Chapter 32

Chapter

Thirty-Two

P ersephone

My eyes fly open as a scream splits the night. For a moment, my disjointed mind can’t make sense of the wet figure that hovers above me, big hands pinning my body down.

I thrash and buck and scream and sob. My hands fly, nails catching skin. I gnash my teeth and kick my feet.

“Persephone!” A deep voice, so devastatingly familiar, breaks through the screaming echo in my mind and I sob. My body falls to the bed, spent.

Devastation floods me like the river Lethe in my nightmare, and I weep.

“Persephone.” Hades gathers me in his arms, against his broad, warm chest. His wet chest. Wet like the monster who’d delivered me my end—the monster I’d called Mother—in my nightmare.

I sob harder, burying my face in the wet warmth of his chest, inhaling his scent and willing myself to forget.

But the images are seared there, like a scar on my mind. A scar no ointment can heal, no laser can burn away.

My body begins to shake. Or maybe it’s always been shaking, I’m not sure. I only know Hades holds me tighter, refusing to let go even as he asks, “What happened, Persephone?”

“I don’t know,” I lie. How can I tell him this truth?

I don’t understand it myself. How I keep seeing myself as this dark Queen, daughter of Demeter, and unloved concubine to Hades.

“Talk to me,” he begs, but I shake my head as I claw deeper into the safety of his embrace. I can’t get close enough to him. Can’t fully sink myself into the net of safety the dark danger that emanates from the man provides me.

“Why are you wet?” Somehow, I’ve stopped the flow of my tears even though I can’t quite defeat the tremble that rattles my limbs.

“Went for a swim.” He speaks the words into my naked shoulder. “You were asleep. ”

I laugh, but the sound is unhinged. “I wasn’t asleep, I was passed out.”

Hades looses a tense chuckle, his big hands spreading over my naked back. “Will you tell me what you dreamed? What scared you so much?”

The nightmare flashes in my mind, and I answer with the rawest honesty I am able to give him. “I dreamed I lost you.”

His hands pulse against my back, pressing me deeper into his broad chest. Against my breast, I can feel the violent thunder of his heartbeat.

I wrap my arms around him, letting my lips drift over the wet warmth of his neck and tasting the salt of the sea. He inhales a sharp breath, his hands moving to my waist and holding me in place even as I spread my legs around his, aching to be closer, to sink into the safety of him .

“Please,” I whisper against the salty warmth of his throat, his jaw. “Please, Hades.”

“Please what, little goddess?” His voice is rough with gravel.

“Make me forget,” I plead, the irony of my nightmare of drowning in the Lethe not lost on me. “I want to feel safe.”

“You are safe,” he vows. “I will protect you, always.”

I touch my lips to his and he captures my mouth in a kiss, devouring my hesitancy as he invades me with his tongue the way I wish he would invade me with his body. My own body begins to warm, the heat beginning in the marrow of my bones and quickly radiating outward to the flesh that presses against his.

He groans into my mouth, a hot spill of need tasting of fractured restraint. I open to him, deepening the kiss even as I spread my legs over his lap, sinking low. When my core meets with the hard swell of his cock, he rips his mouth from mine to shove me back into the bed. I think he’s going to leave me there, but he doesn’t. Instead, he falls between my legs, careful not to give me his weight, as he slams his mouth to mine once again.

The kiss is brutal, verging on violent. It’s tongue and teeth and possession. His hands roam my body as mine roam his. Under my fingertips, his muscles ripple and quiver. His hair is wet where it’s tied back at the nape of his neck, and I graze it with my fingertips as I run my nails down the length of his back. He hisses in through his teeth, dropping blazing kisses down the length of my neck and over my chest before he comes back to my mouth. He nips my lip and swallows my moan, his tongue sweeping over mine as he devours the remnants of the nightmare that threatens to cling to me.

“Please, Hades,” I beg. I’ll beg for forever if that’s what it takes.

His low growl is a sound of broken will that sparks the wick of hope inside me. When he rears back on his knees between my legs, I hook his shorts with my fingertips. He freezes. Shadows twist in the flames that dance in the depths of his eyes. I tug them down his thick thighs, revealing the swollen length of his arousal.

He’s so big, I have to swallow the quick fear that spills inside me.

Determined to have him. To have him take me , I don’t wait for permission to drive him to the edge of his control.

I wrap my hand around him, shocked at the heat that threatens to burn my palm. I stroke, watching as his eyes burn and a low hiss whistles between clenched teeth. My hand moves up to the tip, where I let the pad of my thumb slide over his slit, watching as he fights a twitch, before stroking down to the base.

He makes a low sound in a language I don’t recognize. I’m sure it’s a curse, but it might be a prayer. I continue to stroke him just like that, slow and maddening, until he catches my wrist in his hand.

“Please, Hades,” I say again, my eyes on his. “I want to feel you.”

“Feel me?” I’ve stripped his voice raw with want, and I love the sound.

