother, such a thing has never been gifted to me.

I have never been worthy of it.

“Let me make it right to you. Anything,” I weep. “Anything to make it right, Mother.”

Mother smiles. It is the brightest and most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen grace her lovely face. She bends at the waist, her cruel hands coming to cup the sides of my face in a gesture that promises an eternity of tenderness.

I lean into her though, letting my eyes drift closed as I devour the warmth of it, even as I know her warmth is fleeting.

“You have a gift, my dear daughter.” She lowers her hand to cover my left breast. “In here. It is bright, swirling with the power of the stars, the moon, and the sun. Hades may not want you, but I planned for you far before he took you for his own. I made you into the power you are today, the weapon you will become tomorrow.”

My mouth is bone dry as I stare up into her eyes, alight with a hunger for something dangerous and deadly. “I don’t understand.”

“You can free yourself from the binds of the Underworld, my daughter.”

“How?”

She smiles a wicked and lovely smile. “With the power to create all things comes the power to destroy.”

I don’t know what she is talking about.

“You want me to destroy the Underworld?” Even if I had the power, which I don’t, I couldn’t. This realm has become my home. The souls may as well be my children, this land that sprouts life my infant. To destroy it— I could never .

“No.” Mother shakes her head. “I want you to destroy Hades.”

“I—” I am struck by the horror of her words. “Never. I could never.”

“He does not love you.” The words rattle as they spill into the space between us. She’s angry. The kind of angry that sparks famine. I’ve seen it before.

Still, I whisper, “But I love him.”

There is a pause between us that is so quiet, it’s eerie. Even the Lethe whispers where moments ago it sang, as though it senses it will soon feast on a buffet of secrets. Secrets it will use to sustain the Garden of Silence.

“You disappoint me,” she seethes, and then her hands are around my throat, squeezing. The splitting scream she lets free, deafens me.

I can’t move, can’t think as her lovely face twists into the beastly Goddess void of mercy. The black wings of a terrible bird split from her back to lift me from my feet. I’ve seen this beast before, countless times. But her shriek has never been so loud. Never so angry. So deadly. It crawls over my body like a cold winter wind, caging me in a cyclone of devastation. It is the call of a reaper wrapping its talons around my eternal soul.

I’ve watched from the impenetrable safety of stone temples as the very cyclone of her scream has torn through fields of wheat, cutting down crops. I’ve watched the people beg and weep and pray, but she hears nothing through the vicious screams of her immortal Goddess.

My mother is beauty and devastation. She offers the sustenance of life as easily as she rips it away with her screaming storm winds.

And she is a fickle, fickle Goddess.

For the first time, I am the sole focus of her ire. And it is excruciating.

Warm liquid leaks from my ears, spilling from my eyes. I think I’m crying until I pull my hands away and see red. Blood.

My mouth parts to beg for mercy, but no sound spills. Bubbles of bloody pleas pop from where they burst between my parted lips to splatter the gown she wears, marring it red.

Roughly cut blue apatite stones shred my knees, whispering promises of the ultimate freedom as my blood spills over the Garden of Silence. I can’t hope to fight her power. And I know no one will come to save me. No one knows I’m here. And even though her screams could shatter glass and burst organs like a pincushion stabbed one too many times—no one will hear her beyond the Garden of Silence.

The everlasting night of the Underworld flashes in my sight as I am thrown into the Lethe. Desperate for air, I inhale before I remember the devastation that even a taste of the river can reap. Water surges over my dry tongue to soothe the bloody walls of my throat, but before I can spit it out, my mother launches her wretched form into the shallow water, straddling me even as I buck and fight. I claw and scream as water flows, a river into my body. Under the water, I see her hideous face distort into a twist of hateful rage.

I have no air.

She screams words that penetrate even the rushing of the water. “You’ve disappointed me, my daughter. But you will do better next time. I vow it.”

The river continues to flow into my body, filling my belly, my lungs, until I am certain I will burst.

My body bucks.

Hades’ face flashes in my mind.

My heart weeps, and then it ruptures.