Page 7 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

“Of course, he is.” Minthe smiles, a wicked and lovely thing. It falters as she scoops the ground dust into a jar that she seals carefully with alid. She turns to face me and I wait, knowing what is coming before it dares to leave her lips. “What are you doing, Hades?”

“We’ve discussed this, Minthe.”

“No, you’ve told me what youwon’ttell me. Why aren’t they in Tartarus? Why haven’t you told the Olympians?”

I feel the fire flash in my gaze, and watch as Minthe cringes. But only slightly. She’s been with me too long to truly fear me.

I move away from my latest prison. The painting in which Oceanus will spend his foreseeable future. I’ve had to rehome the Titans far sooner than I’d like, the binds of my prisons weakening like the rest of me. I settle behind the sprawling desk I’ve had crafted from the same obsidian that veins the white stone of this tower.

I pin Minthe with eyes the color of coal. “Hang the painting when it is dry.”

Her mouth tightens. I raise a brow when it parts, because I think she’s about to give me attitude.That just won’t do.

She is saved when my attention cuts to the swinging door of my office. My teeth grind behind my scowl. “Has everyone forgotten who I am tonight?”

Leuce, braver even than Minthe, struts into my space. She heads straight for Minthe, gripping her around the neck and pulling her in for a deep, penetrating kiss.

I feel no arousal as I watch. I very rarely feel anything at all anymore.

Aside from anguish and rage, that is.

My pitifully eternal soul weeps. The echo of my grief screaming her name within the endless depths of me.

Leuce breaks the kiss and turns to me with a wide, cat-like smile. Her gray-green eyes, the color of a white poplar’s leaves bleached by heat, flash as they meet mine.

I feel an unusual flutter in my chest.

A quickening of hope.

She strolls casually across the room. Her heels click with the heavy beat of my pulse before she settles her palms on my desk, silver nails sharp against the obsidian slab. She leans close, her voice like dripping honey.

She tells me, “I found her.”

Chapter

Five

Persephone

My ears are still ringingfrom the last scream of my name in his familiar voice. Never, not ever in my life has it ever sounded so loud as it did only minutes ago. The grief. The rage-infused anguish. It’s so close I feel I might reach out and touch it.Him. I fear I might walk into it with every step I take as I put distance between me and the girls.

My vision bursts between sharp and blurred images as I move, disoriented and panicked. Maybe I really am losing my mind. Maybe I do have something deeply, inherently wrong with me. I’m hearing voices. No, not voices. A single, specificvoice. But does it matter how many there are when it’s a constant in my mind?

With a shaking hand, I reach out to steady myself against the wall. I’ve found myself in a big, hexagonal shaped, windowless room. There is only a single arched entrance from which I came. I’m not sure how I ended up here. If it was a hall I took or stairs.

I’d been fleeing, I realize. Fleeing that which I have no hope of escaping. My own mind is a treacherous place. A prison I was born to, and I fear it’s a prison I’ll die within.

People chatter as they roam the room, pausing to consider the art that has been hung on the walls. My skin feels dewy, either from the escape I attempted to make or the nerves that thrash inside with the quick violence of a whip.

My knees wobble as my gaze shifts from the people in the room, to the painting closest to me. Something about it has my pulse quickening. It pulls me closer, as though the talons in the painting have stretched from the canvas to claw at the threads of my ravaged soul, tugging me nearer. It’s a gory piece, there’s no denying it.

It’s not the style that usually grips me, for I am typically drawn to the heartsore pain of a lost love. A tragic end to a beauty that never got the chance tobe. My heart is a glutton for the worst kind of punishment within the strokes that caress a canvas. Always seekingthe romance that never blooms. The love that never flies. The passion that, tragically, dies.

This painting is not that. It is raw, however. Upon a more intimate inspection, I see that it’s not just talons that reach out from the painting, as though to snare the viewer. But it’s the leafless limbs of a starved tree, billowing in a violent wind. Behind the curled talons is a thing of darkness. It is faceless, boneless, and yet, somehow, humanoid. Beyond the disembodied darkness, torn pieces of flesh and shattered bone burst outward to shimmer in the vastness of a deep ebony streaked with depthless blue, that I realize in horror, depicts an endless night of suffering. The stars are the flesh and bone that have been torn from—what? A dark soul? And holding it all together, imprisoning a galaxy of torment, is the taloned tree that roots to nothing, swimming in a lifeless, endless eternity.

It's tragic. Utterly, completely,painfully tragic.

Something slashes inside me. It’s quick and unsettlinglynot mine. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. I only know that it feels like grief. Like I’m looking into the core of a living thing I know. A living thing that is of me…even though that can’t be. It’s just a painting.

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