Emboldened—determined to tempt him beyond his ability to deny me—I spread my legs wide and lay back in the bed. His gaze feasts on me, filling me with a need that burns in my bones.

“I want to feel you here.” I touch myself between my legs, letting my fingertips drift featherlight over my core. Then I sink a single finger deep into my center, my breath hitching on a strangled moan. “And here.”

“Persephone…”

“Please don’t reject me.” I slide my finger out, and in. His eyes blaze. “Please, I’m begging you, Hades, take me .”

His throat bobs as he swallows hard. His hand closes around my wrist, and he gently pulls my finger from my center to lift it to his lips. I ache, my insides on fire, as he sucks my finger clean.

“I love the taste of you. Hunger for it.” He licks his lips, as though determined to devour all of me. I shudder.

He lowers his body to mine, and I swear I feel heaven when he slides his hot tip into the wet of my core. He rocks against me, the ridges of his cock playing with my clit.

I moan and beg, “More.”

“Do you love me, little goddess?” he demands, his voice rough with the last remnants of his control.

My heart shrinks, knowing that this is the make it or break it moment. Still, I answer honestly, “Yes.”

But it won’t make me stay.

He groans a sound of pleasure and broken will as he notches his tip to my entrance. I cling to him, locking my legs around his back. With his eyes on mine, he speaks a dark vow that invades the wreckage that is the untethered heart in my chest. “I’ve always loved you. I will always love you, little goddess. I’ll make you mine in a way that you will never belong to another. Never be free of me.” He pauses, breathes against my lips, and vows, “And never question the way I feel for you or your place at my side.”

Looping his arm around the small of my back, his tip still threatening to invade, he holds me tight. His eyes dare me to challenge his words, but only for a minute before he plunges deep. My eyes snap wide as he stretches me, invading so deep inside me, I swear I feel him in my womb.

It’s not a gentle claiming. It’s deep and complete. One fell swoop and I know I’ll never belong to another. I’ll never be full like I am right now with this man invading me. My body, my mind, my heart, my soul…

He lives in every part of me, fills all the empty voids as though this was where we were always meant to land. Together. As one.

His breaths shudder across my lips as he stills inside me where he’s rooted to the deep of my core. My legs are spread so wide to fit the broad width of him. I can’t help but cling to his shoulders as I ride out the waves of stinging pain as my body stretches and changes to accommodate him. To welcome him .

“Relax, little goddess,” he encourages as I suck in sharp breaths that taste of him. Woodsmoke and sin and Hades . “You can take me.” He shifts gently inside me, a slow rock out and back in. “You were made to take me.”

His eyes never leave mine as he pulls out again, pressing in. Out and in. In and out. Over and over. I don’t know when it happens. When the sting fades to pave the road for pleasure. I just know that the burning in my bones devours the pinch in my core until my hips rock into his thrusts, meeting him for every thrust. Every stroke.

He moves inside me for what feels like forever and not long enough. My heart riots in the cage of my chest, desperate to land in his palms. At his feet.

Hades invades my mouth with hungry kisses. Pressing his lips tenderly to my jaw, my throat, my chest. We trade breaths as we move together, climbing higher, soaring. Against my skin, his is slick. Maybe I’m slick too. I can’t tell where I end and he begins. I can’t find the divide as that thing so deep inside, the crackle of starlight and shadows, sunlight and flame, the above and beneath— me and him —snaps into place.

I gasp and Hades grunts at the lash of a fastening of souls. I swear, that’s what it feels like as the band in my chest tightens, the lock clicking into place, the key melting into the magma of the heat that spills from my bones.

A crescendo of something far bigger than an orgasm builds inside me. It spreads like fire in my veins. Consuming me.

“Hades,” I cry, because I don’t understand this thing .

This is more than sex. More than love.

Threads of fate snapping into place. The thought is not mine, even as it echoes in my mind.

Hades’ arm under the small of my back pulls me tighter into his chest, as though he can’t get me close enough. As though the divide between us is still too far. My head falls back and his tongue dips into the hollow of my throat. We murmur an ancient sound of man and woman—a coming together—a primal, primitive sound of connection formed in a time before words.

I feel Hades hook his foot into the bed for purchase, shoving deeper into my body. His tempo quickens, thrusts unmeasured. Hot breaths threaten to burn into the hollow of my throat as he grunts into my skin, hips bucking, bottoming out with every thrust home.

Home.

And I take him. I take all of him, spread wide and open for his claiming. For his possession.

That thing that has been building. The orgasm that is more than pleasure—more than coming apart—builds and finally erupts. Hades roars into my throat as I scream into moonlit darkness.

I’m shaken to the core as he roots himself deep on a thrust that edges on violent. Hot seed spills from him to fill the void of me. And finally, finally , the burning in my bones is gone. A cool relief left in its place even as that band of something ancient and ageless tightens. The clashing of us. The binding of souls. The weaving of fate.

The beginning and the end.