Page 8

Chapter

Eight

H ades

“I’m pregnant.”

Her words explode in my mind. Happiness ruptures my heart. My soul implodes with bliss.

I am overjoyed the like I have never known. This is all that I have ever wanted. It is all that I have ever dreamed. That this woman—this goddess—would one day carry my child.

And now she is.

She is carrying my child.

I have spent an eternity hoping for this, trying for this.

My seed is not dead, after all.

I grab her face between my hands, kissing her deeply. A sound spills from the depths of me. It is unfamiliar.

It is laughter. Pure joy and hope.

The God of Death inside me quivers with feeling. We have wanted nothing but this, but her, but a family of our own for so long.

I kiss her again, dragging my lips over hers. They tremble, and I realize as sick coils in my gut that she tastes like grief.

I pull back in time to see Hydra land on the balcony, her silhouette large through the sheer curtains.

“You are not happy.” The words nearly get stuck in my throat.

Her blink is heavy. Her words raw. “I was.”

“Was?” I ask.

“I—”

“Persephone, what is wrong?” I’m afraid to ask, but I need to know. The fear is a boulder in my throat I struggle to swallow down. “What did you see on the cave wall?”

“Hades.” She shakes her head. My name is a sob that falls like a curse between us, consuming the happiness of this moment. Tainting it. Poisoning it.

I pull her to me, crushing her body that now trembles against my chest. I inhale the sweet floral scent of her, strong again now that the overwhelming scent of her arousal is less.

“Whatever it is, I'll make it right,” I vow to her. I vow to our child that is inside her.

She shakes her head, her fingers curling into my chest. “You can't. It's written…” She gulps in air. “It's prophesied, and it will come to pass. I know it will. I know it, Hades.”

She's crying now, and I feel as though every tear that leaks from her eyes is the thread that unspools me. I hold her tighter, as though my arms might keep the threads of us together, might keep them from fraying.

“Talk to me, Persephone. Tell me what you saw.”

It takes a moment for her to gather herself enough to speak the truth that threatens to ruin us.

“You tried in my past life to make me pregnant, didn't you?” Before I can answer, she presses on. “You wanted it. You've always wanted it. I know that now. I don't know how I know that, but I do. I know.” When she looks up at me, those green eyes misted over with grief, I can do nothing but nod.

I am raw.

Outside, I hear Hydra huff. I can hear the heavy emotion in that single sound. I don’t know why it frightens me as it does. But it does. So much.

She knows what is coming and she grieves, too.

I hold my mate tighter.

Persephone swallows hard. “On the cave wall, I carved our joining. The joining of woman and beast—of God. Us.” She shudders. “It came alive for me. The drawings in stone. They all came alive for me, Hades. I saw—” Her words break, voice cracking. “I saw so much.”

“Tell me what you saw.”

“It hurts.” Her voice dips in grief. In fear.

The sound of it chills the heated blood in my veins in a way that I have never been chilled.

The God inside me repels it, rejects it.

She speaks again. “The red moons—the blood moons—they were my fertility. There was a pull from them which called for us to mate. To create.”

As soon as the words are between us, I know they are truth.

“I was never supposed to get pregnant until now.

I don't know why. I don't know why the Moirai sanctioned this now, but they did.

And the reason is because—well, I don't know the reason, Hades.

I just know that we are never going to be able to raise them.

We're going to have them, and they're going to die, and we're going to bury them under the Elysian Tree. Their souls are going to be given to human women, and they will bear our children. They will love and raise our children in a way that we can’t.”

“No.” I shake my head, refusing to believe the words she speaks even as I can taste the truth of them.

“Yes.” She nods sadly through her tears. “It is written.”

I swallow hard. Emotion burns my throat, but I manage to ask, “There is more than one?”

Tears streak down her face now. Her lips tremble.

Her body trembles.

“We're having twins,” she tells me. “Girls. They're so beautiful, Hades.”

Her hand falls between us to cradle her stomach, where the lives we made are growing. The lives I already love—that will end too soon.

I cannot bear it.

“I will fix this.” I am desperate for her to believe my promise, I think, so I can believe it, too. “We will talk to the Moirai, and I will fix this. We will raise our own children.”

She shakes her head. “We can't.”

Tartarus, but her eyes are so sad. “Little goddess.”

“I understand now that I've taken the time.

They're meant for more.” Her sad eyes implore me to understand, too.

“They're going to change the world. No, they're going to save the world.

But they won't be able to do that if they don't sympathize with humanity.” She touches my face with her trembling hand.

“We cannot raise them as Goddesses and expect them to understand what it means to be human .”

Her eyes are daggers into mine. They dig deep into the gutted trenches of my soul, threatening to carve out my very heart.

“This is the sacrifice we must make.” Glistening tears fall in streaks of grief-tainted love down her face. “For all the realms. For life.”

I refuse to believe this truth. “You interpreted the carvings wrong, my love.”

Her eyes soften even as the tears continue to fall.

“I think that is why I had to die.” I flinch at her words.

“I was always fated to come into this world a Goddess, only to be stripped of everything that was me, down to the barest parts of my soul—to be reborn as a human so that I might sympathize with the world the Gods created and destroyed—so that it could be healed. So that I could help heal it.” She shifts onto her knees.

Her eyes never leaving my own. “There's a war brewing, Hades.

We're meant to fight in it. We're meant to sacrifice them for the better of all—even if it breaks us.”

She collapses against my chest, and I finally understand.

I understand why I was never able to plant my children inside her womb—to gift her with life.

It is not simply that the Moirai had not sanctioned their birth within her body as a Goddess. I have had her multiple times under the blood of the fertile moons since I brought her to the Underworld, but I had only had her once in my Gods’ Form.

And now I understand why she can suffer my heat, because it was that heat that was needed to craft the souls of those who will one day bear the power to destroy Gods.

My hand falls to cradle her belly, and behind the lids I squeeze closed, the Moirai bestow up on me a vision that would bring me to my knees—if I wasn’t already there.

Tiny infants wrapped in quilts woven by the Moirai. One gold and one onyx. The tongueless sisters, for the first time since the beginning of time, stand outside their black mountain to witness the passing of souls from this realm into another.

Two leaves fall from the Elysian Tree to drift down the spiral of a breeze onto the still chests of my daughters.

Persephone falls to her knees at their feet, her sobs echoing throughout the entirety of the realm.

A sea of souls stands witness to a time that will change the trajectory of life as it is known within all the realms.

The Elysian Leaves glow, one veined in gold and the other in onyx as the souls of our children—our greatest sacrifice—rise from the bodies of our daughters. The leaves burst into flames hotter than those in the core of the Pit, and they are gone.

The ancient notes of the tongueless Moirai sound strong in my mind. “You will see them again, King of Gods. We thank you for your sacrifice.”