Page 122 of Queen of the Underworld

One of her maidens walked into view.

“Despina!” Persephone called to the young woman, her hope soaring as she finally spied an ally among a sea of enemies intent on destroying everything. “Help me.”

Only the brunette refused to look at her.

She cut Persephone’s heart to pieces as she turned away from her and went back along the corridor, disappearing from view again.

Persephone stumbled to a halt, her ears ringing as Despina’s betrayal swept through her to rob her of her strength. Was no one in Olympus on her side?

She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling cold to her marrow, and alone. She had never felt so alone.

The guards caught her again, jostling her, but she was barely aware of them as they seized her and marched her towards her room. Her ears rang, numbness swallowing her as the last of her hope bled from her.

They pushed her into her room and the door slammed behind her, and she looked at it and then at the windows that had been boarded up, leaving her in near darkness, only faint light that seeped through cracks in the wood chasing it back so she could see.

The irony wasn’t lost on her as she sank onto a chair and listened to her mother barking orders at the guards stationed outside the door and her boarded-up windows.

This room that she had been so desperate to return to felt more like a prison than the tower ever had.

And her mother had torn her down and shattered her faster than Hades ever could have managed.

She clutched her arms as she held herself, aching to see him and wishing it was his arms that held her so tightly, keeping her together when she was close to falling apart.

He wasn’t the monster.

Her mother was.

And now, she would be forced to wed another.

Chapter 36

Hades stalked across the black lands, his dark gaze narrowed on the temple ahead of him and shadows streaming around his feet. His talons flexed, making the tired muscles in his arms ache, but he couldn’t halt the action. His mood was too black. Too grim. The fight that had broken out in a region far from the temple had been a merciful reprieve from his torturous thoughts, and he had savoured crushing his foes with his bare hands and his bident, battling in close quarters with his enemies for the first time in a long time.

Seeking to satisfy the dark, wicked craving for bloodshed and violence that continued to roar inside him, and had his thoughts twisting down wretched paths that made him have to fight his own body.

His feet veered off course of their own will, and he was halfway to the main temple and the group of guards that waited outside it before he caught himself.

He growled and gnashed fangs at what he had almost done.

Fighting his own men now?

Persephone had only been gone a day, but he had sunk swiftly into the abyss during her absence, far quicker than he had anticipated. Instead of the slow slide into the darkness that he had thought would happen, he had plunged into it the moment she had disappeared from view, and it had been quick to seize him and drag him deeper still.

“Persephone,” he murmured, breathing her name with all the love and the need that burned inside him, an inferno that seared him with constant thoughts of her.

With an undying need to see her right that moment.

Had he done enough to win her heart and ensure she returned to him now that she was back in her bright, warm city of Olympus?

He wasn’t sure that he had.

He shifted course and headed for his chambers, his body and his heart feeling heavier by the second. He could have done many things better. He could have approached her differently, being gentler with her from the beginning. Warmer. He half-smiled and scoffed. If only he had been able to remember how to be such things back then.

He still wasn’t sure he had ever known how to be gentle and tender.

In fact, he was sure it was Persephone who had taught him to be such things, showing him that it was all right for him to feel warmer emotions. He might be a king with a realm to rule and keep under control, but he was still a man. He could still love and be loved in a way all other men in this world experienced. Needed even.

He huffed as he trudged into his chambers, pushing the twin wooden doors open, and paused on the threshold of the black-walled room to look back beyond the columned terrace.

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