Summer Queen

by Amelia Wilde

  Eleanor moves to the next planter. Waters. Does something to the soil. Pats it down.

  “He likes flowers.”

  He. Likes. Flowers.

  Why is it that everything people say in this place seem like little bombs, meant to explode what I thought I knew? My mind does a hasty struggle between what I know—that Hades does not care about flowers—and what Eleanor knows, because she’s known him a lot longer than I have. Jealousy burns the back of my throat.

  No—no. I refuse it. I’m not going to be jealous of an old lady, even if she does know some fact about Hades that I would never have guessed. One glass poppy does not indicate that a person likes flowers. Now I’m questioning everything.

  “The thing about flowers here...” The watering can flashes in the light at the next planter down. “They have to be resilient enough for the lights. If you ask me, it’s more a problem of timing than anything else. Everything must be exactly right...” She snaps her fingers to indicate exactly right. “Otherwise, they can’t stand up to the environment. “Between you and me, I’m not often successful.”

  “But you keep trying? Is it...is it a contract with him?”

  “No, no.” Eleanor’s fingers move down into the dirt. A sprouted plant comes up, and she moves it a few inches to the right. “He gave me something to do. He thinks I’ll be lonely without a project.”

  Who is the man she’s talking about? Not the Hades I know.

  But then I think of the pomegranate. Of the fury in his face when he discovered I wasn’t eating. The library. The books...

  “Are you? Lonely, I mean.”

  “How could I be lonely? I’m getting constant visitors. Luther visits me—oh, once or twice a week. And the others are in and out for the things they need.”

  “The others?”

  “Don’t you live in this mountain too, my dear?” Eleanor winks at me, and I have no idea what that wink is supposed to mean. Hopefully the dim light hides the heat in my cheeks.

  “I’ve been preoccupied.”

  Pressure accumulates at my breastbone. She’s going to tell me something else that rocks the world off its axis, isn’t she? I brace myself.

  “Ah.”

  The urge to explain rears up. Whenever my mother was angry I had to choke out this same, stupid urge. Explanations never made her less furious. Explanations didn’t convince her to take the lock off my door or send me back to school.

  “The others.” Her gaze goes to the shadowy dark at the end of the room, where those hallways connecting her to Hades’ fortress must be. “Most of the ones in his mines are like him, in one way or another.”

  My head shakes in spite of myself. “That’s impossible. Nobody’s like him.” Nobody is as cruel or as demanding or as passionate. Nobody.

  “The light hurts them, too.”

  I grab on to a nearby planter and use it to steady myself. What fresh vertigo hell is this. “Eleanor, are you joking? All those people...they can’t be like him. Someone would have done something by now.” There would be...a drug. A treatment. A cure.

  Maybe there is a drug.

  Maybe Hades left something out on his map.

  “I’ll admit that very few have such an...intense physical reaction to the sunlight.” Eleanor clicks her tongue and moves three planters down. “Very few. Many more find it intolerable for other reasons. Not the sun, but—you know what I mean. The world. They sign their contracts with him and then they don’t have to go back.”

  I’ve heard those rumors before—that people go to the mountain and never come out again. They went willingly. I don’t know how much more of this conversation I can handle right now, honestly. I’m ready to sit down hard on the grass outside and let the breeze strip away the confused heat in my cheeks and the horrible divide in my brain. The fact that I need Hades doesn’t make him a good man. He’s a dangerous man, the cruelest person I’ve ever met.

  Eleanor’s not done, and she’s not lying, either. She’s just talking. It’s a casual truth. The way I imagine a grandmother would talk to a granddaughter.

  “Now, with Luther...It wasn’t so bad when he was younger. Most times, I could keep him out of his father’s way.”

  When he was younger. He’d have to have been very young for a woman like Eleanor to be able to meaningfully control him in any way, and my mind runs into another end. Of course he was a little boy once. I just can’t picture it. I don’t want to follow the breadcrumbs that lead from those years to this one. To a man like Hades.

