Page 29 of Queen of the Underworld

“You did not sleep?” That question came out hard and demanding, pushed from his lips by his anger at the thought she might have spent the days they had been apart as untouched by the restful arms of sleep as he had been. “Have you not slept at all?”

Had it eluded her for the same reasons it had eluded him?

Had thoughts of their kisses kept her awake too?

He stared at her, willing her to answer those unspoken questions, surprised by how desperately he needed to know the answer to them. Hope built inside him. Hope that she might want him as fiercely as he wanted her.

She cut it down by throwing her hands up in the air, the sudden action making her wobble on her feet, and defiantly barking, “Could you sleep if you were in my situation? I am a prisoner. Held in a cell. Kept here against my will.”

Hades’s face slowly pinched in a scowl as she hit him with each word, wielding them as he would his bident, cutting at him with them. The part of him that wanted to warn her to take more care with how she spoke to him fell mute as she mumbled something under her breath, something he was sure she hadn’t wanted him to hear as her cheeks pinkened and she cast her gaze away from him as he glared at her.

“My bed is also a stone slab.”

He slid his gaze towards the bed he had provided for her and the anger he felt turned towards himself instead as he took stock of it.

He went to it, partly because he felt she was questioning his powers since he hadn’t created some bedding for her, something soft to cushion her fragile frame, and partly because he didn’t want her to suffer.

Which struck him hard and had him glancing her way.

His mood only darkened as he realised she was moving in time with him, shuffling away to keep the distance between them steady, and fear was building in her gaze now. A gaze that kept darting between him and the bed.

The corners of his lips turned downwards.

She thought he would force her onto it.

He had done his best to appear more like other males, and had been moving towards the bed to make it better for her, providing her with the comfort she needed, and she had presumed he had some nefarious agenda and would do something as dark and despicable as taking her against her will.

He glowered at her for that one.

The bitter anger that had been building within him, stoking the darkness and drawing it to the fore despite his attempts to calm it and remain in control—to remain gentle—reached a crescendo as her gaze shifted and she stared at his pointed ears.

Hades pivoted to face her and snarled, “What?”

She tensed and her hands leaped behind her back as she swiftly angled her face away from him, but those curious emerald eyes roamed back to him, and lingered.

And she surprised him all over again as she bravely found her voice rather than remaining meek as many would have in the face of his anger.

“Your eyes are different again today… and they change in strange ways… and your ears… I have never seen pointed ears on creatures other than beasts,” she said, the barest hint of a wobble in her voice that told him she expected him to growl and snarl and snap at her in response to her observation.

Like the monster she had portrayed him to be.

“Never seen pointed ears on creatures other than beasts,” he growled in the language of the Underworld, keeping his one-sided conversation secret from her. “The goddess thinks me a monster. A hideous one at that by her account.”

The hope that had been foolishly building inside him shattered and he had to gather the pieces to claw it back together, unwilling to give up. A more sensible male might do that. Give up. Hades huffed. As sensible as he was, he would not give up. He should give up. He cast that whispered doubt from his mind. He would also not listen to the darkness. Not today.

He couldn’t afford to let it take control.

The goddess was intent on provoking him though, rousing the darkness and feeding it.

She frowned at him, her fine dark red eyebrows knitting for a moment before they furrowed slightly and her voice softened. “You are not like the males of Olympus. They do not have such features. The sight of them—”

“Scared you,” he snarled in their common tongue, feeling much like the beast she thought him to be as he stared her down, struggling against the darkness as it mocked him, as it dripped poison in his ear to fill his mind with a single thought—she would never choose a male like him.

And by the gods, that was a blade in his heart that twisted and stabbed, and severed pieces of it from him.

He tried to conceal his hurt from her, bringing up a wall of darkness like a shield, a barrier of impenetrable ice around his feelings that would stop her from wounding him again.

The great god-king of the Underworld.

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