Page 72 of Seduced

“Envy.”

“Yes. It is the answer to your question. The reason for my inexcusable behavior.”

Envy.

What was he envious of? What did he have to be jealous of? A sudden image of DeVere grabbing for her hand, crying and thanking her, flashed through Poppy’s mind, and she inhaled sharply.

“Why do you have so many cats?” she asked, desperate to stop thinking of how she had almost fainted at the idea that someone would think her good and precious and worthy of being thanked.

“Because when I was a baby,” Hades said, “my father, who is a prince, tried to have me drowned with a litter of kittens.”

“I beg your pardon?” She must have heard him wrong.

“‘S true. It’s why I can’t touch or be touched. By anyone—or anyone. I…I always feel the servant’s fingers choking my neck. I find myself in a perpetual noose, so to speak. Talk of being in hell….Anyway, my respected father, the devil take him, tried again when I was four. Well, he gave the order, you understand, he would never get his own hands dirty. It was others that did the almost killing.”

“He…what?” Poppy felt lightheaded.

Is this a nightmare? Am I asleep?

Her chest constricted as though someone was twisting a knife in her lungs.

“Once more when I was six,” Hades was saying.

Will the nightmare never end?

“It will not,” Hades replied.

Damn, I must have said that last one out loud.

Don’t swear.

“You are, after all, in the bowels of hell, do not forget it, Wyatt. After that, my mother took me and ran away to England and promptly died, leaving me in that school. I have been rescuing cats ever since.”

His mother…She must not have been his father’s wife, by the way he spoke. Poppy’s stomach tuned. ‘I have been rescuing cats…’

“But you have yet to rescue yourself,” she said.

Hades smirked. “Has anyone ever told you that you are too clever for your own good?”

She hung her head. Yes, someone had, in fact.

“And then you created the club,” she went on, trying to piece the story together.

“The Underworld first,” he said. “Then the Hellion Club within it.”

“Oh, you are not fooling anyone, my lord Hades,” Poppy said. “The Underworld might be under the world, but it is definitely not beneath it. You are doing so much good in there. Hiding people, saving poor lost souls like…Maybe you could curb the lost fortunes issue somehow, and then the damage the club does shall be diminished greatly. I am certain you will figure it out by the by.”

“You make it sound so simple.” Hades was running a frozen hand through his snow-wet hair.

“It is,” Poppy said, “when you look at it the right way.”

“I have never heard you speak like this, Wyatt,” he said and she shrugged. “No, don’t get defensive now. It seems that this is your true self, after all.”

“I know less about myself than you do at the moment,” Poppy said.

I can’t feel my legs. Did I use to be able to feel my legs?

“I am discovering it again,” she went on. “My own self. And I have you and your club to thank. So you see, I speak from experience. You are who I have to thank for finding a measure of freedom. You are a good man, I think, my lord Hades. Well, the kidnapping aside.”

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