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Persephone
When I wake, I find Hades gone, his side of the bed cool to the touch. Judging by the sunlight slanting through the warehouse’s dingy, dust-covered windows, it’s only early evening.
My stomach rumbles and I think of my last meal. A hastily-chewed vending machine sandwich, a handful of mixed nuts, a can of sparkling water. It was the best that the gas station had to offer.
Now I look around the warehouse, pursing my lips and wondering where my next meal will come from. I stand and wander over to the worktables, my curiosity from earlier still piqued.
Heading to the stacked boxes of supplies, I bite my lip. My heart skips a beat as I tear into the first box. Despite having been literally torn from my life and kidnapped to be here now, I still feel it.
The thrill of opening new art supplies. Whether it be a new bright paint palette or fresh blank pages of paper or the crispness of unused charcoals, I still have the same giddiness. The sense of untapped potential, of materials needing only to be molded by my hands to be something great.
The first box is heavy and on the small side. Ripping the top open, I find all varieties of inks in tiny plastic bottles, each labeled by hand with numbers corresponding to their hexadecimal code. Some of the inks have more heft than others. Those are quite old and might even be a little gunky, having gone a bit solid in extended contact with air. Others are fresh and new, light and completely liquid.
I close that box, setting it aside. The next box I open is a heavy, wide, flat one. One of several such boxes, this one is thousands upon thousands of sheets of the thin clear plastic membrane that makes up contact paper.
My excitement begins to grow, tingling along my fingertips, making me smile almost reflexively.
The front door of the warehouse slides open with a loud thunk, making me jump. I turn to see Hades nudging the door closed. His hands are full of paper grocery bags and he walks them straight over to me, putting them down on the end of the worktable.
“You’ve been busy.” I amble over to him, pressing up on my tiptoes to peer in the bags. The aroma of buttery bread wafts up to my nose. “What did you bring me?”
He shoots me a quelling glance and reaches into one of the bags. “I got new phones for both of us. And I stopped at a boulangerie on the way back.”
“Oooh,” I say. As he hands me a phone and opens a box of croissants, I have trouble deciding which I want first.
“There are French macarons too. And a little pot of forest honey.”
He nudges the box of macarons toward me. I look at all the goodies for a long moment before I decide on a croissant.
In the end, I grip the phone in one hand and the pastry in the other, taking a huge bite. It’s maybe the best bite of anything I’ve ever had in my whole damned life.
Buttery, flaky, chewy. It melts in my mouth.
“Omigod,” I mutter, closing my eyes. “This croissant is better than sex.”
Hades looks at me sharply. “What kind of sex are ye having that is less good than a pastry, lass?”
Heat suffuses my cheeks. My mouth is too full of buttery goodness to speak, so I just glare at him. He starts to unpack the other bags and I turn my attention to the phone. Pursing my lips, I turn it on and scroll through the contacts.
“There is only one number programmed in here,” I say after a minute.
“Aye. That’s mine,” he says, holding up his identical phone. “What other numbers do ye need?”
“How very practical of you.” I roll my eyes. “I should email my brother. Let him know that I’m all right.”
“Lass…” He stiffens, pinning me with a hard glare. He prowls around the table, staring at me with an air of disbelief. “I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how our enemies came to know where to find us in Valencia. Ye wouldn’t have sent yer brother an email back there, would ye?”
My brows arch. My mouth opens, a quick retort on the tip of my tongue. I reply to him with all due venom.
“It’s not like I sent Lawrence a picture of the villa, our address, and the story of how you kidnapped me. I just emailed him a very brief paragraph letting him know that I was okay.”
Both of Hades’ hands shoot out, grabbing my upper arms and gripping me hard. His face contorts, looking as black as a thundercloud.
“Are ye a fucking idiot?” He pulls me closer, shaking me a little. “Ye went against my explicit instructions, lass. Anybody could have been monitoring his email. Ye might as well have lit a beacon and invited Ex-BF to come for us whenever he felt like it.”
“I… I don’t think so, Hades—” My heart starts beating fast.
“Ye feeble minded idiot.” He sneers, pulling me so close to his face that we are only an inch apart. “It’s a wonder they didn’t come sooner. The fact that we got away was sheer luck, ye know.”
