Page 31 of The Catacomb King
“Yes,” Hades said.
There was so much wrong with this, I didn’t even know where to start. And my mind was still fixated on the wholefeeding-you-to-Chaosthing. I couldn’t untangle my thoughts, couldn’t calm my petrified, banging heart. My palms had begun to sweat. “Don’t you have engineers already? I haven’t even been to college.”
Hades sighed. “Well, first of all, we don’t have college, so no one cares. I only even know what a college is because I read so many books, and some of those books are from the Lümerlund.” My mind flashed on the full bookshelves in the room he’d stashed me in. “Second of all, no, not really. People here don’t… I mean, yes, they have jobs, but we don’t treat them the same way you treat jobs in the Lümerlund.”
“And you know how we do our jobs because of… books.”
“Yes.”
Would that humans wrote as many books about the underworld as the underworld seemed to have about us. Thenmaybe I’d know what was going on. “Elke seems to do her job,” I pointed out. “Your maidservant.”
“Elke is devoted to me, and her job is an extension of her devotion. It’s different. But finally, even if we did have better engineers, no one has had the idea to use the water from the Primordial Mountain.” He hesitated. “No one except for you.”
A warmth was kindling in my stomach. A softer, lighter, more dangerous warmth than the heat I felt whenever Hades glared at me or threw me over his shoulder. That heat was powered primarily by fear — he was mykidnapper— and this warmth was, too, but… worse. I tried to quash it. “How did you know I’d had that idea?”
Hades was silent. I was beginning to realize that he stayed silent when he didn’t want to answer a question but didn’t want to lie.
“Youwerewatching me,” I accused him. “You listened to my conversation with Calix when I told him about the blueprints for my reservoir system. You said you hadn’t been!”
“I said no one had been watching youthis whole time,” Hades corrected. “But yes, Persephone. I was watching that conversation.”
Persephone. He knew my name. He had learned it while eavesdropping on me and Calix. He shaped the syllables with his smooth, square accent. My name in his mouth. I had never heard it spoken like that. I swallowed. I had to keep talking so I wouldn’t ask him to say it again.
I said, “Is this why you usually kidnap healers and midwives? Because we’re better at our jobs than you?”
Hades smiled a little bit. “I told you,” he said. “You’re smart.”
“Stop. Just answer the question.”
“Not always. But sometimes, yes. Twenty-six years ago, the last tribute midwifed my own birth. Typically my people, um, hatch. But my mother… took after our human ancestor. As do I.Our own midwives did not know what to do with her… parts.” His eyes flicked down to the triangle between my legs.
His discomfort was hilarious. “Doyouknow what to do with them?”
I thought he would blush. Instead he smirked. It was like getting punched in the face. “Trust me,” he said. “I really do.”
Suddenly it was hard to swallow. “From the… midwife?”
Hades’s smirk widened. “No.”
Okay. I shifted uncomfortably. He was still looking at me, his blue eyes bright and smug, his broad shoulders back, his black hair framing his gorgeous face. No, no, he’d kidnapped me from my family! From my home! He was going to sacrifice me to a monster-god! He wasbad!
Bad in a good way?whispered a vicious part of me. The part that was excruciatingly aware of the heat in my own loins. I couldn’t stop thinking of how he’d glanced at my groin a second earlier. The urge to glance at his, too, was almost overwhelming. I wanted to take his clothes off. It sounded insane, but I wanted to see if he had a human cock or something else. And if he had a human cock… what would it be like?
I had to get away from this. This was just the terror, desperate for something else to latch onto. My thoughts had turned into cotton. I managed to spit out, “What happened to your mom?”
Any sexual energy evaporated at once. The smirk dropped off Hades’s face.
I almost apologized. But at least I wasn’t thinking about his cock anymore. Ugh, comeon.
“She died,” Hades said. “In childbirth.” And then: “My father didn’t like her anyway. It was a marriage of convenience. She was a cousin of the Vizeking’s.”
“And easy to boss around,” I guessed. “Easy to use as a pawn. Because she looked human, like you, and you godlings don’t likethe ones who look human, do you? The human-looking ones are second-class citizens.”
Hades had stiffened. Again he gave me only silence.
I coughed. “Sorry,” I said. “That was mean. But it’s true.”
More silence, and then he said quietly, “Yes, it is.”
