by Eris Adderly
But who. Who was helpless?
Was he not the one who could not keep hold of reason? When the mere sight of her had his depravity welling up, obliterating all sense? When her flesh called out for his marks, when her body jumped at his licks?
Hades shivered.
There was no need for any of it, and yet he could not stop. And when she’d begged him …
“Please, Hades. I want to hurt for you.”
He hissed at the sound of her voice in his head, seared by a longing he couldn’t relieve. Wavelets from the river lapped at the bank, ineffectual in their soothing.
When Persephone had begged for the pain he had loved her. And not just any pain had she asked for. His pain. His! He came to her with his corruption and, with her eyes, her limbs, her tongue, she said, ‘Purify yourself upon me.’
He could have imagined no greater gift until she’d cried out at the height of their passion. That single word, that impossible jolt.
Sýzygos!
Beloved. When had the Lord of the Dead been anyone’s beloved?
It was a thing decided.
He could not let her go.
And he could not keep her.
You can. And you already know it.
The fingers of his right hand curled into a fist. Persephone was … different? No. ‘Different’ was not a large enough word. There weren’t large enough words.
He had fed his darkness in the past; sadistic games stringing together a trail of forgettable mortal women. They had been playthings, to a one. The Goddess of Growing Things was everything but.
He still wanted her cries, though they sank like a hook beneath his ribs. He still wanted her fear, though it clutched at his lust the way no Daughter of Man could have ever achieved with her temporary whimpers. But now, he …
He cared. Enough to ask her permission. Enough to wait until, impossibly, she crumbled in want of the cruelty he had to give.
He cared enough to cede her at least one opportunity. He took so much, surely, he could grant a request.
You didn’t outright give it to her, Clymenus.
It was true. The riddle he’d put to her was nothing more than a failsafe. She would never answer it and he would enjoy the self-righteous feeling of having offered her a reasonable bargain. Utter nonsense, of course, but when had Hades Nekrodegmôn ever allowed anyone to face him with even odds?
In a smooth gesture, he brought forth the bident from the ring on his hand, slashing it through the æther above the shore of the River Styx. He could travel the spaces between without the use of the weapon—it was his domain, after all—but the action had a satisfying decisiveness about it, and that was what Hades needed now. To decide.
He stepped through the rift and into the corridor just outside the doors to his chambers. Persephone was inside. He could feel her heartbeat when he allowed himself to settle into the silence of the hallway.
What methods she’d used to find her way back today, he wasn’t sure, but the goddess had requested the night and half the next day to contemplate his question while she roamed his realm undisturbed. She’d promised to meet him here at the end of that time. Perhaps she hadn’t left at all. It didn’t matter.
Hades schooled his features to the stony calm that had served him so well over the ages and pushed open the double doors.
There she sat, regal and expressionless in one of the heavy walnut chairs as he closed the doors behind him. Her legs were crossed under her chiton and graceful wrists dangled from the arms of the chair.
He clasped one wrist in the opposite hand at his back and moved into the room at an unhurried pace. She hadn’t twitched a muscle since his entrance, and it was clear her eyes had been on the door, waiting.
There was something on the air. Some premonitory tang that made the back of his neck prickle.
“You are afraid.”
It was as if she’d inherited the lightning and struck him.
“What?”
“Again and again you have demanded it of me. ‘What is it you fear, Persephone? Tell me why you’re afraid.’ ” She leaned forward in the seat. “And each time I have given you truth. And each time I have felt your satisfaction, to be able to claim those vulnerable pieces of me. Because it is an obsession. Your own fear is an obsession, and you can’t control it, but you can control mine, and it grants you a feeling of security to do so.”
She assaulted his foundations in blow after ruinous blow, but he managed to keep it from his face. His heart thudded in his chest, and somehow he twisted it into a smirk.
“And what is it I’m afraid of,” he said, “if you’re so sure that’s the case?”
“You need control.”
The smirk shifted. She uncrossed her legs to place both bare feet on the floor.
“That is your secret, ‘confessed to no one’, I believe your words were? Hades, Lord of the Dead, has to maintain control of every situation, at all times, because if he doesn’t, he fears someone will gain a single toehold and take from him that which he has carved out for himself.”
She … she cannot.
“You are very afraid”—she slid to the edge of the seat—“someone will uncover your secrets and use that knowledge to ruin you.” The goddess tipped a nod at the Elaionapothos, but a new shadow on her words told him ‘secrets’ extended beyond just the Oil.
“That is why you chose this question,” she said. “You believe you’ve hidden yourself with such skill, Unseen One, that you never bothered to prepare for an outcome in which I might come up with an answer.”
Was his mouth open?
“I have, haven’t I.” Green eyes blazed. “I’ve found one of your secrets.”
“I … I suppose you have.” Hades swallowed to wet his throat, and she was already rising to her feet. “Persephone, last night I … I need to explai—”
“Irrelevant.” Her hand cut the air in a negating line. “Do you give over control, or not?”
