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“I’m aware,” Hades said.
“And you? Why are you sulking on your balcony instead of lying with your love?”
“I am not sulking,” he said.
“You always sulk,” she said.
Hades glared, unwilling to argue with the goddess. “I cannot sleep, if you must know.”
“Worrying too much?” she asked.
He did not respond.
“Perhaps you should not worry when you are with her,” said Hecate.
“That is when I worry most,” he said, because he thought of what he stood to lose if anyone got in his way.
“Trust that your love is stronger than any god,” said Hecate.
“It is not our love I worry about,” he said. “It is what I will destroy to keep it.”
“Since when have you ever worried over carnage?” she asked.
“Since I decided to marry the Goddess of Spring,” he said.
“Foolish man,” Hecate said. “You never had a choice.”
Her words made him uneasy. There was something he disliked about the truth of the Fates and their threads. He’d have liked to think he would have chosen Persephone no matter the weaving of their lives and that perhaps she would have chosen him, though he knew she feared that all they had was what Fate had given them.
He wondered if she still thought that or if she had begun to believe their love might be greater than ethereal thread.
There was a part of him that did not wish to know.
“Do not pretend Persephone does not know who she has chosen to love,” Hecate said. “She sees all of you. She is the Goddess of Spring after all. She is used to life and death.”
CHAPTER IV
HADES
Hades returned to Persephone but did not sleep, a fact that did not escape her notice. She had risen around noon and frowned at him when she woke. She traced the high point of his cheek. He took her hand and kissed her fingertips.
“I am well,” he said.
“Why do you lie?” she asked.
To protect you, he wanted to say.
“What will you do today?” Hades asked instead.
She gave him a strange look. “I am assuming you are asking because you do not intend to stay?”
“I have business in the Upperworld,” he said.
“On a Sunday?”
He knew she did not ask because she was suspicious but because it was unusual. He normally spent the weekends sequestered in the Underworld with her. Sometimes they did not leave this room; other times he took her to explore parts of the Underworld she had never seen.
Whatever their day, it was time he cherished with her, and while he hated to give it up, he knew this could not wait.
