Page 9 of Hades and Persephone: Keeper of Sins

“He calls my name. That’s it.”

His eyes are so impossibly dark as they search mine. When his lips part, I wet my own. His eyes drop to chase the movement, flickering with something that snares the breath in my chest. It looks an awful lot like hunger. A ravenous, starved, dangerous hunger.

I excuse it away with innocent ignorance. I’m not experienced enough to know what hunger looks like. Much less hunger on a man like him.

“Whatisyour name?” Am I wrong, or has his voicedropped in pitch? And why does it suddenly ring with the familiar undercurrents of the voice I’ve only ever heard in my head?

My name falls between us on a breathless breath. “Persephone.”

Chapter

Six

Hades

The urge tolift her into my arms and steal her away to the Underworld is strong. So strong, I have to shove my hands into my pockets. Such an act did not bode well for me the first time. I suspect that tossing this lovely creature, my wife reborn, over my shoulder and carrying her away to a world she knows only as damnation, would go over even less successfully now. In this new time where people walk the earth unaware of the Gods that continue to rule above, around, and, well, under them.

When did we stop demanding reverence from thepitiful people born in our image? How was it we allowed the birth of new gods and their religions to amass the following they possess today, essentially wiping away our memory and labeling it myth?

Even now, Olympus grows restless. Inside the seas, Poseidon rages. His fury has washed away entire cities, and yet they remain ignorant, praying to a God above as they once prayed to my grandfather, Uranus, before Cronus plucked him from the sky to cut the flow of his seed and end his reign of misery. Before I stripped him of flesh and bone and cast him to the sky of a world within my own realm, a cage of my creation, a prison.

I imagine it now, though. Taking her for my own. Sinking inside her. Possessing her.

My blood heats like the fires of Tartarus, burning me from the inside as desire swirls. An unchecked storm of chaos and need threatening to devour me as I was once devoured by the insecurities of my father, freed only by the ego of my brother.

I can see myself taking her, claiming her, even now. In complete disregard for the way the people would watch, would scream their outrage at the injustice of her stripped freedom. As though they have a right to this freedom our laziness has allowed them to, falsely, believe they possess.

But no. I must pause. I must wait. I must do it differently this time.

This time I will not force her to take a stand at myside. I will not force myself inside her body. I had been a young God when I’d allowed my obsession with her beauty to morph me into a being of desire, stripped of all rational control.

I am not young now. Now, I am ancient.

And the goal is not simply her body. It is the entirety of her heart, and the eternal life of her soul. For if I’d had her soul the first time, they never could have done what they’d done. Never could have stripped me of all that was her, casting me to live what felt like an eternity of torment without her.

No, now that I’ve found her, I will not rest until I possess all the parts of her. Until the soul I’ve loved for eternity is stitched to the very fabric that weaves mine, knotted in such a way that even the Fates cannot unravel the ties that bind us.

Her lips part, little tongue teasing out to wet full lips stained a lovely shade of rose pink. The urge to lean in and capture her mouth beneath mine, to taste her lips, is like a stab through the gut.

It’s been too long.

She speaks. “I don’t know why I told you my name is Persephone. No one calls me that.”

“Is it not your name?” I already know it is, know it’s her. There are slight physical differences, of course, to the young Goddess I’d claimed as my wife eons ago. But I’ve ached for her memory long enough to see that within this familiar, lovely body, underthis creamy flesh, behind those emerald eyes, is the same soul—theonlysoul I’ve ever truly loved.

She has finally, after too long, been reborn.

And just in time for the stirrings of an Olympic war.

I feel my jaw pulse, a rare physical allowance into the truth of my emotions. Her eyes widen in response, my perceptive little wife.

Of course, she doesn’t know she’s mine. But it won’t be long.

As though sensing the building magnitude of my ageless obsession, she takes a quick step back from me. The urge to chase, to devour every ounce of space that dares take form between us, is so strong that standing still nearly takes me to my knees.

She lifts a delicate hand to push lovely waves of white-blonde hair behind an elven tipped ear. A feature she shares with Demeter even now, born of another.

Her voice is soft, and I imagine the way her sighs and cries will fall when I root myself deep within her. “It is my name. But, um—” She swallows. I make her nervous.Why do I like that?“Everyone calls me Annie.”

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