Page 54 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

“I don’t need stitches.”

“Uh, I think you might, Hades, it was dee—” Her words cut off as she pulls the towel from my palm to stare in shock at the closed wound. Shesputters, “H—how?”

“I told you it wasn’t deep.” Alright, well, that’s a lie. It was deep. It’s always deep.

Her eyes flicker from my palm to mine and back to the now closed wound. Her lips part, close, and part again. She whispers, “I don’t understand.”

I pull my palm from between her hands, even though the loss of her touch—any touch she gives me—is physically painful. The last weeks with her have been damn near torture. After centuries without her, all I want to do is lose myself inside her.

My instinct is to take her. To claim her.

I’ve been fighting the most basic instincts I have since the moment I saw her standing in that room, lost in my art. The war that has raged inside me is a war I fear I may soon lose.

Lifting the black-boned skull, I mix the blood and ash as Persephone grapples with the impossibility she’s witnessed, desperate to shed reason on the impossible.

Finally, after a moment, she says what anyone would say. “I suppose I misjudged.”

I’m thankful the wound isn’t clean, still crusted with blood. If she saw a fully healed scar at this moment, I think her understanding of the world as she knows it would shatter.

Humans don’t deal well with the fabric of their reality being unravelled. It tends to result in a fracturing of the brain in such a way they never fully recover.

Of course, Persephone currently possesses a human body, but she has the soul of a Goddess. I am confident that she would rise above her human fragilities—confident, but not certain. Therefore, I don’t intend to test her. Not yet.

I do not wish to break her.

I say nothing as I lift my brush, and begin to swipe angrily at the enchanted canvas. I’ll soon have to return to the Underworld so that I may retrieve more enchanted canvases from Hecate. Her refusal to travel to Earth grows more tiresome with every century that passes. I’m not sure, with her depleted strength, that she would make the pass through the portal anyway. The Underworld is a hungry beast who feeds on all with Godly powers.

As I work, I feel Persephone standing close, watching. Weakness I loathe spreads like poison in my veins. My power, mystrength, is syphoned to feed my realm. Every day, I grow weaker. I am forced to paint the prisons in which I keep the Titans more and more frequently, the wards that bind them splintering faster than the time before.

It’s only a matter of time now that I have her back. The Underworld will remember the Goddess who breathed life into her darkness as the God remembers the Goddess who bloomed life in the wake of his rage. She will feed us all.

I don’t know when I did it, but I stripped of my shirt as I always do when I paint. The touch of her small, soft hand on my shoulder bleeds power I devour deep into the marrow of my black bones.

Inhaling through my nose, flamesburst in my eyes. I blink them away before I twist on the stool I perch on. Concern paints darkness over the shining emerald of her eyes, and her rose petal lips are parted enough that I taste the sweet wine she sipped with dinner on her breath.

I fight the shudder that rolls through my body on the wake of an intense desire to claim her. Invade her.

Fuck her.

“You look—” She shakes her head and pulls her hand from my shoulder. Her brows knit. “Hades, are you well?”

At the loss of her touch, the spike of power I’d felt inside me dulls.Interesting.

“Will you do something for me, Persephone?”

She considers. I watch her pink tongue slip out to wet her lips. Something flares in her eyes a moment before she agrees, “Anything.”

She doesn’t know what she’s saying. If she knew what I was, she wouldn’t make such liberal promises.

“Come.” Hooking her around the waist, I pull her between myself and the canvas dripping with shades of black, red, and gold. She looses a tiny gasp when I pull her plump behind between my legs to perch on the stool. The swell of her ass is fitted tight to my groin, and I can’t help it, I harden.

“Hades.”

Fuck me, when she says my name like that.I’m already on the edge.

“Paint with me.”

Words shudder from her to fall into space that crackles with power and tension. “I can’t paint.”

---