Page 8 of A Touch of Chaos

“I want my husband,” she said, and a brutal cry tore from her throat. She covered her mouth as if to contain it and then vanished, teleporting to her office at Alexandria Tower where she’d left Hades tangled in a web of her magic. The evidence of her choice remained—the buckled floor, the broken vines. She had known he would not be here. She had known that her magic was only strong enough to hold him for a short time. Still, she’d held on to a small kernel of misguided hope.

She knelt on the broken ground and touched the dark and severed vines. As she reached out her hand, she was reminded of the weight that was missing there.

A burst of Hermes’s warm magic alerted her that she was no longer alone.

“Theseus took my ring,” Persephone said.

“Then we can guess what happened,” he said.

Hades could track the ring, and he would have used it to locate her, but where was it now, and could they trace it?

“I shouldn’t have left him,” she said.

She should have called to him while she’d waitedwith an ailing Lexa and Harmonia at the hotel, but she had been too afraid of the consequences. Even then, would it have mattered? She had no idea at what point he’d been led astray.

“You did what was necessary,” Hermes said.

“What if it wasn’t?” she asked, though no matter how she reflected on it, she still felt like she’d had no other choice. There had been too many threats at play—divine justice and Sybil’s well-being—except that all Persephone wondered now was if she’d assigned Hades to some other terrible fate.

“It doesn’t matter,” Hermes said. “What’s done is done.”

She knew he was right. Their only option was to move forward.

She rose to her feet and then turned to face the god who had become one of her closest friends.

“Find my husband, Hermes. Do whatever you must.”

He studied her for a moment, his beautiful face somehow soft and severe at the same time. “Do you know what you are asking, Sephy?”

She took a step closer, holding his golden gaze.

“I want blood, Hermes. I will fill rivers with it until he is found.”

Theseus would soon discover that he had flown too close to the sun.

Hermes grinned. “I like vengeful Sephy,” he said. “She’s scary.”

Her gaze shifted to the reddish glow just beyond her door. She left her office and stepped into the waiting area where the view overlooked New Athens.

Light burned the horizon, and Persephone thoughtit looked a lot like fire. She had never thought she would see the sun as a threat, but today it felt like the dawn of a new and terrible world.

The irony was that no one else would know the horror of her night.

Today, mortals would wake to see that the snow had ceased to fall, that the clouds that had burdened the sky for weeks had parted. The media would run with stories of how the wrath of the Olympians had ended and assume that the battle outside Thebes was what brought Demeter’s storm to an end.

“Is it wrong to feel angry that they will not know what horror we lived through last night?”

“No,” said Hermes. “But I do not think that is what makes you angry right now.”

She turned her head to the side, but he was still a step or two behind her.

“What do you know about my anger?”

“You do not like when beliefs are fueled by falsehoods. You see it as an injustice,” he said.

He was not wrong.

It was the reason Theseus and his organization of Impious demigods and mortals angered her so much, and Helen, her once-loyal assistant, had only helped perpetuate those lies with her news articles. And what made her stories so believable was that they were anchored in just enough truth.

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