  “You’ve known him since he was a child?”

  “Of course, dear heart. I was his nanny.”

  My heart sinks, stomach going cold. I don’t want to understand what she’s telling me. We ate him alive. This is like unraveling a blanket. The intricate stitches reveal many more layers to the fabric than can be seen from the surface. A woman who cared for him, doing her best to keep him away from his own father...the rage that must have been involved...

  “What would—what would his father have to do with the sun?”

  “It’s better if an angry man can’t use it for punishment. Now it’s only Demeter’s flowers standing between him and—”

  A voice calls out from the murky black. Eleanor puts down the watering can and pulls me into a brief hug. She smells like the mountain breeze and a gentle powder, and I have to hold myself back from putting my head down on her shoulder to cry. Her papery palms come up to meet my cheeks. “Come back another day, Persephone. I’ll teach you to make flowers grow for him.”

  19

  Persephone

  Hades isn’t in his room when I come back in, so I keep the wind in my hair and try to imagine that the sun is still on my face. A small window in the library helps, plus the discovery of the book he’s left me. At first glance it’s nothing out of the ordinary, but when I pick it up the cover crackles.

  It’s covered in plastic.

  This isn’t something he already owned, it’s something from a library.

  A stamp on the inside names its owner: The New York Public Library.

  I laugh out loud. “What?”

  There’s no answer, nobody here, but...how? How did he steal books from that faraway library for me?

  Settling in with this book—an adventure story about spaceships and a coordinated alien attack—gives my thoughts a little order. They’re still in a kind of disarray, one here, another over there—but at least all of them are gathered in the same place.

  It takes me a few paragraphs to become aware of Hades standing in the door with a strange, almost soft expression on his face. As soon as I do I wonder how I ever missed him—he takes up most of the doorframe and the way he watches me is hot enough to burn. Should I stand up? No, I don’t think so. I shove the book onto the table by my armchair.

  “I met Eleanor today. Oliver said that it was okay.”

  He comes into the room, all long lines and expensive, dark clothes. Hades’ face hardens. “Good. Then you can get some fresh air without being unaccompanied.”

  Something happened to him today. Maybe I wasn’t observant enough to notice it before, but I notice it now. The thin ring of blue in his eyes is my first hint. The second is the rough set of his jaw. Like he’s been grinding his teeth. A memory of the crisp breeze dances over my cheeks.

  “We had a nice conversation.” I sit up straight and tall in the armchair, like he’s a headmaster out of one of my books. The quiet pulse between my legs started before he walked in the room but it intensifies now, the closer he gets. He clouds my mind. Makes it too hard to stop talking. “Oliver didn’t tell me that she was your nanny.”

  Another flash in his eyes, an emotion gone too fast to do anything more than send a shiver down my spine. “She was.”

  Stop, stop. Stop talking, don’t say anything...

  I can’t stop. There’s a dark, dirty part of me that wants to goad him into punishing me. But most of me wants to press against the boundaries he’s built up around himself. If what Eleanor says isn’t
true, he’ll brush it off with a cruel word. If it is, then I’ll have learned something. I want to please him and I want to push him in equal measure. I want to be a good girl and a twisted little slut.

  “She told me about your father.”

  His face turns to stone, gaze sharper than all of his diamonds.

  “I shouldn’t have said anything.” I try to swim up from the intoxicating haze of looking at him. “It was a mista—”

  His hand comes down across the front of my throat and cuts off the word and my breath. It’s a glancing blow, long enough to get my attention. He has it. He has all of my attention. With the other hand he pins my wrists above my head on the chair, stopping only to run his fingers over my new bracelet. Is he regretting it?

  “No, Persephone. Go on. Tell me about my father.”

  While he says this he tears my leggings off, ripping them in the process. My panties come next. My socks. The bralette I found in a drawer in the closet. He leaves the tunic, which only makes it worse when he shoves it up around my neck.

