Page 51 of Queen of the Underworld

She looked back at him again. “Years.”

“How large is it?” He sipped the ambrosia. “It seemed vast.”

She shrugged. “I am not sure. I found a dreary spot of desolate land and wanted to bring it to life and make it my own, and each time I visit, I add another tree.”

He didn’t miss the glance she gave out of the door as she said ‘desolate land’ or how her expression pinched.

Thanks to the ambrosia, he was feeling kind enough to let her slight tumble from his shoulders rather than hit its mark. If he tried to look at his realm from her perspective, he might even admit it was desolate.

But he wouldn’t.

This realm was his and it was part of him, and he loved it as it was. Hades pulled a face at the ambrosia. Perhaps he was drinking too much. He was beginning to sound like a sentimental fool.

“Then you must have been visiting it frequently and for decades, because even if I allow for the trees spreading naturally, there had to be close to ten thousand in that forest.” He eyed her closely as she frowned over her shoulder at him.

What had made her want to build a place of her own, so far away from Olympus? Most gods and goddesses he knew were happy in that city, lounging around in their temples. Doing nothing.

“I added many at first,” she bit out, as if that accounted for the number of trees he had sensed in her woods. “A thousand at least.”

He angled his head and continued studying her. “You have that much power?”

She pivoted to face him and hit him with a hard look. “Yes, I have that much power! Release the hold you have on it and I will show you how much power I have.”

He had hit a nerve again. He filed it away. His little goddess didn’t like people judging her power. Which made him feel others had belittled it in the past. Which made him angry. Shadows curled around his arms, snaking towards the bottle of ambrosia, but rather than taking a swig to calm the darkness, he set the bottle aside on the stone floor and sat up, the whole of his focus on his queen.

“Persephone,” he husked and held his left hand out to her, willing her to cross the line she had placed between them and take it and show him that this wasn’t a futile endeavour and she could come to want him.

Maybe even love him.

When she remained where she was, denying his need to soothe her hurt, he curled his fingers into a fist and withdrew it. The shadows closed over it, their tender caress a comfort to him, and he glared at his hand as he gathered the words, aware he needed to keep them soft and the sort her Olympian males would employ in a moment like this.

But he couldn’t.

Because he couldn’t stand by and allow others to belittle her, to make her feel she was weak and of little consequence. Zeus had done that to him once, and it had moulded him into a dark male, one who sought to show his might at every opportunity, who refused to allow others to see any trace of softness or warmth. He had spent millennia striving to be the strongest, the most powerful.

The most feared.

“What are you thinking?” she whispered and he lifted his gaze to her, aching to know if she truly desired an answer to that question or whether she had asked it because she felt it was the polite thing to do.

Her green eyes held his, genuine curiosity in them, together with a trace of softness that tugged him into speaking and saying what was on his mind, although he held back the worst of it and focused on her instead.

“I am thinking you should not let others mould you with their words, transforming you into something you are not. I saw your creation, Persephone. I saw your power, and it was… beautiful.”

She looked away from him, turning her cheek to him, and he swore tears lined her lashes before she blinked them away.

Did his words mean that much to her?

Would she have reacted this way if any other male had said them?

“What are you thinking?” he murmured, a need to know her thoughts filling him, a desire to know if they were about him. He frowned at what he was doing. The last time he had cared about someone’s opinion of him, it had ended with him hurt and caged in this dark world, all of the light stolen away from him.

Hades stared at Persephone.

She was light.

She was life.

And he found himself leaning towards her as a flower would, thirsty for her light, craving more of it, as if she was a source of life for him.

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