“I’m not done with you now, and I’ll never be done with you. Those are the terms in exchange for your piece-of-shit boyfriend’s life. You did it, Persephone. You saved him. But you’ll never save yourself.”
Hades lifts me up by the chin, quickly enough that I have to scramble to my feet. He holds me off-balance, leaning close, and I want to collapse into him and sob against his shirt.
It’s sick. It’s wrong. I want it.
The train carries me away from my mother’s house, away from everything I’ve ever known, at a breakneck pace. My mind floats back to those fields.
I hated the fences. I might love them now.
Hades snaps his fingers in front of my eyes again and I startle.
“Now.” It’s all I can do to stay upright, even with his hand gripping my chin. “Let’s find out what else you’ll do.”
7
Persephone
I tremble in his hands, and Hades watches this as dispassionately as you’d watch a flower grow. Unlike my mother, he wouldn’t think twice about crushing blooms under his heel or in his hands. He’d just as soon tear out the petals and spit on them.
“The crawling was fine.” A cold assessment. The way you’d talk about a thing. “The tears are delicious, but you’ll have to do better than that.”
He rises to his feet, towering over me. I can’t move. I can’t anticipate what he’ll do or what he’ll say, so I stand there, rooted to the spot, staring at the buttons on his dark dress shirt. It’s the nicest dress shirt I’ve ever seen. Some of the other girls at school had spare clothes aside from the uniforms, and I could tell those dresses cost a lot. But this? It’s nicer than all of them combined.
“I have to say, Persephone, the sight of you scared....” He makes a low noise in the back of his throat. “You were such a courageous little thing out there, offering yourself up.” He laughs again, and I want to sink down to the floor and hide my face. More than that, I want to hook my fingers in the space between the buttons of his shirt and hold on for dear life.
“I’m not afraid of you. I’ve known you were dangerous all my life. Th-that doesn’t make me afraid.” I have never been so terrified. It’s become the air I breathe and the rise and fall of my lungs.
“It’s strange you didn’t warn your boyfriend about me, given all you claim to know.” His eyes rake across my face. My lips. My neck.
“He’s not my boyfriend. I said that before.”
His bristling silence tells me I’ve stepped in the direction of defiance, and the air crackles with a warning. “So you don’t really care whether he lives or dies?”
I look up into his face as best as I can from this distance.
“That’s not true. I—I love him.” A lie, and a flash in Hades’ eyes proves he believes it as much as I do. “We weren’t together like that. My mother would never have let me be with him. It was something we were going to discuss when we got to the city.”
“Oh, isn’t that sweet.” He clicks his tongue. “You should be thanking me. I’ve saved you from a lifetime of cooking his dinners and pretending to be interested.”
I close my lips, pinch them tight. Terror mixes with confusion, all of it wrapped in the overpowering need to survive. I did love Decker. I loved him enough to try to save him from Hades. But something rings true in Hades’ words, all of it shaking the foundations of me like a two-ton bomb. Is he right, or am I so afraid I’m taking his word for it? Why would I take Luther Hades’ word for anything?
That’s exactly what I’ve done. I’ve taken his word.
“I wasn’t pretending.” Some part of me was pretending, but which part? The girl who never had a boyfriend before, pretending to know what she was doing? Or the woman who had fallen in love, pretending it wasn’t happening?
“Good. Prove it to me.” He takes me by the arm and turns me to face the desk. “Bend over.” He puts a hand on the back of my neck. “You had so much trouble understanding my instructions before, so I’ll make it easy. Bend.”
I can’t breathe. I can’t think. I can only obey. I thought crawling was the worst of it. I thought the nightmarish images that came to mind about what men do to women were the worst of it. I never… I never—
The desk meets my hips, a hard, unforgiving line. I’m painfully aware of the curve of my back and my ass and then the press of my breasts against the unyielding surface.
“What are you going to do?” I whisper. “Please, tell me.”
He gives my neck a shake, and my cheek makes contact with the desk.
“A summary of my plans for you isn’t part of the terms.” Another shake, harder. “In fact, I’ve already held up my end of the deal.” Hades rubs a thumb absently up and down the side of my neck, underneath my hair. “I didn’t kill that disgusting worm of a man. I didn’t kill you, though I could.” My body fights between tensing up and giving in to the slow slide of his thumb. Why, why, would I ever want to let myself relax? It’s not me wanting it. It’s my traitor of a body. “You’re so small. It would be nothing.”
The heat of my cheek has already warmed up the desk beneath it.
“I thought you wanted me alive.” I keep my eyes firmly focused on the shuttered window on the opposite side of the train. The thought of him seeing me like this, bent like this—
It can’t get any worse.
It gets worse.
“I’ll get considerably more enjoyment out of a live woman than a dead one.” The hand lifts from the back of my neck, but I stay pressed flat against the desk. He hasn’t said to get up. Hades makes a satisfied sound. “Look at you, trying to anticipate my wishes. Can you guess what will happen to you next?”
My breath stops, and there it is, that damn chin going again. A million images run through my mind. A million horrible, filthy images, snapshots of things depraved people would do. I know that not all sex is bad, but most of it must be. My mother kept all of it from me for a reason. And the things the other girls talked about at school were nothing like this. They involved soccer players and football captains and coaches, not bending over a desk, ass lifted up toward a man who’d just as soon kill me as—
“No,” I breathe. “I don’t know.”
“You’re lying.” He kicks my legs apart, though I’d pinned them together as tightly as the muscles will allow. It didn’t matter. “You might wear a white dress and live on your mother’s farm, but she’ll have told you things.”
“No.” My desperation rises in another round of tears. They drip onto the polished surface below my face. “She’s never told me anything about this, about—about any of that.”
His hand slips down my spine, counting each ridge, until he stops just above the swell of my ass.
“You bleed every month without knowing why?”
“I know why.” I’m incandescent with shame. How can he say all this into the open air? “I know about getting pregnant.” The warm air from the train car glides underneath the hem of my dress and strokes me between my legs, where all that separates me from Hades is a thin layer of cotton.