  I can’t tell him about his father because I’m struggling to catch my breath. Hades steals all the air from any room he enters, and the only way to get it back is to beg him for it. My body is begging him for it. I’m a house fire, burning up underneath him. The last thing I need is more oxygen. It’s the only thing I want.

  He knocks my knees apart with his free hand, letting them fall over the arms of the chair, and then he twists his fingers into me.

  “Do you need to be reminded of my belt, Persephone?”

  He’s so cold, uncaring. Harsh. Nothing makes me hotter than when he’s like this. He curls his fingers and I clench down on them with a gasp. Hades does it again and one of my knees slips from the arm of the chair. He puts it back in place with a mean slap.

  “She—she—she said that he would punish you with the sun.” The things he’s doing with his fingers—god, I can’t, I can’t. Hades winds me up with a detached, exacting precision. His only goal is to make me come, and right now. “She said—”

  The first orgasm hits me in mid-sentence and I lose the rest of it.

  Every time I think that nothing can ever be more humiliating, nothing can ever turn me on more, Hades finds a way.

  Nothing can be worse than this. It’s not dark, there’s no cover, and his fingers are still inside. Working. Twisting. Curling. What’s he doing? Am I supposed to be asking a question? I decide to ask one.

  “I don’t understand what she meant. I don’t know what she meant.”

  “Do you ever stare at the sun?”

  The inside of me is so sensitive that another one is already starting again. I’m pinned in place by his hands and by the chair and there’s nowhere for my hips to go.

  “No. It’s dangerous. You’re not supposed to look—look—”

  He strokes harder, and I swear I can feel the tip of his fingernail touching a part of me that feels like a live wire. Like a spark, a cascade of sparks, a wildfire. Hades watches me while I come again, short and hard.

  “You’re not supposed to look at the sun,” I finish.

  “And if you were stupid, you might try it.” Those fingers. Again. Again. I can’t even begin to get away. My legs are too heavy to lift from the arms of the chair. “If you stared long enough, it would feel like a knife in your eye sockets. It would feel like an icepick through your temple. It would feel like jagged rocks boring into your skull.”

  He makes me come a third time, and this time, when it’s almost over, he adds a thumb to my clit and rubs in slow, easy circles until I scream.

  “See how it works? How quickly pleasure turns to pain?”

  “I do, I see it.”

  The rest of what I’m trying to say turns into nonsense. Whimpers. Cries. His thumb is relentless. I had no idea a light touch could feel so good, or hurt so much. His fingers twist again and I can’t resist him. I couldn’t stop myself from coming even if I tried. It tears through me like the edge of a knife. I can’t catch my breath. Beads of sweat gather on my collarbone.

  “If you start with pain...” Hades curls his fingers, deliberate, slow, torturous. It’s like him in every way. In the most extreme ways. “If you start with pain it turns into more pain until finally all pleasure is consumed. Until every sensation could eat you alive. Look at me. Look at me.”

  This orgasm—this will be the one to consume me. I’m barely alive at the end of it, hanging on by a thread. The blue in his eyes is almost gone. “This is what light does to me, in all its forms. I can delay it with special lights, but it always ends like this. There is no cure. There is no fix.”

  My heart breaks for him while my body breaks apart under his hands. The beginning of a scream bursts out of me but I bite it back. If I start screaming again now, I might not stop—and I’m getting what I wanted. I wanted to know more about him. I know it now down to the marrow.

  “And...it...hurts...you?”

  “Every waking moment, unless I get what I need.”

  He offers me one moment of reprieve in the form of tracing his thumb around the outside of my pussy. It’s not enough to breathe, not with his fingers in as deep as they’ll go. He’s going to do it again, he’s going to do it again—

  His fingers curl.

  This isn’t so much an orgasm as a wretched, screaming peak. Words fly apart into senseless sounds and the universe narrows to his hand. Curling. Stroking. I have to fight my way out of it, out of darkening vision and not enough air. When I do, Hades looks completely calm, as if he’s not forcing me to orgasm as payment, as punishment.

