Page 39 of The Catacomb King
“It tickles,” I whispered back. “Shut up.”
“I think you like it.”
“Should we just be sitting in the middle of the road like this?”
“Would you prefer to go back to the bedroom with me?”
“I’d rather walk on rocks.”
“Looks like that’s your other option.” Oh-so-gently, he prized another minuscule bit of rock out of my flesh. He used the fingernails of his index finger and thumb. My breath kicked out of me.
By the time he had stripped both of my feet, I was practically trembling, and my feet were flecked lightly with blood. Hades licked his thumb and cleaned the blood off. He was focused so hard on me, his expression looked almost studious.
His right thumb lingered on the ball of my foot.
He flicked his gaze up to me andpressed.
I practically felt my eyes roll back in my head. “Stop,” I gritted out.
“It doesn’t feel good?”
Now it was my turn to sit in sullen silence rather than tell him the truth. But I wasnotabout to sit in the middle of the road while the Prince of Darkness gave me a fucking foot massage. “The longer you spend playing with my feet, the closer I get to starving to death. Can we get a move on?”
“You know there’s a knot in your foot muscle the size of a human fist.”
“That sounds like a me problem, not a you problem. Can I walk now?”
He scoffed. “I’m not letting you walk.” He hoisted himself to his feet and swung me into a bridal carry. Gods, this was so humiliating. “Tell me where we’re going.”
“I can —”
“I told you,” he snapped. “While you’re doing this work, I will do as you say.”
“But that obedience doesn’t extend to putting me down when I ask you to.”
“And letting you hurt yourself? No. Now tell me where to go.”
“I’m a grown woman, I can take c?—”
“No. I can’t let anything happen to you. I need you.” Sweat on my skin in the cold. “To build the pipeline.”
“Yeah, yeah, you and your gods-damned pipeline. I need it too, you know.”
“This will go faster if you’re not walking,” Hades pointed out. “You’re slow.”
Slow and weak and human, he meant. “All right. Go to the graveyard first.”
For the next six hours I ordered Hades, like my own personal carriage, to carry me back and forth, again between the graveyard, the reservoir, and the library. We added in the bank and the bedchamber and the mushroom farms, too — more data points. He refused to go to the throne room and the Lake, though. So much for obeying my every whim.
We already knew that the catacombs moved; what I was trying to figure out was whether thedestinationsmoved or stayed put. Hades, when I explained this to him, squinched up his mouth with curiosity. Which would have been unremarkable except that it resembled his expression in the library, andthatmade me wonder what he might look like when he was alone. Reading, for example, instead of criticizing me or dragging me around like a sack of meat. I caught myself wondering if he read like I did — he’d mentioned books back in his room —and if he could read for hours, too, and then come suddenly to consciousness, disappointed at being back in the world. If he could feel his own smooth face from the inside like I could, all the worries erased from it for a brief and shining time.
I didn’t care, but I had to admit that Hades had the face of a man who had a lot of worries.
I wasn’t doing this for him. The reservoir, the mapping. But if itwasgoing to erase some of that concern and exhaustion from Hades’s regrettably handsome face… and make him look young and light, like had for just a moment, when I’d agreed to help… well, that wasn’t a reasonnotto do it, was it?
We took every route imaginable. I used the Prince’s pace length as a measurement. I had gotten a roll of parchment and a charcoal from the library, and I mapped our paths as we went. It was difficult to do in three dimensions. But after four laps, I came to the conclusion that I was correct. The catacombs moved, but the destinations didn’t.
“I suspect we built the rooms ourselves,” Hades said. He’d been carrying me for a long time now and sounded — not out of breath, exactly, but hazy. His hands kept flexing on my thighs.
