Summer Queen

by Amelia Wilde

  And the truth of me.

  I bury my face in Conor’s shoulder and whisper my thanks to him. I know he’s a dog, but it matters. My arms lock around Conor’s neck but after a minute he strains gently against me. He wants to follow Hades.

  So do I.

  I get up and hook my fingers into his collar. Conor tugs me along toward the bedroom, the blanket slipping down over my shoulders. My lips tingle, on the verge of going numb, but Conor—despite his bullet wound—is warm and solid next to me. He’s not afraid.

  The bedroom door is open.

  A massive window, floor-to-ceiling and nearly as high as the ones overlooking his factory, displays the night sky in such perfect detail that it must be fake. Breathtaking, but fake. There’s no possible way the stars are so close, so bright. But the stars don’t compare at all to the man standing next to a massive bed, all the sheets and blankets the color of midnight. The window gives off enough light for me to see the dips and shadows of his face in profile and not much else. The light from the sitting room falls off behind me and as I step into true dark they switch off completely. The stars get brighter. He gets darker.

  Hades went in here ahead of me. He must be expecting me to follow, but it doesn’t look that way. He looks alone. Like nobody could ever be watching. He’s half-turned away from the door, the muscled lines of his body statuesque and carved from the stars behind him. If he were a statue it would be called Pain. His chest rises so lightly it’s hard to see the movement.

  It’s the hand over his eyes that gives him away.

  It steals the last of my breath, and when Conor walks away from me to go to his side I sway on my feet with a lightheaded rush. Conor settles by his side and leans against his leg, insistent. I have a million questions. This is like finally being inside that library in New York City, not just out front but inside, and not being able to touch the books. There’s no way to broach the subject of something so personal with my heart in my throat and a dry mouth.

  A new need hums into being and wraps itself around those deep instincts for his hands, for his mouth. It’s not just the future I need to know about now. It’s him. It’s all of him. The thought of being inside his mind, with his thoughts, sends a fresh pull of goose bumps over my skin.

  He takes his hands away from his eyes and the movement startles me out of awe and into the reality that he means for me to sleep here with him. Here. With him. In his bed.

  “Come here.”

  I go to him without thinking because my lungs feel tight, cutting off the air I need for reason and logic. There’s only a starlight anxiety, crisp and clear, in a constellation with no name but that I recognize intimately.

  Hades pulls the blanket from my shoulders and drops it to the floor. Air floods back in, my vision sharpening. I’m ready, I’m ready. Do you know what you did to me? I’m certain that what happened on the train isn’t the end of my punishment. I’m certain of it, and I can take it—

  “Get into the bed.”

  For the first time, I hear it—the edge of suffering in his voice. It stops me from asking my usual parade of questions about what’s going to happen. It stuns me to hear it. It’s as intimate as him pressing his fingers into me while I writhe and beg. More intimate.

  It’s a scramble to get into the bed, high off the ground, but Hades doesn’t seem to notice how awkward and exposing it is to climb this way when I’m completely naked. That urge to ask him what’s going on—what’s hurting him, really—can only be stifled by holding my breath and wriggling under the covers. They’re so soft, light and strong as silk but burnished, like cotton. I’m probably not supposed to be looking but I can’t take my eyes off him. Clothes fall in the starlight. His shirt flutters down first, followed by his pants with the clink of his belt buckle. Then he walks around to the other side and gets in. Stretches out.

  The starlight dims in a slow fade, easing away with every breath he takes. I discover I’m jiggling my feet, tense and waiting, trying to breathe through the painful closeness of this. How am I supposed to just...fall asleep next to him? Maybe it would be better if I released some of this pressure by just asking a question. I want his voice. I want the truth. I want—

  A hand comes down on my thigh, low enough that I take it for what it is—a warning. Stop moving your fucking feet, Persephone.

