Page 41 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

Now, as I slide my cock in and out of her sweet mouth, a feeling of possession I’ve never felt before swells inside me like a flame. It’s ready to destroy anything that threatens it. Anything that threatens to touch her.

I will not share her. Not this time. Not in this life or any life that dares come after, if I fail to secure her eternal soul.

Iwillpossess her eternal soul, even if I have to scheme and trick and steal to make it mine. Try as I might to do things different this time, nature is not easily changed, and it is my nature to take. To possess. To claim that which I desire. I may possess the strength to woo her now, to take the time to invade the space inside her heart, but I am not foolish enough to think for even a moment, that if danger presented, I wouldn’t steal her away to the Underworld where she would be safe. I would think only once about the repercussions of my taking her from this realm, from the only world her human life has ever known.

My gaze burns as she hollows her cheeks, sucking me deep. I groan a thick, long growl of pleasure as I tighten my hand in her hair, my thrusts picking up speed and intensity. Emerald eyes glisten as they lock on mine, but not a single tear falls. She takes every vicious pump of my cock in her mouth, the tip hitting the back, with a talent only my Goddess could possess, drawing my release from me with a force that nearly brings me to my knees. I watch as she swallows every drop of my seed, hunger still burning in my veins. It will always burn in my veins for her. For the woman made to stand as mine. My Queen. My Goddess.My mate.

But not my soul mate. For Gods, there is no such thing. It is a reality that I mourn in this moment, a reality I’ve never mourned in all the millennia I’ve lived. A chance to find the onewhose soul would fit with the missing piece of my own, not simply a soul to stand with mine. A soul connected, woven.

Legend tells the tale that Zeus splits all whole souls in half, cutting through them with searing bolts of lightning as they scream their agony and sorrow to the sky. He threw them to the earth so violently, the land shook with the collision, the thunder of it echoing in the sky. Scattered in the fall, they are forced to spend lifetimes in desperate search for their other half.

But the truth of the story goes much deeper. Yes, Zeus did such a thing, sadistic monster that he is. But it was in ire for the nerve of the Moirai, the three Fates who dared to carve out chunks of the Olympian’s souls, casting the fragments to a vulnerable eternity within the bubbling depths of their wicked cauldron. For after the Primordial God and Goddess, and the Titans they birthed ruled in selfish power, the Moirai learned.

The all-seeing Fates watched the Titans rule and fall to the Olympian Gods they birthed—Gods even more powerful, with the potential to be far crueller. More disassociated from the souls they craft to worship them. The souls they were intended to care for. To protect.

It was in response to the potential of that cruelness that the Moirai acted.

It is not so easy to split the soul of a God or Goddess, since we are simply who we are, birthed ofether and power. Whole. But stealing chunks of our eternal souls in bargains for the fates they weaved to be woven in our favor, had been a practice of our earlier time. An ancient, nearly prehistoric ceremony we foolishly succumbed to with the dangerous, cunning Moirai.

Legend whispered that Zeus held power over the Moirai, but there is no governing the power that is the Fates.

They are primordial judge, jury, and godly executioner. For it is from the Moirai in which a God can face an eternity of misery, longing for an end that simply won’t come, for our souls are eternal. I would know. I suffered an eternity in the aftermath of my wife’s vicious murder—an act sanctioned by the Moirai.

Never in the history of the Olympians has a God ever connected with his true soul mate. For our souls are complete, but for the fragment bargained to the Moirai, and contained in a cauldron of magic deep within the caverns of Mount Olympus, where ancient power surged, predating even the Titans. Its derivation spanned somewhere with the primordial Gods of Origin, predating even Uranus and Gaea in favor of Chaos. For the Fates’ lineage has never been traced. Human legend is muddled, accusing Nyx of birthing the ancient deities only to turn and claim they were fathered by Zeus.

They are wrong. Not even the Olympians know theseed from which the Moirai sprouted. We only know their tyrannical rule over balance, the scales of justice they weigh, the fates they weave—and the fates they cast into an eternity of searching for that bargained piece of our souls we once thought we wouldn’t miss. But the holes in our soul’s fester like an untreated wound, growing larger with every passing century.

It is a yawning hunger I’ve experienced for so long; it has become a part of me.

But it is as I pull Persephone from where she sits in the tub, her breasts connecting with my chest—the human heart in her chest thundering—that I feel something stir somewhere deep inside me where that missing chunk of my soul once belonged.

I am frozen, robbed of all breath. I stare into the pools of her emerald eyes, to the eternal soul that flickers deep within. The soul that is woven with—somethingother. Something familiar. Impossible recognition for the piece of my stolen soul snaps into place, like a band stretched too far and released. I nearly flinch, the pinching shock of it so great.

Tethered souls birth eternal mates. Balance and justice spin the thread of knotted fates.The thought is unbidden in my mind—not my own. Spoken in the unforgettable tones of the tongueless Moirai.Two souls paired by divine recognition, now stitched together for eternal salvation, over lands scorched in treachery.

Persephone whimpers softly as her hand pushes between our bodies to press her palm into her chest ina mirror of where I had felt the snap. She pushes back from me, wide eyes dipping to the space between us where her hand is now twisting, as though toying with something tangible even as it is unseen. Her eyes snap up to mine, wide with a fear that cools the heat of arousal in my veins. In its wake, a rising tide of protection surges high.

“Are you okay?” The demand falls rougher than I intend. My mind is still racing with impossible questions even as my eyes sweep her face, now drained of color.

“Did you feel that?” she gasps, her words breathless with shock and disbelief.

“Feel what?” I need to know what she felt. Had she felt the band snapping into place, as well?The impossible sealing of our souls?

Her brows furrow, and her head tips back. Panic flashes in her eyes. She whispers, “You didn’t?” Her lips tremble. “I—I—” She shakes her head, and I hold her in place when she tries to push from me. She forces a fragile smile that splinters with shards of terror. “I’m imagining things again.”

“I felt something,” I tell her, needing her to know she isn’t losing her mind. That she can trust herself.

Her eyes snap to mine, sharp now. “You did?”

Breath stills in her lungs as she waits.

“I did.” I lift her hand in mine, placing her palm against my chest. “Here.”

“Me too.” She breathes breathlessly, green eyessearching mine for answers I can’t give. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” I tell her honestly. And I am rendered momentarily speechless as my mind races with the impossibility of my suspicions.

Had the Moirai began weaving the fragments of the souls they held prisoner, crafting soul mates just as Zeus split them apart? It would be divine manipulation at its finest.

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