Page 64 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

She’s always so careful not to drink to intoxication.

“Oh, no.” She folds her arms over her chest, only making her cleavage more obvious. She shakes her head and sways on her heels. “We’re not talking about me.” I want to hide her from the sight of everyone. I don’t understand this jealousy that is takingover me. It’s new, my inability to reason with it. I don’t like it. “Are you listening to me?”

“Are you drunk?” I repeat my question.

“Jesus, Hades.” She rolls her eyes. “Maybe a little. I was having fun with friends since you weren’t home. It’s not a crime.”

I lean into her, so close I can scent her cooling arousal. My anger rises along with a surge of hot jealousy. “You orgasmed in my hand last night, Persephone.” Her face flares a hot shade of red. “I sucked the blood of your innocence from my fingers and tonight, I find you nearly fucking a kid on the dance floor of my club.”

Her mouth drops. “I wasn’t nearly fucking him. And he’s not a kid.”

I don’t think she knows just how on edge I am.

“You were aroused,” I accuse.

Her already dropped jaw drops again. “Screw you, Hades. I’m done. I quit. This isn’t—this isn’t worth?—”

It takes me less than five seconds to throw her little body over my shoulder and step into the elevator. She thinks she’s quitting. She’s not leaving me, even if it means I have to steal her to the Underworld and keep her a prisoner for the rest of her eternal life.

Fucking woman.

It looks like the scheming women in my life might get what they want after all. They’ve woken the ancient and barbaric side of me, and now I’m notsure I can rein him in.

Fucking women.

“Put me down you—” I don’t wait for whatever names she thinks to call me. I just land a quick palm to her ass, the crack of it like lightning in the small space.

Persephone screams. Rage and something else flood her little body, but she’s no match for me. Not now. Not yet, before she realizes the power she’s capable of.

“You don’t have the right to touch me like that.”

“I have every right,” I growl as the doors roll open to the Tower penthouse. Three sets of stone-cold eyes glare at me, but none of the dogs move to intervene.

Before I set Persephone, kicking and screaming on her own two feet, I disable the elevator. She’ll need a code to escape, and unlucky for her, she doesn’t have it.

With the elevator now inactive, I set her on her on the heels that make her legs look quite literally delectable, and stalk away from her.

The sound of her finger slamming into the button has a deadly smirk tugging at my lips. It widens into a smile when she lets out a loud shriek of frustration.

“What the hell is going on, Hades?” she demands. The slap of her heels sound over the tile as she follows me into the kitchen. “You can’t just keep me where I don’t want to be.”

She’s full of shit.

I’m beyond pissed and I need air. Like I knew shewould, she follows me up the stairs to the rooftop patio. Noc, Jas, and Prim follow her.

The sky is a canvas of stars in ebony. Usually, one so close to the sky where Zeus and many of the other Gods and Goddesses have made their kingdom—the kingdom in which I am banned—would invite unsolicited visits of such Gods. Not me. I’ve been careful to ensure that such things would not occur, even going so far as to mock Zeus his inability to interrupt me here, so close to his own realm.

The flames that burst from the top of the tower, a shower of gold ribboned with blood red, were pulled straight from the deepest bowels of Tartarus. Not even the Gods are able to touch this flame unscathed. It is a power that is mine alone, this ability to walk in the fires unscorched. Mine and hers.

As Cerberus is of me, a companion I crafted in the beginning of my banishment to the realm of Death, when I’d been lonely and angry and filled with resentment, my dogs, as well, are immune.

I stroll to the bar, pouring wine into a glass. I can still smell her cooled arousal, the remnants of it clinging like dew to her skin.

“I’m talking to you, Hades, look at me.”

If I look at her, I’m liable to whisk her away forever. I have a feeling she won’t forgive me quite the same way that she did in ancient times. Something is different now. I sensed it from the very beginning.

If I take her, force her, I might succeed in capturingher body, but I will lose the ability to ever possess her heart. And her soul? It would be lost to me. There, but eternally out of reach.

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