  “Sleep,” he says. The last of the light fades away, leaving us in total darkness. I can only feel the sheets, his hand, the rise and fall of him breathing next to me. It’s too much to ask. But he’s not asking, is he? His touch is a command. And I have no choice but to obey.

  11

  Persephone

  When morning comes I have to move.

  I find myself freed, in a way, and bereft in another way. Hades turned over on his side in the night to the other side of the bed. Sleeping was easier when he made me do it. Now, in the filtered light from the window—I still can’t decide if I’m seeing any real light at all—I test the boundaries. I wriggle my toes, then my feet. He doesn’t stir. I’ve never seen him breathe so evenly and deeply and it makes me feel strangely protective of him. As if he could ever need protecting. As if I could ever be the one to give him that. Impossible.

  If I was hungry for truth last night, now I’m starving. Ravenous. Deep sleep cleared my head, and this much is obvious: I can’t keep living this way. I can’t sign contracts and get kidnapped and live in a mountain fortress if I don’t understand what’s going on. I’m done being a naive child.

  And anyway, I know where that road ends up. It ends with days spent in bed, staring uselessly at the wall, heaviness in my chest. The world looks gray when things get that far. It becomes impossible to see beyond the next hour. The next minute.

  I’m not going to that place again.

  Will I ever go outside again?

  I watch the window over Hades’ shoulder. It brightens so slowly. No, it must all be illusory. It’s an imitation of a real sunrise with all the color stripped out of it. The thought of that kind of sunrise makes my heart ache.

  Of all the things from my previous life, I took being outside in summer for granted the most. Wandering through a lush field with a basket in my hand. Feeling new green shoots of grass under bare feet. A flower’s stem pulling up from the ground. This life with Hades is carved and polished in a way that’s terrible and wonderful, but there will always be a part of me that longs for summer. For blue skies and clouds and flowers in bloom. For wind in the leaves and a breeze in the middle of a hot day. Morning dew. Evening lightning bugs. All of those things.

  Maybe I can find a glimpse of it if I look long enough.

  Maybe I should start now.

  My head is three inches off the pillow at most when the hand glides easily around my throat and pins me back to the bed. The languid morning feeling I had, with all my daydreams about long walks and gardens, is chased away like a shot. Hades looms over me, tracing a path up and down my neck with the pad of his thumb.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  The fact of him—tall, unbelievably strong, unbelievably dangerous—never gets less shocking. It thrusts me underwater and drags me out again, dripping wet and shivering. Hades is rumpled in a way he never would have let me see before. Has anyone seen him like this before, with a hint of bedhead and one cheek slightly pinker than the other? I reach for his hair and run my fingers through it like I’m not afraid of him. He keeps his grip light on my throat, but he doesn’t stop me.

  I know what he’s capable of, that’s why it’s hard to answer. I know what I’m inviting. I’m scared of how much I loathe it and how much I want it in equal measure. This—the bed, the bedroom—doesn’t feel entirely real. Fear rolls over me again, icy and taunting. All of this could get ripped away any moment.

  “I asked you a question.” The warning comes with a squeeze. It reminds me that he owns every breath I take.

  Another truth: he owned them long before I signed my name above his on a piece of paper. He owned them the fir
st moment I saw them.

  “I was going to...” I so desperately want him to touch me, to take me, and at the same time my heart pounds out a warning to go, to run. He’s proven himself to relish hurting me. And yet... “I’m tired of so many secrets.”

  This early in the morning, his eyes are blue. A skylike, soaring blue shot through with a deeper color like the ocean. And his body over mine throws off heat like a summer day. It lands on my skin and works its way through in a rough, inescapable massage. He has perfect lips. Every time my eyes drop away from his eyes, they land on those lips, those teeth. Every time, it’s like seeing him the first time. I work my fingers through his hair and down the side of his face. Hades blinks but doesn’t flinch. He stays still, breathing lightly, letting me do it. I feel like a fawn caught in torchlight, but that’s an illusion, too. He is completely unconcerned about scaring me. His hand stays at my throat.

