Page 34 of Queen of the Underworld

“Perhaps I am better off here,” she muttered, and there was the bitterness she had aimed for and completely missed before. It didn’t last long before it morphed into a bone-deep sort of despair, one that had plagued her for years, steadily building inside her until it had become oppressive and part of her, like a festering organ that existed only to spread poison through her. Her mother only cared about being rid of her, and the other gods and goddesses barely even acknowledged her if they saw her in the city. “No one in all the realms would miss me if I just disappeared.”

Hades looked over his shoulder in her direction, too far away for her to see if he was looking at her, but she felt it. His gaze was a warming caress, one that was strangely soothing, and he lingered, even coming to face her.

As if he had felt the depth of her misery and felt compelled to do something about it—even something as minor as making her feel she wasn’t alone.

“Would you miss me?” she whispered. “I want to say that you would… but I do not know if you would miss me or yourqueen.”

And he had stayed away for days.

A male who missed his female would not stay away for days. He would be eager to see her and would return as soon as possible. She had watched him pass between the large black temple to her left and the barracks to the right many times over the last few days, and he had never looked at the tower. She had even spied him at a vast distance, a speck of black exiting a columned building set into a mountain.

Screams frequently echoed from that building.

If she had to guess, she would say it was Tartarus, a prison that was home to the titans.

To Hades’s father.

He kept his own father imprisoned, but she could hardly blame him. Zeus had often recounted the tale of his own heroism and how he had saved his siblings from their father, Cronus, and had led their side in the war against the titans, ensuring their victory.

“How different would that tale be if you told it?” she murmured to Hades and he turned his back on her, continuing towards the barracks. She sighed. “I imagine it would be quite different. I am starting to imagine all the tales told about you would be quite different if they came from your lips and not the whispers of others.”

His lips.

Persephone’s cheeks heated as the way he had kissed her flashed across her mind, how fierce his lips had been as they had claimed hers and how demanding too. And the way his tongue had brushed the seam of her mouth, enticing her into opening for him.

“Stop it,” she muttered and gritted her teeth. “For all you know, all men kiss as he does.”

She doubted that.

Men exited the square building and lined up before him, and she fell back into watching him, studying the dark king of the Underworld and seeking out more pieces of the puzzle that would help her understand him. A better use of her time would be finding a way out of the tower.

Persephone made the mistake of looking at the only method of escape she had found during her previous attempts.

The several-hundred-foot drop to the black ground had her heart lodging in her throat and she shook her head. Just the thought of falling was enough to make her push back from the balustrade and edge towards the door. She stopped when her spine met the doorframe, her heart thundering as she fought to calm it. She was not going to leap. While it wouldn’t kill her, it would break bones. If she broke more than one leg, or her spine, escape would be impossible and Hades would catch her.

She could only imagine how furious he would be.

She pressed her hand to the black stone beside her and focused, feeling the power that flowed through her tower. She had studied wards as a child, and had learned to decipher many of them to pick them apart and undo them, but she had never encountered a ward like the one Hades had placed on her prison. It was intricate, and while she understood parts of it, many others were unknown to her.

Which meant she couldn’t break it.

She sighed, studying the ward anyway, something she regularly did, devoting several hours a day to attempting to decipher it. It wasn’t the containment ward that she focused on either. It was the other, subtler one she had gone searching for when the void inside her had begun to irritate her.

A void that was steadily growing colder the longer she was without her powers.

They were there. She was sure of it. But it was as if they were covered in layers of something, muted and, not numbed, but it felt close to it. She pressed her hand to her chest and studied the feeling. They felt just beyond her reach and no matter how hard she strained, how fiercely she tried to summon them, she couldn’t draw them back to her.

Hades barked an order at the men in his strange language and moved along the rows, stopping from time to time to bite out hard-sounding words. He even hauled several of the soldiers from their positions. Another man who had to be a commander took them from him and marched them to one side of the regiment. By the time he was done, a group of a dozen men had formed there, and they moved away with their heads bent. Had they done something wrong?

Hades disappeared.

Persephone studied his lands a little longer, her thoughts slowly growing sluggish again, and when the crimson sky darkened towards black, and Hades hadn’t reappeared, she went back inside.

And eyed the bed.

It beckoned her, far more tempting now than it had been, with its bedding that was plump and appeared soft. She trailed around the room, trying to resist it, and stopped near the steps that spiralled downwards. She looked from them to the bed. Either she could attempt to decipher the wards on the door again or she could snatch some sleep while Hades was gone.

Sleep won.

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