The Passion of Hades - Eliza Raine Page 0,35

I won't be able to stop myself.'

Then he vanished before I could tell him he didn't have to.

Sixteen

Hades

For the love of all the fucking gods, the gold vines were back. That was me done for. There was no fucking way I could resist her, glowing green and gold and showing me every delicious thing she wanted me to do to her. I turned the temperature in the shower down even further, blasting my body with freezing water. It wouldn't work, but short of fucking Persephone senseless I didn't know what else to try. There was no way I was going to relieve myself with someone else, and doing it myself had stopped working centuries before.

It was getting harder and harder to believe that I was going to be able to let her go. If she regained all of her power, if those gold vines ended up able to share more than just her sexual desires...

Memories of her wrapped around me, of our bodies entwined, those beautiful vines filling my monstrous heart with life and light. I'd told her that she had changed the Underworld when she had been here, made it brighter. I had told her that I had tried to create life to replace the hole her absence had left inside me. But she couldn't know that she was the only chance I had at reversing the damage this place had done to me. The damage my brother had done to me.

I hadn't started out as a monster. I had found taking life more repulsive than most of my siblings, in fact. Which was why Zeus thought me weak, and favored Poseidon. For the first few decades of my new role, dealing with the dead had saddened me. I felt pity and empathy for the souls arriving in my realm. But that was unsustainable. As King it was my job to judge the guilty. I wasn't expected to bother with petty thieves or remorseful adulterers, but I had to deal with the scum of Olympus, the worst of every species alive. Day after day I saw and heard of the increasing levels of brutality mortals were capable of, their motives always shallow and selfish. The more punishments I had to dole out for their unspeakable acts, the less I cared for them.

And as my brothers’ realms flourished, and they both found wives, my sadness turned to bitterness.

Those punishments started to become a way to vent my building anger. I started out telling myself that those receiving them deserved them, ignoring the fact that I was now enjoying watching men flayed alive, or flesh burning from skin. Ignoring the fact that the well of power that had always burned hot inside me was darkening, twisting, dirtying.

The more horrific my punishments of the guilty became, the more my brothers seemed to respect me. Before long, they left me alone, content that I was doing the job that Zeus had bestowed on me. I surrounded myself in smoke, banned everyone from my realm, and let myself become the monster the King of the Underworld needed to be.

But then I met Persephone. Somehow, she alone recognized what was buried deep inside me. And the same life-giving power she used to nurture and grow plants had flowed into me through those gleaming vines for four years, healing parts of me I thought lost forever.

Until she was ripped away.

Before I knew what I was doing I had slammed my fist into the marble wall of the shower. It cracked, collapsing completely, water spraying across the room.

'For fuck’s sake!' I shouted, and stamped my foot. It instantly repaired itself. What was I going to do? I wasn't sure I could cope with losing her again.

The rest of the day dragged painfully slowly, my mind slipping back to the images Persephone had sent me almost constantly.

'Boss, pay attention, this is important,' said Hecate, snapping me out of an intense vision of Persephone's soft lips wrapped around the tip of my cock.

'Sorry, what?' I asked, shifting uncomfortably in my seat. Stupid fucking erection.

'Kerato says he has news. On the Spring Undead faction.' I sat up, immediately alert.

'I'll see him in the throne room now.'

'My Lord,' the minotaur bowed low as I flashed onto my throne.

'What news do you have?'

'We have captured someone known to be closely associated with the attacker.'

'Where is he now?'

'She is in the holding pits.'

'Bring her to me.'

Rage simmered inside me, the memory of what that man had almost done to my Queen making my