Page 48 of Queen of the Underworld

As if he belonged to her.

It was a curious feeling that flowed through him whenever she spoke like that, making him feel that he was hers. It wasn’t quite pleasure. Not the kind he had sought long ago anyway. It didn’t satisfy his body. He frowned as it struck him.

It satisfied his heart.

It pleased that part of him.

And it made something else dawn on him too. He wanted to be hers. He wanted her to say what she had just uttered and mean it with all her heart. He wanted her to stake a claim on him and to make him belong to her and her alone.

He needed that so fiercely that it made him restless, had his mind whirling with ways he could make her desire and need him in the way he desired and needed her.

“Sit.” He patted the bed again, half lost in his thoughts still.

She folded her arms across her chest, her emerald eyes narrowing on his in a challenge as her delectable lips flattened in a mulish line. “No.”

Her refusal irked him, tainting his pleasing thoughts of making her wild for him, and he glowered at her.

“Many females in this world would be overjoyed to sit with me.” He tasted the lie in those words, and cursed the doubt that pierced his heart like an icy needle to chill the warmth she had stoked in it by calling him hers.

She arched a fine dark red eyebrow at him.

“Then summon one of them if you desire company,” she bit out.

“I desire your company,” he growled and before he could slam a lid on it, the darkness growled at him to make her sit with him, as restless with a need to make that happen as he was, and his shadows had ripped from the stone floor and snapped around her wrist.

She shrieked as they pulled her to him, onto the bed right beside him, so close her sweet scent of lilies teased his senses and the feel of her near him addled his mind more than the ambrosia. When he realised what he had done, he was quick to release her from his shadows. She scooted backwards, away from him, and he reacted on instinct, lunging for her wrist and locking his hand around it to stop her from leaving.

He needed her to stay.

He wanted her close to him.

Wide emerald eyes leaped from his hand to meet his.

The feel of her trembling beneath his touch was a dagger in his chest, punching so deep it pierced the darkness and scattered the shadows. He lowered his gaze to her delicate arm and his hand that tightly gripped it. Another mistake. His biggest one yet.

He struggled to convince himself to release her, had to wage war against his own body and that powerful need to keep her near him. The fierce way she shook gave him the strength to defeat that need, to loosen his grip and release her. She was quick to snatch her arm away and clutch her wrist to her chest. She rubbed it as she shuffled away from him, her eyes never leaving him.

Wary. Frightened.

Her fear was a potent drug, but not in the way fear was when he sensed it in others. When Hades felt it in her, he was overcome with a powerful need to calm her and ease her fears.

To protect her.

He almost chuckled at that, the irony of it all shredding his hope again. He could hardly ease her fears and calm her when he was the cause of them. He could protect her, but he would have to protect her from himself.

Hades looked at her, watching as she rubbed at her reddened wrist, her head bent and eyes lowered as she came to her feet on the other side of the bed.

“I am sorry,” he murmured, not hiding his regret from her, or his apology by speaking a language she didn’t understand. She deserved to hear how deeply he regretted his actions, and he hoped she might also hear that he hadn’t meant to hurt and frighten her. It had been a momentary loss of control.

Her green gaze lifted to him, soft and without a trace of fear in it now. Or hardness. If she lashed out at him, if she wanted to strike at him out of anger, he wouldn’t fight back. He would take whatever punishment she gave him.

But rather than striking him verbally or physically as he expected, she heaved a long sigh and drifted away from him. Turning her back on him.

And that punishment was far too harsh.

He couldn’t bear it.

Hades stared at her back, yearning for her to turn so he could see her face, so he could bathe in her beauty and her warmth, and so he would know he hadn’t messed everything up.

---