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Phaidros was gone by the time I recovered enough to breathe. A glance around said he’d used a rather liberal definition of home. The forest in front of me was devoid of any life. Even the trees were barren. But I had reclaimed the mantle.Anyspot in the realm was home to me. I felt the glimmer of Cole’s soul under my skin, and I knew he would sense my presence in the realm as well. The silver burned still. I might have been freed of the gag, but my mouth was still covered in blisters; my wrists and feet shackled; my barely healed throat was encircled by the burning metal. Teleporting back to the castle took the last of my reserves.
At least my aim had been true. I landed in a heap at Cole’s feet.
He’d been in the library. If I’d felt any better, I would’ve teased him,wondering if he was reading anything particularly erotic—or looking for tips.
But he wasn’t in a teasing mood. And I could barely speak.
He flew to me.
“I will kill them,” he snarled.
His fury was a caress. Cole tore my shackles apart, ripping the cuffs off with his bare hands. The wolf lit his eyes as his gaze hit me. I tasted copper, swallowing the blood that had pooled in my mouth.
My body shook. His arms were around me, as healing as the magic that worked over my skin to heal the silver burns. He was steady, an anchor. But I was a tempest, shaking, rocking back and forth. I buried my head in his chest, my eyes clenched shut, as if I could escape the memories of the past day.
“You’re safe,” he promised, fingers threading through my hair. A gentle massage meant to steady me, to ease the frantic energy.
“I’m not scared.” I lifted my head to meet his gaze. “I’mfurious.”
The library shook with my displeasure, but Cole didn’t glance at the books that fell from the shelves.
“She has them trapped, Cole. All the souls, ever since that fucking deal. And now that I freed her, she can force them to fight for her. If you could have heard them… they’re in agony. Just being near them, I could hear their screams. They’re crying out at me, angry I’ve abandoned them, desperate for mercy. It’s Tartarus all over again. She’s made slaves of their souls and left them to suffer. And I willkill her for it,” I snarled.
“We will,” Cole promised. “And we will free the shifters she’s trapped.”
I didn’t know how. Worse, I knew Cole had no idea how to doso either. They were in her domain. I’d let her have them in her domain, left their souls unguarded, and now she was their goddess.
Just as I had once been.
Ihad ruled therealm of the living for centuries. It was the source of my magic; it was my responsibility. I was the goddess of all living things, but most precious to me were those I had been born among—the wolf packs. Those who walked in two worlds, as I did: one on four legs, the other two.
And then I met him.
The King of the Underworld. My opposite in every way. But more than my opposite, he was my equal. Something I could not find among all of the living creatures in the realm.
It was no wonder I fell for him.
But straddling two worlds… it was not as simple as wolf and human. Life and death can coexist in moments, not in centuries.
When I became Queen of the Underworld, the realms demanded a trade. No longer would I be allowed to rule over the living. It was too much for one individual. It would unbalance the universe.
At the time, it seemed fair. I would have given up everything to be with him, just as I knew he would have for me. And while I had borne my burden with relative ease, my king was crumbling under his. Oh, he was powerful. He was without equal in his realm. But loneliness is a kind of poison. And besides, unlike the realm that had been Hell, the realm of the living had been peaceful before me. Not perfect; I influenced it for the better. But in my naiveté, I decided the realm could do without me.
Nature abhors a vacuum. I grewinto my role as Queen of the Underworld. While I tended to the souls that made their home in that realm and as I grew to love them, and them, me, the Moon Goddess made her move.
She was subtle, to her credit. My ties to the land were almost entirely gone. It took ages to detect her scheming. While she ruled the heavens, she had no one to rule over. When she thought the living realm was abandoned, she decided to annex it into hers. She chose to start with the shifters.
I should have known her greed would not stop there.
From there, there were decades of back and forth while we played a game of chess with all the souls of the universe. Many pieces were taken off the board. But while the Moon Goddess had nothing to lose—she had no family, no citizens, no love in her—I had a tremendous amount to lose.
The deal we struck had Cole raging. It was the only way. It was what I willed.
It was devastating.
A soul for a soul. Neither of us would claim the land of the living. Instead, we would be locked away in opposite dungeons. Within her realm, her powers bound to little more than a trickle. And me, to the pits.
But while we had both ceded the world of the living, she used a loophole to steal the souls of the shifters. Once they died, they should have belonged to Hades. Instead, she siphoned them away, and in his grief, he was unable to stop her. Tartarus itself had whispered taunts of the world above, told me what had happened to those I had cared about so fiercely. It was a worse torture than the drowning.
