Page 34 of Hades is Mine

“Look, I know girls like the whole happy-families gig, but that’s not who I am. I’m not going to cuddle with you every night and wake up in the morning and play house together.”

“Who asked you to do that?” His sudden shift in personality stunned me. But I should have known this was coming. This was Hades, after all.

“You want to know who asked me to do that?” He laughed bitterly. “Everyone. You. It never ends. I’m never going to be the person you all want me to be, no matter how hard I try.”

“So, you’re telling me you’ve been trying?” I didn’t mean to say those words, but they were the first things that slipped out. From my vantage point, Hades hadn’t been trying at all.

He shook his head. “I’m not going to deal with this bullshit. This is exactly what I don’t want. To stand here and be reprimanded for who I am. I don’t have to try to change for someone else. Love is pathetic.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I cried out. “No one said anything about love. For the first time since I’ve known you, we spent a normal night together. And now you’re jumping to all kinds of conclusions. Why is it always like this with you? You kissed me. You wanted this. And I already have three men in my life who adore me, so it’s presumptuous of you to think I want to play house with just you alone.”

“Yeah? Well, I don’t always know what I’m doing. And clearly, I put my foot in it sometimes when I really shouldn’t.” Despite the directness of his words, his eyes wandered around the room, and he moved from the window to the door.

I narrowed my eyes at him. “What are you saying?”

He shook his head, his face fallen, no mask to hide the rawness of the confusion scribbled over his expression, and he marched out of the room, still only wearing his towel. I sat on the bed, shocked about what I’d just heard. How was it possible that Hades, the Dick of the Underworld, still managed to hurt me?

I thought about Ares’s and Poseidon’s words about Hades hurting me—He didn’t mean physically, Ares said—and realized what they’d been saying to me. When Poseidon and Ares spoke to me about Hades, about being careful with him, they hadn’t referred to the fighting that always happened between us. No, I could hold my own. They’d been talking about Hades and my heart.

Everyone else seemed to understand what was going on, but Hades refused to accept it. And maybe he was too broken to ever change.

But I wasn’t going to let him march out of the room and leave this conversation where it was. I jumped off the bed, yanked off the shirt I’d put on, and threw on the clothes I came here in. With my heels in my hand, I walked through the house, finally finding Hades in the kitchen. He stood in front of the sink, looking out of the cracked window at the shitty backyard. Frozen in time and lost in his thoughts.

“Don’t you dare pretend this has nothing to do with you?” I snapped.

He didn’t even look at me.

“This is about so much more than just you and me. There are people out there dying, humans who don’t deserve this terrible fate. You know this is happening, and you’re pretending like it’s just one big mistake. All of it. You’re acting like you don’t care. But I won’t believe that about you. I can’t see you as someone who’d willingly let them die. Not unless you and X are really a lot more alike than I thought.”

Hades turned to me and his eyes shot fire. “I’m not going to do anything for anyone else ever again. If X is killing them, and nothing I do is helping, then let them die.”

I stared at him in utter shock. His words were poison as he spewed such hatred. Where the hell was all this coming from? “You can’t mean that!”

Hades laughed bitterly. “Oh, Elyse, you don’t really know me at all, do you? The fact of the matter is, Icanmean that.”

I wasn’t willing to believe him. I didn’t want to know Hades really could be the terrible person I’d thought him to be when X had first arrived. I was so willing to believe Persephone that all this had been caused by Hades’s rejection of love because of what he’d been through. I’d longed for him to be the victim, too. Because if Hades was the casualty, then he wouldn’t be the villain. And I couldn’t help but sense a vague sense of familiarity washing over me. A case of déjà vu that this had happened before, and maybe it had in the numerous similar arguments we’d had before.

“You need to leave,” he ordered.

“You’re kicking me out?”

“You’re finally catching on.”

I had nothing else to say. It wasn’t that I was angry because that was normal around Hades. Nope, I was fucking shattered, the wound in my heart so deep, it cut me to the core.

And he stood there, watching me bleed, and like an idiot I kept running back to him. He’d finally managed to get through to me on a level where he could hurt me, hurt me badly. This was a new level of cruelty, and my throat thickened as he managed to reach the part of me underneath the layers, my soul, the warrior girl who fought gods, and he’d broken my heart.

Ripped me apart.

So, I turned around and did exactly what he’d told me to, refusing to let him see the tears collecting in my eyes.

I left.

The moment I stepped outside the front door, it was as if I were being handed from one darkness to the next. But this time, the blackness that surrounded me was heavy and it swallowed me immediately. X was here. He was after my blood, my soul, and I couldn’t face him. Not now when I was as crushed as I was.

“I told you I’d find you, little Lowe. I made a promise you wouldn’t survive an encounter with me another time. And I always keep my promises.”

He wasn’t even in front of me. It was like his darkness shrouded me and his voice floated all around me, an awful sound that scraped all the way down to my very core.

I had to get away from him and fast. Going back to Hades wouldn’t help as he was such a jerk, so I doubted he’d help. I fumbled for my phone, trying to dial Ares, Heracles, Poseidon, whoever’s name came up first in my recent call list. When I couldn’t find a number quick enough, I turned around and ran. I glanced behind me, caught sight of the darkness gliding after me, and panic squeezed my lungs. I was still on bare feet, my heels in my hand, but I didn’t care that the stones on the pavement cut into my soles, that I looked like a pathetic human. My hair streamed behind me as I pressed my phone against my ear, hearing it ringing and hoping to God I’d called one of the guys and not someone else.

I couldn’t believe I was running. I couldn’t believe this was happening—Hades was supposed to be the one person who’d change everything and instead, he’d kicked me out as if I were a dog. And now X would kill me if the guys didn’t manage to reach me in time.

“Elyse!” Heracles shouted, appearing in front of me.

“He’s right behind me!” I cried out and realized I was sobbing. Ares and Poseidon appeared next to Heracles and I ran to them. The darkness that was on my tail hit the three gods like a wall, and I finally escaped. But I didn’t turn around to help them fight. I wasn’t in the headspace to do it. I wasn’t sure if I would ever be in the headspace to do it again, not with how I felt now. I continued running. I ran until I couldn’t run anymore, until my legs felt numb and my throat hurt from crying, until my chest was so tight, I couldn’t breathe.

I wasn’t the person who was supposed to save the world. I wasn’t the humans’ last hope. I was nothing more than a woman who’d believed for far too long that she was more than she really was.

Right now, I’d been put in my place. And it would be best to remember that this person, the one who’d run away scared, the one who’d been rejected, was the only woman who remained.

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