I hate this. With every drop of my blood and breath in my body, I hate it. He’s been there for me so many times, and now I’m right here next to him, without a single weapon or power to help him in return.
All I have…is me.
But maybe that’s enough. “Hades.” I shuffle back toward him, still on my knees. I hunch my shoulders and bow my head. To save Maximus’s life and sanity, I’ll lick the dust off Hades’s boots as this whole crowd watches. For now, I settle for giving the god a verbal version of that. “Please. Please…I am begging you…”
“And oh so prettily,” the king finally murmurs, ticking up my hope that the wilder plan might be averted. He reaches down and cups my chin. “Do go on, love.”
But then he has to go and repeat that.
Which turns Maximus into nothing short of a blood-baited animal. He roars and bucks, breaking an arm free from his paralysis. Another one of Hades’s captains joins his friends in holding him down again. I can hardly bear to watch, but I do, funneling the helpless misery into the new fervor of my pleas.
“Why?” I demand. “Why are you doing this? Your quarrel is with me, Hades. My disobedience!”
“Brought on by your obsession for him,” he spits back. “A compulsion he did nothing to thwart. An attraction he welcomed—”
“Because he knew nothing until it was too late! He had no idea the vow I was breaking.”
He scoffs.
A shiver claims my body. I suddenly relate to Sisyphus, rolling the same stone up the same damn hill. Hades seems determined to punish Maximus for a situation he never sought out, no matter what I say. Or maybe Hades already knows the words I don’t dare give volume to. That torturing Maximus is a worse blow to my soul than any persecution he can dole to me.
But until Hades physically silences me, I have to keep trying.
“I’m kneeling here before you, begging you to let me pay the price for my own wrongs. To serve my sentence. All of it. Whatever duty or penance you would have me do. Even if”—I gulp hard enough to cut off my breath for a long moment—“even if you want to encase me in the ice. Just please…please spare Maximus.”
Every syllable now drips with my torment. With the anguish so great, I welcome its crippling stiffness in my limbs. I raise my head like a schoolgirl at prayer, hoping my suffering puts even a dent in the glowering divinity before me.
“You may rule a dark world, but you don’t do it unjustly,” I say. “You discipline with reason. This detention you’ve enacted…this pain you’re meting…” I slowly shake my head. “It’s unnecessary and unfair. It betrays emotions that are far below you. Weaknesses you shouldn’t have.”
I swallow hard again. The allegations are beyond reckless and dangerous, but I don’t care. But damn it, neither does Hades. He doesn’t surrender a nick of his composure. Not a flash of fire or fury or even a glimpse of the patient gentleman who first welcomed me here.
“I’m still pleading you, with all my heart and soul. I’m asking you to consider, with any drop of the care and generosity—”
“No,” he retorts, even motioning over another captain to become part of the brutal horde on top of Maximus. “You don’t get any arguments or exceptions or points to make. No repartee or jokes or deft little observations disguised as witticisms. Understood?”
He squeezes my chin until I’m whimpering, certain he’s about to crush my jaw. But I welcome the pain as equally as his wrathful eyes and hateful grimace. It’s all part of the thickening mix growing exponentially inside me, as part of the plan I have to enact now. The risk I have no choice but to take. The last chance that I desperately hope will work. I hope…
“Under…stood,” I manage to rasp, casting my gaze back down. The little sign of respect is perfectly timed, letting me stockpile more of the dark devastation that edges up from my soul and takes over from my heart. When I start trembling again, I almost order my senses to slam off. Grief and despair are impossible enough to get through when they’re uninvited. Am I actually letting this chaos take over me? Drown me?
Yes. For Maximus, I’ll endure it all tenfold. Or ten times that. Whatever I have to do. Whatever chunk of my soul that needs to be given.
Hades mellows his touch into a firm slide along my cheek. “Good girl. It’s so much better that you fully comprehend your place, Kara. You know exactly what it is I want from you in return. And I will have all of it. Very, very soon.” He frames the other side of my face with his free hand, gruffly rubbing my skin as if to praise my submissive pose. I hate every second of it. “And perhaps, if you don’t want your lover to keep paying that special fare, even sooner than that.”
No way will fate ever deliver me a larger kick in the backside—or in this case, frontal lobe—and every electrified thread of gray matter attached to it. Everything about the moment is aligned. Every digit of fate’s hand is shoving me forward.
And I let it.
As I lift my head again and rivet the intent of my stare into his suddenly scowling one.
As I seize his hands like a revenant, newly awakened from my grave—and carefully watch as he visibly jolts.
As I take as much morbid pleasure in crooning to him, “You mean we’ll get there like this?”
And as I flatten his fingers over my temples—and let him have every hideous drop of the emotions in my senses. Even the ones drenched in Maximus’s torment, passing more of Hades’s own evil right back into his veins.
“Careful,” I murmur. “You may get exactly what you ask for.”
Hades opens his mouth as if to speak, but no words come. For once, he’s as gutted, sickened, and speechless as all this filth first made me. But most importantly, he’s frozen to the point of immobility—though I don’t expect that anomaly to last long.
Meaning I don’t have another second to lose.
“Gramps!” I call out while rushing back to my feet. I’m grateful when he appears fast, steadying my nervous wobble until my adrenaline fully kicks in. It doesn’t come a second too soon, giving me bravery that still feels so far away. “Stay here, next to Maximus. Get ready to help him. We don’t have a lot of time.”
Gramps rears back and shakes his head. “For what?”
“Maximus.” It’s all I can get out in reply. “Just…help him.”
If this works at all.
But I don’t waste the seconds to utter that. Every move matters now. Every breath, every intention, every insane instant of this far-fetched plan—which is actually starting to feel like all kinds of right as soon as I pivot and seek out the book that was speaking to me with such mysterious force.
I’m relieved to find the tome right where I left it, in the library’s corner. I have to admit to being surprised. After just a few minutes of absorbing the words and symbols that felt written just for me, I half expected the thing to borrow matching magic and walk out of here. But I’m so thankful that it decided to stay, especially when the torch painted on its cover begins pulsing with gold light once more.
This time, I think I know why the book stayed for me. Perhaps why I found it to begin with.
For the briefest of seconds, I close my eyes and run a hand over a page. Then the next and the next and the next, waiting for something to make sense. Sensing it’s going to crystallize with meaning the way a certain line of poetry in Dante’s Comedy would. The act fills me the same way, as if I’ve reached into thunderheads and grabbed the lightning swaddled within.