Page 69 of Hades and Persephone: Threads of Fate

“Hades will never love you, Persephone. He took you when you were innocent and beautiful.” Her hand falls from my face to lift the deep red of my hair, painted in the darkness of the Underworld. Her thin fingers, nails sharp as sheers, twist in the strands. “He took you because you were light and lovely. Now,” shetugs on my hair hard enough to pluck the strands from my scalp. I swallow my cry, choking on the devastation she builds within me with every word she speaks. “You were a flower in a garden ripe with life and now—” Her eyes drift over my face as her lip curls with a scowl. “Now you are used. He spilled your innocence and threw you away.”

“But he fought for me to return—he fed me the seeds of the Underworld,” I whisper.

“Male pride is a fickle thing, dear daughter.” She loosens my hair, brushing it over my shoulders to fall in long waves down my back. The act is not loving or tender, but instead done so that she doesn’t have to look at the fall of red—so different from the pure white strands she once twisted into braids adorned with pretty flowers.

Had that not been what I’d been doing that day Hades stole me, plucking wildflowers with friends? Wildflowers for Mother to twist into my hair when she braided it at night?

It seemed so long ago now. My abduction to the Underworld.

My eyes dip to the blue apatite. Sometimes, when I’m here in the Garden of Silence with Mother, I, too, long to forget. The siren-song the Lethe sings tempts me to take just one sip. The reprieve would be a blessing, even as it is undoubtedly a curse.

My heart hurts. I love my husband, God of the Underworld, Death, and, now, the Afterlife.

My eyes tip up to my mother. They shine with tears I will not shed. “What should I do, Mother? Tell me what I should do now? I’ve done everything you’ve said to make him love me. To show him that he wants me for his own.” I shake my head, my desperation bleeding from my very pores. Between us, heartbreak scents the air. “What do I do?”

“You have done all you can, Persephone.” Her face pinches tight with hatred for the man who owns every tattered piece of my shredded heart. “And I have done all I can do for you.”

“Please.” I fall to my knees at her feet. My hands disappear into the gauzy wheat-colored gown that is cinched by a rope of braided wheat around her waist. “Please, Mother.”

Disgust flares in her eyes as she spits down on me. “He does not love you, girl. He will never love you. He took those nymphs to your bed, and I acted.Itook vengeance foryour honor, and what did you do?”

I shake my head. My heart rages like a stormy sea, desperate to spill emotion into the wreckage of me. “Please.”

“You pulled her from the earth where I rooted her. She would have been little more than a mint plant.Yousaved her, foolish girl.”

“Minthe is good, Mother.” The thought of my friend—the terror in her eyes as the earth rose to capture all that she was and had ever been. The vines of green that still paint her skin in an eternal mark, thesweet scent of the plant Mother had nearly fated her to an eternity of misery leeching from her skin. I’d had to save her.I could never had lived with myself otherwise.“She is my friend.”

“He brought her into your bed.” Her tone is scathing, but it softens when a sob escapes. “And that other one, Leuce—her beauty far outweighs your own. If you think for one moment that he will not place the Crown of Souls upon her head, you are mistaken.”

My heart aches.“I’m his Queen.”

“You are nothing to him!” she shrieks, but the words don’t carry. The Lethe devours the sound before it can travel. “I tried to save you. To help you show him that he loves you. That you are worthy to stand as his Queen, but you fail me time and again. You befriend the nymphs he takes as lovers. You fail to ignite even a spark of jealousy when you spread yourself for another male,” she hisses. “You disgust me. You have failed me.”

I do sob now. It cuts from my core as though squeezed by a vine of thorns.

I’m not even sure I know what it means to be loved. To know love.

Even from my mother, such a thing has never been gifted to me.

I have never been worthy of it.

“Let me make it right to you. Anything,” I weep. “Anything to make it right, Mother.”

Mother smiles. It is the brightest and mostbeautiful smile I’ve ever seen grace her lovely face. She bends at the waist, her cruel hands coming to cup the sides of my face in a gesture that promises an eternity of tenderness.

I lean into her though, letting my eyes drift closed as I devour the warmth of it, even as I know her warmth is fleeting.

“You have a gift, my dear daughter.” She lowers her hand to cover my left breast. “In here. It is bright, swirling with the power of the stars, the moon, and the sun. Hades may not want you, but I planned for you far before he took you for his own.Imade you into the power you are today, the weapon you will become tomorrow.”

My mouth is bone dry as I stare up into her eyes, alight with a hunger for something dangerous and deadly. “I don’t understand.”

“You can free yourself from the binds of the Underworld, my daughter.”

“How?”

She smiles a wicked and lovely smile. “With the power to create all things comes the power to destroy.”

I don’t know what she is talking about.

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