“Yes, of course”—familiar territory rushed away at the speed of panic—“but I wanted to tell you …” He fumbled for words like he never had. “There are things you need to understand, Pers—”
“Hades.”
There wouldn’t have been a larger reverberation had the Hall of Judgments come crashing to the cavern floor.
“I already told you,” she said, stepping in his direction, “I asked for what you gave. All of it. Again and again, you have cautioned me to speak if I’ve reached my limits, and I tell you I have not. I begged, Hades, because I wanted those words you whispered in my ear. I wanted to feel everything.”
Her reassurances rolled over him like a balm. He thought to pull her to him, his hands already reaching out. “Persephone, I—”
“Enough.” A halting hand came up, fierce now instead of delicate. “Enough with your words. That voice of yours in my head. I can’t function. You will not twist this day back under your thumb, lord of this realm or no. If you wish to earn the rest of my trust, you will keep your word. I’ve answered your challenge. Today is mine.”
Persephone’s cheeks flared hot with color, eyes glinting a warning: if he wanted to save this, he was not to provoke her further.
She closed the distance between them and splayed her hand in the center of his chest, green eyes locked on his, intense, and began herding him backward with decisive steps. He came to a stop when the backs of his knees bumped against the platform of the Elaionapothos. The goddess gave him a push.
“Sit.”
Hades sat, but searched her eyes for some sign of what was to come. An unfamiliar tension knotted his gut. Nerves? Is that what this was?
Is this what she feels? When you corner her?
She came to stand between his knees, so like their first encounter on the bench the day after he’d revealed himself. Today, however, her features were cool and detached instead of warring between panic and affront. Her eyes moved over him like a problem she needed to solve.
Persephone brought her hand to his temple and co
mbed her fingers back through his hair, nails grazing the scalp. When he couldn’t repress the entire resulting shudder, the bow of her lips grew into half a smile. A fist at the back of his head took a handful of hair and tilted his face up to hers.
She stared at him. Whatever she read in his eyes, it went unrevealed, but the pull of the connection deepened as her hold went on and on for unblinking moments. When the surrounding chamber seemed to have disappeared, the goddess reached out to pluck at the taut thread between them.
Her lips lowered to brush his, not quite a kiss, and his heart thundered in the silence.
“This is how it feels, you know.” Her whispered explanation came against his mouth, provoking feelings he couldn’t quite name. “To have your heart wrenched in anticipation. Uncertainty.” Persephone flicked the tip of her tongue between his lips, just as he’d done with that first kiss he’d stolen from her.
She pulled away, a satisfied glint in her eye as he twisted on her line. Some objection began forming in his mind, but, before he could give it voice, she bent again to melt her mouth against his. That sweet tongue sought entry and Hades gave it to her, the first kind of submission he could ever remember offering. The sheer novelty had immortal blood rushing to swell his cock.
Every slow lap of her tongue was excruciating. It was everything he could do not to seize her by the arms and throw her to the platform behind him.
She’s obeyed your every monstrous demand. She has kept to her word. Now you keep to yours, fiend.
He gripped the edge of the platform.
Be still.
Her hold on his hair changed hands and Persephone moved her kisses under his jaw and down his throat. One of her knees came to rest on the platform alongside his thigh so she could crowd him. Claim him. Her mouth burned at the muscles of his shoulder, his collarbone.
She inhaled at his hairline, just behind his ear.
“You smell like wet stone after it rains.” Her words curled warm with her breath. “Do you know I can’t get enough?” The fingers in his hair tightened. “Do you?”
Hades had never given a moment’s thought to what he might smell like. She, on the other hand, had been clawing away at his sanity since the day he’d trapped her in his realm.
“And you,” he said, “You are the dew at sunrise. Green leaves in the Spring. Do you know I had nearly forgot what those were like?” She was everything he could not have, every possibility the Fates had never seen fit to afford him.
And what do they afford you now?
Persephone drew back, searching him, and whatever she sought she must have found because the kisses came again, wet and ardent. His hands moved to the backs of her thighs, sliding his touch higher as he went.
“No.”
He blinked at her. Where had her mouth gone?
She took his wrists in a gentle grip and placed his hands back on the Oil.
“I will tell you when you are allowed to touch.”
Fates!
Persephone’s fingers went to the fibula at his shoulder and worked it loose. The dark wool fell away from his chest, exposing him to whatever purpose the goddess intended.
She took her own, unendurable time, fingertips marking out what seemed hours along the lines of his shoulders, the hollow at the center of his throat. He inhaled through his nose when her thumbs grazed his nipples. Had anyone ever bothered? If they had, it was beyond memory.
Her light touch tightened to a pinch and Hades grunted. Before he could contrive any sort of rude remark to misdirect from his shock, the goddess was kneeling between his thighs. A hot mouth replaced her fingers, and his erection twitched in eager response beneath the drape of his chiton.
She brought her teeth into it, and he made some sound. Some noise no other being outside this room ever needed to hear him make. There was a smoky little chuckle and she shifted to mirror her actions on his other side, letting him lean back on his arms to absorb the new sensations a second time.
