“Make it harder.” My hands try unsuccessfully to curl against the window. “Please.”
He stops fucking me for one single sentence and laughs. Laughs. It undoes a knot hiding behind my heart. And then Hades locks a hand around the back of my neck and levering me into a more obscene version of the same position. I hope my hands can stay still on the glass. He delves his fingers into the wetness between my legs and spreads up to where I’m still clenched tight, despite what I’ve asked for. He does it again, and again, long enough that I have time to be embarrassed about how wet I am. Then he’s back behind me, a hitch in his breath. His teeth meet the flesh of my neck and he bites like he could eat me alive. “Be good.”
And then.
And then.
There’s no coaxing this time, not at first, only an iron grip on my hips and a splitting pressure. My brain knows I begged for this but my body doesn’t and a cry tears loose from me, but he doesn’t give an inch. He takes one instead. Did I imagine that it would be easier? It’s not easy, and I don’t ever want it to be easy. Never, never.
He drops his head down on my shoulder and thrusts in again. “Fuck.” There’s a seismic tremor coming through his thighs. He’s holding back for me. Hades could do more, but he’s being almost kind.
In his way.
Which is not kind.
Which is possessive and territorial and cold, relentlessly cold, driving in and in and in no matter how much I thrash against him and sweat and curse. No matter how much he murmurs words of praise into my ear. Words like little slut and cry for me and good, so good, so fucking good. It hurts so much. I love it so much.
And because he’s Hades, because he’s alive and in control and not at all a dead man, he does not touch me where I want to be touched until he’s all the way inside me, until I’m throbbing around him and stretched to the limit, until I’ve begged. And begged again. And again. So when he does it’s like being pulled down into the ocean, swept away on a wave, scattered into the sky. He’s the sky. He’s the only sky that matters.
6
Hades
The storm breaks over the mountain at some point after midnight. Persephone doesn’t hear a fucking thing. She’s asleep in my bed, the covers pulled tight around her and clutched in her fists. She was a babbling mess when I carried her out of the lookout, and completely speechless by the time I was done with her. The shower was another story entirely. She kept laughing while I tried to wash her hair, her head rolling back and forth on the tiled wall, and it was a mess of shampoo and suds.
Which I’ll gladly pay for.
Which I am currently paying for.
Should I be out of bed? Fuck no. But when Eleanor told me how long it had been, there was nothing for it. Leaving the mountain to Oliver for days on end isn’t an option for the future. I’ll have to figure something out with Demeter. Making a deal with her now is unlikely, but it’s not going to happen in the middle of the night.
One of my healing bruises calls attention to itself and I put a hand over it. Right below my ribs. That fucker kicked me when I was already falling, and I was stupid enough not to anticipate it. Just like the old days. Could be broken, but who has time to lay around while it heals? I don’t.
A text message from Oliver lights up my phone.
All clear.
There are more than sixty other texts on my phone from when I wasn’t looking at it.
Lightning leaves a shattered-glass pattern in the sky outside. Eleanor told me that Oliver has taken to stalking the halls of the mountain at all hours. He moved the workers back down into their usual living spaces and hired more men to stand guard. She also tells me that they’re nervous. That everybody’s nervous.
They should be.
I vaguely remember Zeus saying that he would blow up the trains, which seems like overkill. After all, he needs those trains as much as I do, and as much as Demeter does. At least he will need them when he gets over himself. He will, one day. He had his fun with me, and now...
Now what?
Supply lines are fucked for the time being.
I shift in my chair and am reminded that he also fucked up one of my knees. My soft grunt doesn’t appear to have woken up Persephone. I doubt anything would, other than me. My cock stirs at the possibility. But no—three times is enough for her today.
An ache in the middle of my chest seems like it might be a heart attack, at first. Something dire. A side effect of that many fists meeting that much bone. But here, in the dark, in this chair that I’ve pulled from the corner so I can look out the window, I can admit—slowly—that it’s not.
It’s an emotion.
An emotion other than unbridled lust for Persephone.
It’s...caring, I suppose.
Ever since the foster home, I’ve done my best not to care about anything. Fondness is a trap, and one that would chew your leg off rather than set you free. But she’s broken me wide open.
I...care.
A hiss escapes me at the thought, but there it is, knocking itself against my brain and, more disturbingly, my heart. Conor huffs from his spot in the corner of the rug.
“It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.” He puts his head back down on his paws. He spent all three days next to my bed, refusing to eat. It’s given him a wolf-like look in his eyes.
I care about Persephone. Deeply. Obsessively. If anything were to happen to her—
It hurts when I tense up like that. She’ll never know about it. I’ll leave her to her guesses. As far as she is concerned, everything that happened today was effortless.
Anyway.
I also care about the rest of my people in the mountain. All of them, even the workers. And there aren’t just workers. There are families. Children. Some of them were born down in the mines and this is the only life they’ve ever known. They’ve never been shipped off to a foster home with a cruel dictator for a father, for example. The biggest threat here is me, and that’s only if their parents find it impossible to follow the rules.
Persephone shifts and rustles. I’d freeze if I weren’t already sitting down, but she just says something about poppies and turns over.
If I sit here much longer, I’ll regret it in the morning. There are few wounds that heal from retreating into a chair. I’ve already done enough of that to last a lifetime.
So I go out of the bedroom and through the rest of my private space, past the guards in the hall. It’s dark out here. I ordered all the lights off before I came back in. It’s a matter of delay, now that I’m out of pills, which chafes. I installed the lights in the first place so that there would be some normalcy. Now, fuck it. This is about staying alive. That doesn’t make the added exposure less irritating. It’s been that obnoxious since I was seventeen, when indoor lights started piggybacking on the sun and layering on pain and pain and pain.
I don’t know where I’m going until I end up at the lookout, a space I designed as a joke more than anything else. It’s a pointless room, for someone like me. I’ll never sit there to enjoy the view, not with all that natural light.
But Persephone looked wonderful here. There’s that.
I drop into one of the window seats with a sigh. She’s the one who made me such a bleeding heart, and the worst part is, there’s no going back. I can’t shut it out, which means I have to do something other than close down the mountain and let us all die.