Page 29 of Aïdes the Unseen
She looked at me then—truly looked—and I saw it again, the shift in her eyes. The knowing. The hunger.
“You don’t fear me,” I said.
“No,” she murmured. “Does that bother you?”
“It humbles me.”
She blinked. Once. Slowly. “Show me more.”
I took her through the asphodel fields, now gray with the memory of sunless days, and the black gardens I’d planted before memory. My palace stood beyond them—long and low, not golden like Olympus, but veined with obsidian and moonlight.
She walked its halls like she had always belonged.
Even the walls whispered a quiet welcome for her.
When we reached the inner chambers, she paused near the great bronze doors carved with vines and serpents and wings.
“Your throne?” she asked, voice soft and gentle like the hush of morning light breaking over the horizon.
I shook my head. “Not tonight.”
She smiled faintly, brushing a finger along the cool metal. “Good. I don’t feel like kneeling.”
Something in me shattered—gloriously.That night, I did not summon wine. I did not light a hundred lamps. I did not drape her in jewels.She did not need them.
I offered her a room with velvet-dark walls and a view of the silver river. She barely glanced at it. She followedmeinstead. Into my chamber. My sanctuary.
She stood near the hearth, barely burning, more shadow than flame, and let me look at her. Like sheknew. Like shewantedme to.
Her voice was low. “You’ve never asked me to stay.”
“I don’t need to.”
“Why?”
I stepped close, close enough to feel the warmth of her skin, the promise of breath between us.
“Because you already have.”
When I touched her, it was not with the hunger of conquest. It was withwonder.
I brushed a knuckle along her cheek, soft and deliberate. I slid a hand to her waist like she was a myth I had once read and never dared to speak aloud. My touch was careful, the awe in my core devastating.
She leaned in. Not yielding.Offering.
“Say it,” she whispered.
I did.
“I want you.”
Then, again, as I let my mouth trace the curve of her shoulder?—
“I want you.”
When I laid her beneath me, the hollows of the world sighed like stone made warm. It wasn’t frantic. It wasinevitable.
We moved like the tide pulling against the sky, old and sure and rhythmic. Her mouth opened to me. Her breath shuddered against my throat, then I marked her not with bruises butbelonging.
