Page 68 of The Catacomb King
“Yes, you do. That’s not the point. What I’m saying is, we’re not bad, but we’re not… good at being good to each other. We have our rituals and our beloveds, but it wouldn’t occur to us to cry over each other’s deaths, even if we wanted to. I would never have been able to articulate it before, but I think I have been trying to be good for as long as I can remember. I think that’s why I kidnapped you. See how fucked up I am, that I was trying to be a good person and kidnapping an innocent woman was the best I could do? But I didn’t know what goodness looked like until I saw you risking your life to gather those herbs.”
I swallowed. “You’re not being fair. Your people love you.”
“They love you more,” he said, smiling dryly.
“Oh yeah? They’re going to be pretty fucking ticked off when you kill me, then.”
The smile dropped off his face. “Yes. They will.”
We lay face-to-face in the warm damp grass. His hair fell into his eyes, one strand of it clinging to his cheek. His body threw off more heat than the sun.
Do it, some part of me whispered.Do it now.
Do what?
Kiss him, you fucking moron. Look at him. He wants it.
He abducted me!
But he did want it. I could tell from the vein beating fast in the side of his neck. The way he’d gazed at me, before, in that white silk negligée. The catch in his voice when he said the wordgoodness.
And everything he’d done to me aside… I wanted it, too.
Ilikedhim. I liked that he thought I was good. I liked that he thought I was smart. And I liked his devotion to his people, his devotion to his servant, his devotion even to a family that didn’t want him. His thoughtfulness, his curiosity, the way he reallylistenedand wanted to understand when I explained a problem and its solution to him. The way he laughed. The way I could, against all odds,makehim laugh.
And I was going to die.
I shifted forward. It only took an inch. I placed my open lips against his. Did not press. Did not move my tongue. Did not even graze his teeth.
Hades breathed in my exhale.
We lay sandwiched between the cool grass and the hot blanket of the sun.
When Hades exhaled, I inhaled. Took his breath deep into my lungs. Heat pulsed between my legs.
Not even a hair’s breadth separated our lips.
Hades murmured, “There’s something else you need to know.”
I could hardly speak. My hands were inching across his stomach. I felt wild. I wanted to touch his bare skin. I wanted him to hike my skirt up the rest of the way and push his fingers into me, no ceremony, no mercy. Catch his tongue in my mouth while he did it. His hands quivered desperately in my skirt. It was already up around my thighs. I pressed my legs against his. A breathy moan kicked out of him like he’d been punched. “Stop,” he mumbled, but he didn’t let go of me. “You wouldn’t want to touch me if you knew this.”
How could he tell me anything worse than he already had? He was going to kill me, and even so, I could not imagine not wanting to touch him. Maybe it was only my own fear, the thoughts of death hurtling down on me like the rockslide, but in the scant time I had left, I wanted to touch him so bad. Myfingers slipped under the hem of his tunic of their own accord. His hard, hot abs pulsed under my palms. I traced the hairs on his skin. I wanted to lick him.
Hades shivered. “The Lake,” he moaned against my lips. His hands were creeping, creeping, creeping. A few more centimeters and he’d be grabbing my thighs like he did when he picked me up. Somehow we had moved closer together. My breasts beneath the corset were crushed against the flat muscles of chest. His mouth was fully on mine now. One dart of my tongue and I would taste him.
“The Lake,” he managed to say again. His tongue shaped the words against my teeth. I almost sobbed with desperation. “The Lake isn’t going to kill you. That’s not what it does.”
I wanted him so desperately, I couldn’t even process what he was saying. I mumbled, unthinking, “You said that being drowned in the Lake would feed me to the Monarch. That my soul would travel up the waterfall and into the Monarch’s teeth.”
“It will. But that doesn’t mean the process will kill you. The Lake has a different power. Those drowned in its waters are… resurrected.”
My heart skipped a beat. With difficulty I pulled away from him, searching his face. “Wait. I’m not going to die?”
“No,” said Hades miserably.
I sat up all the way. “Then what’s the big deal? Are you saying I’m going to be immortal? That doesn’t make sense. If you can just resurrect people, why didn’t you do it to Mackr? Or his brother?” Unless — “But maybe it doesn’t heal, and that’s the problem? Their bodies would still be all fucked up? Is that it?”
“No, no, the Lake heals. If you can call it that. Persephone, you don’t understand.”
