Page 30 of Queen of the Underworld

Defeated by a mere goddess.

This endeavour was pointless.

Nothing he did would make her want him. His future didn’t hold a loving queen. It held only hurt, a wound in his chest that would fester and destroy him, and his realm with him.

He had been one with the darkness for centuries, had embraced it, harnessed it and savoured it, and he was beginning to recall why he had surrendered to it so easily over the years.

Because when he was darkness incarnate, he had no weaknesses.

No soft emotions.

“What is the name of this goddess who seeks my head and attempts to cleave my heart from my breast?” he rumbled in the language of the Underworld, and then added in her tongue, “Tell me your name. You know who I am. I will know who you are.”

Rather than shying away from the order or falling mute, she tipped her chin up.

“Persephone.” Her green eyes hardened like blades, and he had the feeling they weren’t meant to slash at him. They were to protect her. She expected him to say something cruel in response to discovering the identity of his queen.

No. It was more than that.

She expected him to mock her maybe. Discard her? As if she was unworthy of a place at his side, when he was the one unworthy of a place at hers.

He searched his mind, running through the gods of Olympus, and vaguely recalled mention of her. He was sure his brother had brought her up before, long ago. She was young, and he believed she had power over nature, which meant it was a good thing that he had stripped that power from her.

“You have heard of me. I can see it.” She kept her chin up, but doubt clouded her eyes, laced with fear.

Not fear of him, but fear of his opinion of her.

Hades was no stranger to mental warfare, and he was beginning to suspect someone had been slowly attacking her for centuries, whittling away at her defences and stripping her strength from her. Rather than answering her, because he wasn’t sure what kind of response would please her given her current inclination to see him as a monster rather than a man, he set his mind to rectifying one of the mistakes he had made with her.

Desiring to reforge the broken pieces of his hope by having her look at him with gratitude rather than scorn.

He held his hand out above the stone slab he had foolishly, cruelly believed would be adequate for her, treating her as he would a prisoner rather than a queen, and focused. Power slowly built within him, feeding off his strength and draining him as he murmured the words of a sort of ward in his mind. Rather than sealing or shielding something, this one created instead. As his strength waned, his mood darkened, turning irritable as her words churned in his head, mocking him.

By the time the soft bedding appeared, covering the stone slab, he wanted to growl and snap his fangs at her, or leave.

His gaze darted to her, the tethers holding his temper in check in danger of fraying and snapping as he gave in to his need to see her reaction, the part of him that expected her to turn on him or say something cold at war with the part that wanted to see that gratitude in her eyes.

Even when he knew he wouldn’t.

Surprise and curiosity shone in her eyes, but they were short-lived. Whatever questions rose to the tip of her tongue, she denied them.

He could see it as her expression hardened and she folded her arms over her chest, her fingers digging into her biceps with enough force to leave white marks around them on her skin.

“I do not need a bed,” she bit out. “I am not planning to stay. Let me go. My mother will be frantic by now, and Zeus will be aware I am missing. I do not know why you have really brought me here, but I want to leave.”

“Why?” he snapped, rounding on her and expecting her to bring up her mother again or tell him it was because he had abducted her.

She said something far worse.

She looked over her slender shoulders at the world beyond the balcony and shook her head, causing her tangled waves of scarlet to sway against her skin. “This world is so dark… so stifling. It is so grim. As grim as those on Olympus paint it in the tales they share at the feasts. It is everything opposite to my home… It is not light nor beautiful. I cannot understand how anyone can live in this dreary, dead realm.”

Hades’s temper didn’t just snap its tethers.

It obliterated them.

Anger boiled through him, a rage so dark he couldn’t hold it back, her words ringing in his ears to mock and attack him, to stoke the fury that rolled over him like a black wave.

He was across the room in an instant, his gauntleted hands closing over her arms to rip a startled gasp from her, and had shoved her against the wall a heartbeat later. He towered over her, shadows pouring from beneath his boots as he quaked, as the world outside trembled in response to his rage, his hurt—a world that was part of him.

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