"You're not her," Hades suddenly said when my throat refused to work. "You don't look like her, Kaira. You don't speak like her. You don't behave like the version I knew," he continued. "But you are her. The moment you stepped on the island, I could feel you, just like the others could. The moment you looked at me, I knew. I knew you were connected to me, but I didn't know how. I didn't want to believe it."
"So you let me spiral even after I asked you," I pushed out. "You stood there, letting me think I was crazy because I felt this pull." My feet carried me farther back, away from him.
Away from the pain his silence had caused.
"You weren't ready," he sighed, as if that would miraculously explain the secrecy. "Even now you're not ready for everything."
"You don't know that!" I cried out, trying to make sense of everything. "I was just a placeholder for her, wasn't I?" I asked, needing to hear it from him. "So what now, if I remember everything, the Persephone you knew would just come back and you would get your beloved darling?"
Am I just a vessel, carrying a soul that doesn't belong to me?
"No," he replied. "Fuck. This isn't how I wanted this to play out." That's one thing we could agree on. "I don't know what will happen, Kaira. But I know you're not separate people. You're not just someone who's carrying a body that would host Persephone's soul. You. Are. Her."
But how could I be her when the woman I saw in my visions was nothing like me?
"But you're also different. You're supposed to be different." But was I really? Just like her, or me in another life, I was ready to give this God pieces of myself without truly understanding what that meant. I was ready to trust him without really knowing him. I was also trusting all these other immortals without actually stopping to think about the possible consequences.
My mind reeled through every single interaction, every single reaction, not just since I came on the island. I couldn't stop myself from thinking that every one of those were premeditated. I couldn't help myself but compare my ideas, my reactions, my goals to those of a Goddess that lived more than five millennia before me.
"But I don't belong to myself," I mumbled, refusing to look at him anymore. I refused to look at the man who managed to destroy my heart in mere seconds.
Whatever it was the other version of me felt for him, was gone. The only thing that connected us was this fucking tether attached to our souls.
Bound together. Forced by fate. Yet never farther away.
And it wasn't fury that swallowed the hope in my chest. It was the sadness, the pain, the grief over everything I had lost. It was the last memory of my mother and the knowledge that she probably knew about this. She must have.
And she didn't warn me.
My feet created more distance between Hades and me just as Grimm approached us, but I couldn't stand there with them. I couldn't look at them and see that they were seeing her—Persephone—and not me. I couldn't stay where the ghosts of the past still lived.
So I ran.
I ran from the God who lied and the creatures that used to be friends. I fucking ran from my own destiny and into the forest surrounding Hades's home.
His voice boomed after me. The sound of his feet moving in the same rhythm as mine broke through the silence of the night. Until they didn't.
Until silence was the only thing wrapping around my bones.
The willowing trees connected at the tops, wrapping their branches around each other, hiding the path from the moonlight. My lungs seized, and my muscles screamed as I pushed through the tears spilling down my cheeks. I never cried this much, not before everything happened, but it was as if the dam opened, letting everything out.
My hand drifted up, rubbing the wetness from my face, but my lack of attention cost me more than I would ever know. My leg got stuck on something, making me fall knees-first to the ground, feeling pain ricocheting through the rest of my body.
"Well, well, well," a sinister voice came somewhere from behind. "What do we have here?"
25
KAIRA
The stenchof fear crawled over the cold, hard ground, slithering over my legs, reaching for the center of my soul as I tried calming my racing heart.
I turned around, my eyes landing on the three figures shrouded in the shadows of the forest.
The moonlight pushing through the branches of the trees above us illuminated their faces enough for me to see yellow eyes and sharp talons instead of fingers. The one in the middle crouched, her sinister smile freezing the blood in my veins, and I knew without a doubt that these three weren't my friends. These three were what Elandra had tried to warn me about.
The one in the middle leaned toward me, letting me finally see the face staring at me. The face carved from nightmares.
Her long, black hair cascaded down her shoulders, creating a clear contrast with her porcelain skin. The dark stain on and around her lips made me think of poison, of leeches waiting to attack, and as she grinned, her eyes dragging over my body, I could see the rows of sharp teeth, together with the long fangs pushing against her lower lip. Those yellow eyes sparkled with mischief, with violence, and something else I didn't even want tothink about. There was not a single blemish on her skin, almost as if she was carved from marble and placed here.
