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I stop, pushing out my cheek with my tongue. Hades’ gaze burns into my face.
“Yeah?” he asks quietly.
I suck in a breath. “It’s not reassuring. I don’t feel safe around you, knowing that you are going to fight every single guy who so much as looks at you wrong. So…” I shrug a shoulder. “Maybe think about that before the next time you almost beat the tar out of some guy.”
He stands up, knocking his stool back and glaring at me. “Dinnae be such a fucking coward.”
Then he turns on his heel and stalks out of the warehouse. I sigh and start cleaning up the bloody bits of cotton left from my first aid, shaking my head.
Chapter22
Persephone
Hades is gone for too long. Half a day, almost. I spent the interim fumbling with wax seals and applying contact paper to make up the unstamped pages of three American passports. When he comes back in at the end of a long day, I’m just turning off my work lamps.
He rolls the big door open, and I turn toward the sound, my jaw tensing and my eyes narrowing on his face. Hades heads in the direction of his bed, as if nothing happened.
“Where have you been?” I ask, my tone sounding exasperated.
He stops for a second, clenching his fists before he turns back toward me. “I have a whole business, Persephone. I know that ye haven’t seen me working that much, but I can assure ye that is just because ye have been so needy. The business still needs tending. That’s the only way that I can have plans in place for every contingency.”
Crossing my arms, I pace over to him. His dark hair is shoved back from his face, his button up rumpled. Not only that, but he looks tired.
I try to sound reasonable as I take him to task.
“You can’t leave me here for so long. What if Constantine found me, somehow? It would take you a whole day to notice. I don’t feel safe in this place by myself.”
His mouth turns down at the corners but he just shrugs a shoulder. “We are well hidden here. I have no reason to suspect that anyone might know where we are.”
I want to strangle him because I feel like he’s not even listening to what I’m saying. Stepping closer, I lift my chin. “I could’ve been abducted this morning. And you wouldn’t even know I was gone until now. For all you know, I could’ve been taken out of the country by now!”
I’m not expecting Hades to grab me around the waist with so much force that it makes me tremble. He hauls me up against the wall of his body, his lips twisting bitterly.
“That won’t happen,” he growls. “No one is going to take ye from me, Penny.”
A bubble of humorless laughter leaves my lips, unbidden. “You can’t control everything! The fact that you think?— “
Hades kisses me then, hard and punishing, stealing the very breath from my lungs. My whole body stiffens against him at first. I pound a fist against his chest as he bends me back, his tongue sweeping my mouth, his fingers finding their way into my hair. My heart pounds.
As much as I am loathe to admit it, this is what I knew would happen. Worse, I wanted him to kiss me. To fuck me.
To make me cry his name as I came.
He pushes me back toward the bed, half carrying me, the onslaught of his kiss never giving up an inch.
With every passing second, I feel my resolve against Hades weakening. Every brush of his lips on mine, every stroke of his fingers up and down my body. There’s something different in him. I’ve felt him changing, slowly, a more vulnerable side emerging from the darkness.
But it requires anger to bring it out of him.
His tongue plunders my mouth and I find myself meeting it eagerly with my own. I can feel his desire to dominate, to possess me, and it doesn’t scare me like it used to. I welcome it.
“Hades,” I murmur against his lips. He takes my lower lip between his teeth and tugs, swift and hard.
He pulls a groan from my lips with the ease of a puppet master playing with a marionette.
“Quiet, lass.” His growl sends shivers through my body and my nails dig into his chest. Slowly my eyes lift to meet his penetrating gaze, and what I find there makes me pause.
The familiar arrogance has lifted slightly, and a hint of vulnerability is there. “I’m not going anywhere.”
