Page 60 of Hades

If he had asked her how she had felt back then, that day when he had revealed himself to her, would her answer have pleased him rather than pained him?

Had she felt as drawn to him in that enchanting forest of her creation as he had been to her?

He loosed a low growl, the thought she might have been rousing heat in his blood that scorched him, increasing his need to find her so he could ask her. He wanted to know how she had felt. He wanted to know if the day they had met, when he had snatched her from the mortal world and dragged her into the Underworld, was a fond memory of hers.

If it was, all the guilt and shame that constantly lingered in his heart and tormented him might go away, freeing him of its chains.

But to know the answer to that question, he needed to find her.

Hades closed the small distance between him and Cerberus and laid his right hand on the muzzle of his middle head. He locked eyes with that head, his heart filling with pain as he thought about Persephone, as the crushing need to find her swelled inside him to tear at his strength.

Words flitted through his mind, coming and going just as quickly, and try as he might to grasp the ones he felt he needed to say to keep Cerberus on his side and convince the beast to help him, they slipped through his fingers like smoke.

Because he couldn’t wound Cerberus, and asking him to open the gate—a gate only he could open now, which was part of the reason Hades had moved him to the secret realm, where he would be safe—would do just that.

Cerberus feared it, his memories of the last time he was here clearly painting dark and terrifying images in his mind. To make the beast go any closer to it would be to hurt him deeply, enough that it might shatter the trust between them, destroying a bond that was thousands of years old.

Despite the darkness that seeped through his veins, despite the desperate need to find Persephone that fuelled him, he couldn’t do it.

He couldn’t be so ruthless and cold.

The right corner of his lips quirked at that, a flicker of sorrow flaring in his heart as he looked at Cerberus, followed by deep despair.

“How she has changed me,” he murmured to Cerberus, never more aware of how different he was now.

Before he had met Persephone, he wouldn’t have hesitated to force Cerberus to do as he commanded. He would have been cold and cruel towards the beast, readily breaking their bond to gain what he wanted. He stroked Cerberus’s muzzle, feeling something that wasn’t like him.

Uncertainty.

He wasn’t sure what to do.

His options were limited.

There was his chariot, he supposed. He could punch through the veil between the Underworld and the mortal one with it, as he had many times before.

Hades looked over his shoulder at it and frowned.

He was no longer alone.

Keras stood on the other side of the chariot, with Enyo, Thanatos and Calindria flanking him, and Ares and Megan stood behind him.

Persephone had told him many times that Keras was much like him, but Hades had never seen it before now. The black look in his eldest son’s green eyes—eyes he had always thought were like Persephone’s—matched the darkness that writhed within Hades as he realised something.

Keras had come to stop him.

Shadows twined around Hades’s legs, as dark and restless as the ones that snaked up Keras’s, and as Hades turned to face his family, he felt as if he was looking into a mirror. Keras was all darkness and malevolence, his features sharp with anger and the tips of his ears pointed, and there were dark blotches marring his irises.

And a faint crimson glow in his pupils.

One that provoked the darkness within Hades.

An urge to put his children in their places before they could seek to do the same to him surged through him, the darkness swift to consume him as it overwhelmed the remnants of light in his soul, pushing it back down into the abyss.

Hades flexed his fingers, his sharp nails slicing through the air as easily as they would slice through the flesh of anyone who tried to stand in his way.

Keras slanted a look at Enyo. “Is this what I look like when the darkness takes me?”

Enyo’s jade eyes were soft with understanding as she met his gaze. “You are very much your father’s son.”

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