Once I’m inside and crank the engine, I reach inside my jacket pocket and pull out the black velvet box. Popping open the lid, I look at the ring that I’ll hopefully be slipping on her finger the next time she’s in town.
While I have some planning to do to make sure she gets the proposal she’s always deserved, I can’t wait. Sarah Rose will eventually be my wife, and I can’t wait to start my forever with her. I have no doubt she’ll say yes.
About the Author
Brooke Cumberland and Lyra Parish are a duo of romance authors who teamed up under the USA Today pseudonym, Kennedy Fox. They share a love of Hallmark movies, overpriced coffee, and making TikToks. When they aren’t bonding over romantic comedies, they like to brainstorm new book ideas. One day in 2016, they decided to collaborate under a pseudonym and have some fun creating new characters that’ll make you blush and your heart melt. Happily ever afters guaranteed! View our full reading order here.
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Chapter One
I dream of open skies.
The factory floor where I work is so massive that it’s possible to believe a sky is up there, somewhere. The lights that shine down from on high are specially calibrated not to interfere with the personal lights at our workstation, so if you squint your eyes and hope, you could mistake the ceiling for endless open blue.
I know it’s not, obviously. I haven’t lost my mind. And when I came here, I came here knowing that the mountain is a fortress. The sky can’t get in. The man who owns it—who, as legend says, carved this place from the rock through sheer force of will—hates the sky. Or at least he’s come to a standing truce with it. The sky will not bother him here, and he can pretend it doesn’t exist. He can rule over his own kingdom.
I envy him, a little.
Only a little.
My tweezers make it easy to sort through the small collection of diamonds at my workspace today. I’m fashioning them into equally tiny settings of metal that gleams in the lamplight. Sparkle and shine, wrap it in metal, send it away. It’s not my business to know where the diamonds go once I’m done with them, and that’s part of what gives me peace.
I know—impossible, you’re thinking. Impossible that anyone in Hades’ mountain could have such a thing as peace, when he is so dangerous, when the threat of him is close by like a heart that always beats. And yes, he is a dangerous man, the most dangerous anyone here has ever or will ever meet. But we’re under no threat from him unless—
There’s always an unless.
Unless we step out of line in some way. People make mistakes. Of course they do. That’s the human condition. But the big mistakes—a rape in the shadows of the mines, an egregious theft—well, those are the things that bring Hades to mete out justice.
That guy likes justice.
I’ve seen him come through here more than once, on a mission to elsewhere in the mountain. He’s the kind of man that can be sensed even when he is not trying to attract attention. The dark pull of him can’t be ignored, like a cold breeze on the back of your neck. A person doesn’t have to turn and witness to know it’s there. You feel it.
I twine the last length of metal around the last diamond of the day and put my tools back in their places.
No Hades on the factory floor tonight. No telling where he’s been today. Not for someone like me. Except on the rare occasions when he comes down to the floor or through the rest of the mountain, he might as well be as far as the moon.
And me, at the bottom of a crater.
It’s not so bad. I’m making it seem awful. Like a prison sentence.
The truth is that I came here of my own free will. I signed a contract with him in that big glassed-in office and heaved a huge sigh of relief. Steady work. That’s what I wanted. A chance to save my mother from the bills that have dogged her all her life. Medical debt is hard to get out of. There’s one way to leave it behind, though, and she’s taken that exit, flown off into the sky. Finally free.
I let out a sigh.
It’s been a long time coming, but it’s hard, with the holidays.
With