The gossip of her lips and tongue traveled lower across his belly, and then her hands were working at his belt. By the time he managed to open his eyes, the goddess had him bared, his garment laid open beneath him.
His cock stood out, bobbing and vulgar before the divinity of her features, but Persephone’s gaze held a covetous focus. What could she see beyond impatient male lust?
It didn’t matter because she was taking him in hand and the warmth had his eyes rolling back.
No! Look at her!
And he did.
She drew the head across the silken skin of her cheek, and her smile warned of mischief. A crystal bead had grown at the swollen tip and a pink flash of tongue stole out to clear it away just before she rose to her feet.
She creates a balance. She gives just enough to make you squirm, but not enough to satisfy.
Just as he had done to her.
Images came flickering back from their previous encounters. Persephone with the collar and hook, writhing for release in this same place, atop the same Oil, and him letting her suffer from want. And then he remembered his clothing, undone around him.
The strap.
Would she expect …?
No.
No? How much balance would she want?
Not content with his silent struggles, Persephone had the blood red of her own chiton rippling to the stone at her feet.
Here she was again, a picture of everything he wanted to consume. Long and graceful, tight and round, cream pale and blush pink, and so full of life as nothing in the Unseen Realm truly ever could be.
Hades met the green eyes and what he saw there had him cursing to himself.
“Kneel.”
The Lord of the Dead, who did not kneel for anyone, felt himself slide from the edge of the platform. Felt his knees bend and support his weight on the limestone.
He knelt for Persephone.
She came to stand before him with a roll of her hips made to incite oath breaking or madness or both. One naked foot rose to the edge of the Oil beside them, and the goddess splayed herself at eye level, glistening and perfect.
“Worship.”
It was as if the earth had buckled beneath him.
He fell on her, rabid to obey as he’d never been, her pleasure his only goal.
Hades worshipped. He consumed. He buried his face and his tongue painted her with truth.
Consort.
She made no objection to the touch of his hand now. His fingers parted her, midnight dark alongside dewy rose, so he might taste her every hidden delight.
Persephone bathed him in low noises of encouragement and put a steadying hand on his shoulder. He lapped and she moaned, sucked and she whined. Her unbent knee began to have trouble in its support.
The fist was back in his hair, in silent, vigorous approval, and his cock throbbed along with a rush of unexpected pride. Hades Clymenus was capable of serving, of pleasing, another.
Not ‘another’. Her. Persephone.
His free hand moved to his erection, stroking to purchase relief while he smothered himself in her scent, her sounds.
“No.”
The slick velvet was gone.
Hades blinked up at her, open-mouthed, as the goddess stepped back and stood on two legs. She nudged his working hand away from his lust with a foot.
“Your pleasure belongs to me now, Son of Kronos.” The trouble in her smile made his gut tighten, and he knew what words would come next. “You will have it when I allow.”
Thrice-damned Creation!
And what were the depths of her self-control, that she could wrest herself back from completion in order to make a point?
But he had agreed. He had agreed.
She moved around him to sit on the bed—for what was the Elaionapothos when they were together now, if not the nest of their lovemaking?—one leg tucked under her, the other dangling to the floor.
“Bring your idle hands,” she said, gesturing with a nod for him to join her.
Hades got to his feet, m
arveling at his own obedience, and slid onto the pliant, waiting surface.
“On your back.”
The commands kept coming, and Hades followed. He shifted to stretch out, face up, on the platform beside her, his hands folded behind his head. Persephone wasted no time.
She brought her knee over his waist and sat astride his hips. When the bare flesh of her bottom brushed the standing heat of his cock, it was Hades’s turn to smile.
But the goddess had other plans.
She splayed her hands over his chest. Slid them up along his biceps and past his elbows. When she found his wrists, she drew them apart and laced her fingers with his, pinning his hands on either side of his head.
She is trying to lead today, isn’t she?
He chuckled at the little display and let her hold him like that as she leaned down for a kiss. Her sweet mouth was on his, tasting. The twin points of her nipples grazed his chest. His hands grew warm in her grip. Very warm.
Persephone sealed off their kiss with a hum of contentment and sat upright. Her arms stretched over her head, one hand pulling at the other wrist in exaggerated languor.
What is she hoping to—
Very warm.
She was no longer holding his hands. The Elaionapothos was, right where she’d sunk them.
He tried to pull free but the Oil held him. Above, Persephone smiled.
The Underworld answers to Underworld gods.
It was true, but … where had he heard it?
Hades brushed speculation aside. The reality they shared at this place and time was simple. She wanted his restraint more than he wanted release. It must be so, and he would have to endure until it wasn’t.
And how thoroughly she’d founded his fears! No sooner had someone discovered one of his secrets than they were using it against him. Not that Persephone’s idea of exploiting a weakness was altogether unpleasant.
“Well done, little flower.” He crooked a grin up at her. “I’m impressed.”