  “What do you want to know?”

  So many things. The hours I spent in Zeus’s whorehouse only piled on the questions until they became a rickety stack. But it’s hard to breathe when someone so beautiful and mean is so close to me. It would take nothing at all to turn him wild. He already is. He’s playing with me.

  I gather up every scrap of courage that a trapped animal would have in the hands of a predator and pluck the easiest, simplest questions from the endless well.

  “Why do you have windows like this? Weird windows. Why don’t you go into the sun? Why do your eyes turn so black? I—I want to know more about you.”

  “That’s three questions and a statement.” His eyes trace lazily over my face. My lips. Down lower, to the naked skin underneath his hand. The blanket fell away during the night and I haven’t pulled it up, so he can see my peaked nipples and more, if he wants. My body bends for him even when I fight it. I would do it now. I would do anything now.

  “Yes.” I swallow and he bites his lip. “But you have the answers.”

  Hades pushes himself up on his elbows, releasing me and caging me in at the same time. When God closes a window he slams the door shut, too. That’s the saying, right? Hades hasn’t so much as kissed me but I’m turned into fire by the closeness of him. My toes dig into the bed down between his legs and my back arches. It’s a fraction of an inch, maybe less, but he sees. Humiliation tightens my chest. I should have known it would mean this. I should have known the cost of getting close to him would be difficult to bear.

  He laughs, his voice harsh but still clouded with sleep. “I don’t give out information just because a woman begs.”

  Hades studies me while he says this, eyes dropping lower and lower. What made me this way? What made me so willing to inch my legs apart so that he can take what he wants? What made me so mortified by this fact, so unwilling to do it when he can see? I can’t tell if the torture is the fact that he’s watching or the fact that I want him to watch.

  He looks back into my eyes, and there is no hiding it—he saw. He saw what I was doing, in my stupid, tentative way. I’m dangling from the end of a fishhook. Put me out of my misery. I want to float away on the delicious haze of an orgasm, not stay here, trapped in my own body and struggling to get out.

  “I’m not begging,” I tell him.

  “Exactly.”

  He starts by rolling one of my nipples between his fingers, as casually as he’d pick up a fork. It lifts me off the bed, my hips rising, eyes fluttering closed. He moves to the other one, this one harsher, more of a pinch. I’m embarrassingly, awfully wet.

  “Look at me.”

  I do look at him, though it makes my cheeks so hot I’m afraid my hair might catch on fire. His command seems to need a response. This is what I wanted—a conversation. If it’s going to be a conversation, then I have to keep talking. “If you want me to beg, I’ll beg.”

  He lowers his mouth to my breast and bites, then repeats it on the other side. He’s so slow and deliberate and awful. The only sign he feels any of this is an increased tension in his biceps. He wants to let himself fall, doesn’t he? He wants to let himself crush me. Fuck me. But he won’t do it. Hades is an expert at holding back. Which will mean...

  “I always want you to beg,” he says lightly, eyes back on my face. I wish I could stop panting, get a full breath, but I can’t. “We’ve discussed this. I want you to beg, and scream, and cry.”

  “Then—”

  “Make you?”

  A hand on my jaw, his lips on mine, rough and cold. I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe. I don’t want to breathe in anything but him. His other hand is everywhere, but nowhere it needs to be. He shoves my legs into a wide-open position, wide enough to accommodate his hips, and works himself between my knees. But he won’t touch me.

  He once called me a twisted little slut, and he was right.

  It breaks over me in a wave, my twisted slut desire. I’ve been holding it at bay. Keeping it separate from me, because what does it make me if I really am a twisted slut for Luther Hades? I’ve always been good. I’ve been so good. I’ve only ever told lies meant to preserve my safety. I never wanted to hurt anyone else. I especially didn’t want to hurt my mother. The cards on that table, long ago, flicker back into my mind in this moment. The cards predicted this, all of this, and I’m doing it anyway. The world has been destroyed twice now, and I’m in his bed, rocking my hips toward him, kissing him back.

