Page 12 of The Queen & the King

“Do you always go around kissing strangers?” I ask, unsure why I’ve not run away from this psycho yet. All I know is that something is keeping me here. I push to my feet, watching him warily as I put space between us.

“Strangers?” he asks, standing slowly but making no move to get closer to me. “Persephone, don’t you know who I am?”

My eyes narrow. “How do you know my name?”

His face falls, something like horror flashing through his eyes. “What has she done to you?” he whispers. He steps forward, lifting his hand to… caress me, maybe?

I step back. “I should go…”

The man grabs my hand. “Persephone, what is my name?”

I tense, my body once again reacting to the contact, but something in my brain is telling me I need to wake up now. I tug my hand from his grasp. “What am I? A mind reader?”

His lips tilt up at the corners at my retort, and he moves in closer, cupping my cheeks. I look up into his sapphire blue eyes and nearly lose myself in their depths. “My name is Hades, and I am your husband.” Hades presses his lips to mine, and while my body melts into him, my heart urging me to kiss him back, my mind pulls me back, and I slap him.

I’m not married. How absurd.

“I amnotmarried,” I growl.

Hades grabs my left hand and shows me the ring. I frown down at it. The band fits snugly around my ring finger. At the center, sparkling rubies and diamonds surround the most stunning rose. It is the most perfect ring and obviously tailored to me.

That’s new…

“What’s this then, hm?” he asks, his thumb rubbing over the band absentmindedly.

“You’re insane. Absolutely insane.” I yank my hand free and pull back.

“You can’t explain it, can you?” he growls, “Just like you can’t explain why you feel hollow. Like an empty shell.”

Hollow? How does he know? I take another step back, needing to put distance, not just between him and me, but also with the harsh truths he’s throwing at me. Truths I was barely aware of until he mentioned and named them.

“She took you from me. From our home.” His gaze seems to pierce my soul as he searches mine, looking for something.

There is a flash of an image in my mind, large dark bricks with dark green ivy climbing?—

I scream. There is pain… so much pain. It is like a red-hot poker piercing my brain. I cradle my head, the image dissolving to nothing but the pain lingering.

“The dream is unstable. We need to go.” I hear a woman’s voice echo through the dream, but all I feel is the pain. Tears slide down my cheeks, and I whimper.

“A moment longer.” I feel Hades gather me close. He buries his nose in my hair and inhales deeply. “I love you. I will come for you.”

I cry out in pain once more before the warmth of Hades is gone, and everything goes black.

Nine

Hades

“SEND ME BACK," I DEMAND,the second I’m out of the dream. The three gods look at me like I’m insane. They didn’t see her face, they don’t understand. I doubt I can explain it in any way that will make sense to them at the moment. How do I explain something I can barely cope with myself?

Helios has an arm wrapped around Mellie. Her nose is bleeding. Clearly, it took a lot out of her to pull me out, especially as I fought her. I should feel guilty about that, but all of my emotions are tied up in replaying the dream with Persephone, every millisecond and minute expression that occurred.

Do you always go around kissing strangers?

She didn’t know me. She looked at me, and not even a shadow of recognition flickered in her eyes. It isn’t enough that the bitch took her memories of me. She took more. I didn’t recognize the Persephone I just saw. That wasn’t the Persephone I knew or the self-assured goddess who started at Plutus. She is a shell of the woman I fell in love with. It is as if Demeter took everything that made Persephone special and hollowed her out until the only thing left was what she approved.

My fingertips begin to darken, swirling tattoos crawling up them as I think of all the ways I’m going to make that bitch pay for this. My new experience with torture is going to be useful once I get my hands on that fucking goddess.

Mellie snarls at Morpheus, shoving away from Helios. “The dream was unstable. What the fuck was that?”

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