Page 11 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

I flinch. He hasn’t brought up the voice since I started working for him. Sucking in a deep breath, I nod. “When I told the truth about the voice, I felt punished. Even after I pretended that it stopped, there were people in my life who never looked at me the same. People who looked at me like I was dangerous.Like I concealed something ugly inside me, just under the surface. Like that ugly thing was only ever a moment away from tearing through my flesh to destroy them.”

“They’re fools. All of them.”

I squint at him. “You really think that?”

“I do.”

“How?” I shake my head at a loss. “How can you know that I hear a voice in my head and not think what everyone else thinks? How can you not think I’m crazy? How can you not be afraid of me?”

Hades just looks at me. For a long while, nothing but silence beats between us. “You haven’t mentioned the voice. Do you still hear him?”

I frown, because I haven’t. “No. I haven’t heard him since the night I met you.”

Between us, the air is charged with my admission. I can’t help but study the man sitting next to me. I can’t help but wonder if he could somehow be the reason I’ve stopped hearing the voice. I wonder—could his presence in my life be blocking it? Could this man somehow be a buffer to my insanity?

He murmurs, “You’re thinking.”

My eyes snap to his.He sees more of me than anyone has ever bothered to see.

“How do you know?”

“I know you.”

I feel breathless again. Inside my chest, my heart is racing. But I say, “You don’t.”

“I do, Persephone.” Hades shifts beside me. His arm brushes mine, and heat swarms my bloodstream. I don’t understand how I can feel so hot on the inside and still be covered head to toe in goosebumps. I shiver despite the inferno under my flesh and watch as his dark eyes drop to my chest, where I just know my nipples are visibly hard under the thin material of my tank top. “Will you tell me about it?”

My heart stutters. “Tell you about what?”

“What happened at the dig site?”

The heat I felt a moment ago leaves me in a rush of cold. Rubbing my hands over my arms, I cast my gaze to the water that glitters in the pool. “I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“Apparently, I didn’t see anything.”

His voice is soft. “You don’t believe that.”

“I believe that I’m losing my mind, Hades.” My shoulders fall with my heart. I feel so impossibly fragile.I don’t want to be fragile.“That’s what I believe.”

“You’re not.”

“You can’t know that.” I’m getting frustrated. I’m getting frustrated with him, and with myself. With my stupid mind that works so differently from everyone else’s. With the fact I can’t find a moment of peace from the chaos that lives within me. Chaos no one else can see.

“Tell me what you saw.”

Pulling my bottom lip between my teeth, I shakemy head. With a tiny scoff, barely heard over the sound of our legs swaying in the water, I say, “Everything was totally normal, until it wasn’t. I was digging next to Willa. We were talking—about nothing, really—and then I felt this tremble in the sand under my knees.” I shutter my eyes against the sky I’ve tipped my face toward, inhaling through my nose for a calm that never comes. “The earth started to—I don’t know, Hades—the earth started to just fall away. I know, logically, it’s impossible. In my mind, it was like a sink hole just gobbled up everything under me. It made this wide, steep set of stairs visible. There were so many stairs and it went so deep, I couldn’t see the end of the tunnel. It was just this yawning mouth of blackness—I—” I open my eyes to find Hades staring intently at me. Embarrassed heat scorches my flesh. Lower, I add, “I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so afraid. I felt like there was something waiting for me in those shadows. A monster.”

When Hades says nothing, I laugh. It’s tinny. I beg, “Say something.”

Quietly, he speaks. “I think you have a beautiful mind, Persephone.”

“If beautiful is fractured.”

“Perhaps,” he agrees, and I flinch.

He thinks my mind is fractured? Why does that hurt so much?

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