AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t lissssten to her,” Mormo said. “The girl liessss.”
“I’m not lying about wanting to live.” I flipped him off. I didn’t need to pretend to like Mormo, and I sure wasn’t going to act like his opinion mattered here. Hades didn’t respect him. Mormo was nothing more than a boot-licking sycophant. He hadn’t gotten what he wanted from Hecate, so he was trying to swim upstream with the bigger fish.
Manea’s focus had shifted from me to Hades, and she seemed put-off by his sudden interest in the situation. “What are you thinking?” she asked him.
“If the girl likes to bet, I have a wager for her.”
Oh mercy, I didn’t think I was going to like this.
“Yes?” She ran her hands through his hair. Admittedly he had pretty dreamy hair. Too bad the rest of him was so scary I wanted to poop just looking at him for too long.
“The stakes are simple. I win, my ladylove gets both your lives. You win, you are free to go, and the balance is restored. She won’t come for you again until Atropos tells us your time is up. Agreed?”
“This seems like an absolutely terrible plan,” Leo said.
“Better than letting them kill us.” Maybe. “Okay, fine. What’s the bet?”
Hades looked up at Manea, stroking her face and beaming proudly. “It’s very simple. All you have to do is escape.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Escape.
All we had to do in order to live was get out of the underworld.
Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
Leo glanced at me and must have seen a pretty stricken expression because he asked, “Is that bad?”
I nodded slowly.
“Can we do it?” Leo kept staring at me.
Hades chuckled, and the sound vibrated inside me, threatening to turn my guts to jelly. Manea looked absolutely fucking delighted. And why wouldn’t she? I’d just agreed to a bet so insane I might as well have killed Leo myself.
“Escape.” I repeated the word one syllable at a time, hoping it had a secondary meaning I didn’t know.
“It’s been done. Once.”
My head bobbed automatically, and I fought the urge to sit down. This wasn’t a small task, like getting locked in a vault and trying to find a secret key. The underworld was just that, its own world. There were regions and levels and things people had never lived to talk about. How were we supposed to get out when I didn’t know what we were getting out of?
It’s not like there was a visitor map with a big glowing You Are Here and handy signs pointing towards the exits.
“We can do it.” Leo took my arm and started to back away from the throne. I went with him, my feet working on their own without assistance from my brain.
“Escape.” I looked at Manea, and the expression of victory she greeted me with brought me back to my senses.
I don’t know what it was about her condescending, gleeful grin, but it sparked a fire inside me that rivaled the flames outside.
They thought they had us beat before we’d even begun, which just went to show they had no idea who they were dealing with.
I would get out of here, no matter what it took.
And then I’d gladly tell anyone who listened how I was able to cheat death twice in one week.
It wasn’t until ten minutes later, standing outside Hades’s temple, I really got an idea of how mammoth a task it was we’d taken on.
Leo and I stood on the deep, bone-white steps of the temple, and looked out over the expanse of the underworld kingdom.