  I try to pull his face in closer, try to bring us together, but he shoves my hands away with a ruthless strength. He pins them above my head. He won’t let me get closer. My hips meet empty air. He’s so close—it would only be a matter of inches. My pussy aches for him, my clit starved for pleasure, and if he doesn’t touch me or let me touch him I’ll die.

  I will actually die.

  Hades doesn’t seem to care. He pushes my hands against his headboard and keeps them there, his other arm balancing him just out of my reach. I think of crawling on the floor to him. I think of his fingers between my legs on his balcony. I think of the way he took me the first time, how much it hurt, how much I wanted it—how I knew he wouldn’t stop until he was finished. That’s what I want from him now. That’s what I need from him now and he is refusing me, he’s...

  He’s laughing at me.

  He’s delighting in this, in my frustration and desperation.

  Fury rises into a scream that I let loose into his mouth, then yank my head away. “Are you happy now? You did it.” God help me, I can’t stop thrusting my hips. I cannot stop searching for him. I can’t stop wanting. I am his twisted little slut. “You made me scream...” The words become another cry.

  The hand on my jaw turns my head back toward his. Hades’ eyes blaze. He’s proud of himself. I pull against his hand and get absolutely nowhere. “Am I happy?” He throws the words at me like tiny daggers. “No, Persephone. I’m not. If you want my secrets, you’ll pay the price.”

  12

  Persephone

  I’m so angry, so hungry. I do want his secrets. I’m already paying the price of daring to want more than my mother’s fields. I can pay more. But it’s not rational, this want that takes me over. It’s in my muscles and bones and the hot flush of my face. Anger burns through me and fear chases along with it and the mix is so intoxicating I don’t know if I’ll ever get over it.

  “I’ll pay it.” I get the words out through gritted teeth. “You name the price and I’ll pay it. I—I’ll trade.”

  “What’s your counter-offer?”

  My counteroffer is that he should do whatever he’s going to do, he should hurt me, he should pleasure me—all of it. He should do anything other than frustrate me like this. The things he’s done have been bad enough. They’ve turned me into a twisted little slut. The phrase rings in my ears. Never is a long time rings in my ears. He’s so cold and businesslike, as if we’re discussing an addendum to the contract we signed.

  My hips meet air again and again while he watches with detached amusement. I’m a writhing mess. I am nothing. He’s everything. I love it and I hate i
t and I need it.

  What’s left for me to give to him? I already belong to him. I already said that, cried it, screamed it. His people have been between my legs and everywhere else, preparing my body for him. He has invaded every possible part of me. What else can I offer? Anxiety tips itself into my mind and freezes me in place. What can I say? What can I say?

  He watches my struggle with cold interest for another beat. “Ah. It looks like you need to be taught a lesson about hesitation.”

  “No—”

  No is the only word that affects him. Hades yanks me up off the bed until our faces are almost touching. “Yes.”

  Then he’s moving, so fast I can’t anticipate him, so confident I can’t keep up. Hades drags me off the bed and pushes me to my knees on the floor. He strokes my hair back from my face, leaving no strand to distract me. It takes my breath away, how gentle it is. It takes the next breath, too, because it must be some kind of trap, some kind of trick. He would never be gentle. The image of him standing there, hand against his eyes, comes back to me. Maybe he would be gentle. Maybe that’s in him somewhere, along with the ability to feel pain.

  “Open your mouth.”

  I hesitate again. Not because I don’t want to obey him but because I do. What will be left of me if he consumes me completely?

  It’s too late.

  He only needs one hand to force my jaw open. He uses the other to show me how hard he is, how huge. These are things I will never stop learning. I will always be shocked. I’m shocked now, trembling on my knees on carpet so plush it reminds me of untouched grass. The air in the room slides between my parted thighs and strokes me where I wish he would.