… death was… peaceful.
Easy.
When Hades came for her, it was with a firm touch. Hands with strength enough to pull her free of the wreckage, his grip wrapped around her waist. Looped beneath ruined legs that were dragged through sand without a whisper of protest.
Cheek pressed close to smooth muscle, she felt it when the Lord of the Dead commanded her to, “Yield.”
So she did.
CHAPTER 3
Something warm was pressed to her lips.
Blunt and alive.
A divine libation that tasted of the sea.
Brine so sweet and full of vigor she couldn’t help the smile that spread across her lips.
She drank.
Greedily.
With reckless abandon. Allowing herself to be fed, she was limp. Paralysed, anchored to the sands from the weight of her chains as ambrosia washed over her tongue and sweet currents drifted all around her. Caressing her hair, toying with the rags still clinging to her chilled skin. Playful now, as if it wasn’t that very same current that had killed her.
He tilted her head back, repositioning that vessel behind her teeth. Driving it deeper, one strong hand wrapped around her nape, moving her into a position of servitude so she might accept more.
A tiny sound escaped her, then. The barest whisper of life still clinging to her mortal shell, she tried to refuse. Tried to gag and reject even as he pried her jaws apart and forced it deeper.
It was too hot. Too vibrant.
Too…much.
“Swallow.”
It was a word spoken through the sea. Echoing all around her—through her blood.
A thing not heard, but felt.
It was a command she could not ignore, for he pressed the nozzle into her throat and pumped that glorious brew straight down into her stomach. Forcing her to drink the sea dry. Filling her belly with breath and warmth until she bulged with it.
Swollen and full.
When he’d fed her all there was to give, he pulled the spigot from her throat and ran thick fingers over her lips. Caressing. Almost… gentle. Tender, just for a moment before those fingers grew cruel. Tangling in her loose tresses, finding a firm grip against her scalp, he hauled her up from the sands of the sea floor and began to swim. Moving as if he were the ocean itself.
Pure, raw power rippled all around her. Every movement sent a current roaring behind him. Each heave of muscle moved the Aegean and parted the sea.
Towing Kore by her hair with one hand, she was weightless in his wake. She felt no pain—not even from her crushed legs and pelvis.
There was only… a glowing.
A cauldron of bubbling warmth in her belly that pressed against the walls of her abdomen, sloshing against her spine and organs, where she was bursting at the seams.
It filled her with ambrosia. Saturated her lungs with life and freed her from the pain of drowning, of being crushed by the full weight of the deep. But she wasn’t breathing. Not really. She was… suspended.
Because she was already gone.
Hades himself had come to escort her to judgment, for surely only one of divine blood might swim with such effortless speed? Such elegant, powerful grace.