  I take the biggest breath of my life. “What is it that you need?”

  He cocks his head to the side, looking down at me. We could be anywhere. A meeting room in the city. A headmaster’s office at a college. He’s worked years for this, hasn’t he? He spent years learning to hide an excruciating pain. He had to. He didn’t have any other choice. The fragments of my heart snap again. It’s not Hades I feel sorry for. It’s that little boy. And a little girl I knew once, who could never get out of her mother’s fields.

  “Are you sure you want to buy that information?”

  “Yes,” I hiss. I’m shaking, an earthquake made human.

  “Very well.”

  I don’t realize he pulled back until his hand slams back into me, his fingers ready to destroy me. Hades gives no mercy. He drives me into another electric burn of an orgasm. I feel it up to my fingertips. I’m not trying to pull away, not trying to wrench my wrists away from him—it’s my base instincts. If I am the universe then this is also the end of the universe. It’s the end of me. It rushes up in a tall wave, inescapable, and I take one final breath before I go under.

  It’s a long while before I resurface. How long, I don’t know. My hearing comes back first. Wind plays on the narrow window, testing the glass. Hades breathes nearby. Vision is next.

  He’s watching me.

  When I blink up at him he eases his fingers out of me. Even that small movement is too much and I arch back on the chair, jaw locked tight, making small noises that I won’t let into the air.

  He takes a deep breath, lets it out.

  “There are certain plants only Demeter knows how to grow. The pills she makes can keep the worst of the pain at bay for a few hours at a time.”

  Hades releases my wrist. I’m wrecked, spent. I’m going to need his help to get out of the chair. If I give it everything I’ve got I might be able to walk to the bedroom, but I’m betting I’ll end up in a heap on the floor.

  He keeps his eyes on me, in this horrible, exposed position, while he undoes the buttons at his wrists. Undoes his belt. He can’t be doing that. It’s a dim thought and it falls apart in the face of all the evidence. Hades is shoving his shirtsleeves up to his elbows. He is stepping out of his pants. He’s letting the huge iron length of him out into the air.

  He is stroking a hand over one of my knees, then the other, and then he’s bending down to put his big hands just above my knees on th
e arms of the chair. It takes his weight. It’s made to.

  “There’s only one other thing that has that effect,” Hades comments. His lips are an inch from mine. He brushes them against me. He hasn’t kissed me up until now, but my lips still feel bruised and swollen. All of me is so sensitive I could die.

  “What is it?” I don’t have enough energy to work up true fear.

  Hades thrusts himself inside me and leans down to brush a stinging kiss to my cheek, whispering one word in my ear: “You.”

  20

  Hades

  Oliver paces back and forth in my main living room, staring at the windows like we’re in danger of imminent attack. I’m quickly running out of patience for his performance, even if it is probably justified. A summer storm lashes at the window. Lighting bolts strike out over the countryside. Oliver paces. Three, four, five, six steps. Turn. Another set of steps.

  “No one is going to scale the mountain and burst through the window, Oliver. Not in the next fifteen minutes anyway. Sit down.”

  “I can’t.” He crosses his arms over his chest and I get a glimpse of the man he used to be—the man I forced onto the train by his shirt collar when he tried to get back to the city the first time. “Something’s coming. It’s not right out there.”

  What’s not right is me, standing here with Oliver, instead of shutting the door on the world with Persephone. I’m not accustomed to hiding from problems.

  This one, however, is unsolvable.

  “Did you try getting through to Zeus’s people today?”

  “Yes.” Oliver runs the pad of his thumb over his other four fingernails, back and forth. “Even the people outside his circle aren’t answering. It’s like the city’s gone dead. Or dark. If you would just let me—”

  “No.” For the last day, while I’ve been settling unrest in the mines—no doubt because that stupid fuck tried to whip everyone into a rebellion—Oliver has been popping up to ask if he can go to the city and scout things out. He cannot. “You’re needed here.”