this way, but I don’t know if I’ll get another chance. I love you. I made this mess, and now I’ll fix it.
Yours,
P
I read it again. And then a third time. “Godsdamn it.” If she’d left me to save herself or her sisters, that would be easier to swallow. I’d suspected, but suspecting and knowing the truth are two very different things.
Something inside me goes cold and barbed as I pull out my phone and check the gossip sites. Persephone’s only been gone a few hours, but her photos are already all over them. Her in that black dress at Zeus’s party. Zeus with his arm possessively around her waist. Her giving him that sunny smile that is fake and sweet enough to make my teeth ache.
She walked back into his waiting arms to save me. I can’t wrap my mind around it. She’s seen my preparations. She knows what I’m capable of. My people and I can weather anything Zeus throws at us. It won’t be pretty, but we can do it.
Persephone just stepped in front of a bullet meant for me.
The thought makes the cold feeling inside me go positively frigid. Zeus will make her pay for leaving, for letting me have my hands all over her in front of his peers. For soiling her, in his mind. He’ll take his rage out on her, and not even Persephone can survive that indefinitely. Maybe her body will, but he’ll fracture her soul, the strength that makes her her. Zeus isn’t the type of man to tolerate any resistance.
I promised I’d protect her.
I fucking love her.
I tuck the note exactly back where I found it and walk out of the bathroom. I’ve ghosted through these hallways often enough that it’s child’s play to avoid my people and the cameras. Charon will lose his shit when he realizes what I’ve done. Andreas will never forgive me. None of it matters. Nothing but doing whatever it takes to ensure Persephone is safe.
Even if it means she runs as far and fast from Olympus as she can. As far and fast from me as she can. Even knowing that her freedom means I lose her forever. Better that she be lost to me in favor of the world and her freedom than submitting to Zeus to pay the price for sins real and imagined.
I’m going to kill him.
I make it a single block from my house when a dark sedan cruises around the corner and slows next to me. The passenger-side window rolls down, and Hermes gives me a shadow of her normal grin. “You’re about to do something stupid.”
Dionysus is in the driver’s seat, and he looks as exhausted as if he’s gone on a weeklong bender. “Hades always did have a noble streak.”
“I wouldn’t want you to get in the middle. I know how you both hate that.” It comes out far harsher than I intend, but I can’t help it. Against my better judgment, I started considering her and Dionysus friends and look where that got me. Betrayal. Endless fucking betrayal.
Her smile drops. “We’re all playing the roles set out for us. I knew the script when I accepted the title.” She glances at Dionysus. “We both did.”
“Not all of us had that kind of choice.” I can’t keep the bitterness, the anger, from my voice. I never asked to be Hades. The decision was taken out of my hands the first moment I drew breath. A heavy mantle to lay on a newborn’s head, but no one cared what I wanted. Not my parents. Certainly not Zeus when he made me an orphan and the youngest Hades in the history of Olympus.
She sighs. “Get in the car. It’ll be faster than walking, and you don’t want to show up to Zeus’s all rumpled and messy. Presentation is eighty percent of negotiations.”
I stop. The car stops next to me. “Who said I was going to Zeus?”
“Give us a little credit.” Dionysus chuckles. “The love of your life just made a deal to save your skin, so naturally you’re going to pull a very romantic, very impulsive move to save her right back.”
My internal debate only lasts a moment. At the end of the day, they’re right. They both have a role to play, just like the rest of us. Holding that against them is like being angry at the wind for unexpectedly changing direction. I walk around the car and slide into the passenger seat. “You helped her leave,