Teased by Darkness (Bound to Hades Book 2), page 3
Was this some magic he used to force my body to respond to him or had I just completely lost my mind?
“If you’d done any of those things, then you would just tell me so,” I informed him pertly. “You’re teasing me with half-truths.”
“Touché.” His hand spasmed where it lay on the bedsheets, only inches away from the outermost curve of my thigh. He seemed to be fighting with himself not to touch me. “Teasing you brings me more satisfaction than I thought it would. It takes the edge off of other urges.”
And I realized then that he was holding himself back, willing himself to keep from touching me even though that was clearly what he wanted to do.
I had said yes, pledged to stay here and let him drain me of life to keep the Underworld intact. It had been pretty clear when I agreed that touch would be a requirement for making that happen. And pain. When he had taken me into his arms and I collapsed against him, I’d assumed it wouldn’t be long before he was fucking me up against a wall. I appreciated his restraint, but that didn’t mean I understood it.
Maybe he already regretted forcing me to stay here. Maybe there was still some piece of humanity left in his black soul. Could that be what kept him from fulfilling the darkly sensuous promise I had seen in his eyes since the moment he first appeared at the Stockhouse and told me wanted to take me away?
Or maybe he just didn’t want me in the way I thought he did.
Then I wondered what the hell was wrong with me. Was I really feeling put out that he hadn’t tried to rape me in my sleep? My head had clearly gotten fucked with at some point, even if my body had been left alone.
But I couldn’t stop myself from asking the question, even though doing it while naked in his bed was probably the worst possible time.
“What sort of urges?”
He knelt on the floor, bringing his body that much closer and his gaze level to mine, even though it still very much felt as if he was looming over me. “Do you really want to know?”
I knew I was only digging the hole deeper. “Yes.”
“I want to hurt you. Desperately.” His hand clenched into a fist as his quicksilver eyes studied my face. “I want to tear into all this pale flesh, leaving you bleeding and begging me to stop. Then I want to fuck whatever is left of you into the ground. And after that, clean you up and start all over again.”
The lump in my throat made it difficult to speak. “That’s sick.”
“It has taken everything in me not to give into those urges, at least not so soon. But eventually I will, because I won’t be able to stop myself.”
The idea of it was terrifying and disgusting. But a small part of me also wanted to know what it would be like to feel pleasure from him with the finest edge of pain to it. Every girl who ever read Fifty Shades of Grey imagined what that edge would feel like, even if they never acted on their desires in real life.
Except Christian Grey never had to hold himself back from killing anyone during kinky sex.
“So, what are you going to do?” I asked, proud that my voice only wavered slightly.
“Ease my longing with softer hurts. For example, at this particular moment I’m wondering what it would be like to parade you through the castle for all to see just like this, naked as the day you were birthed. I imagine that your embarrassment would taste like sugar, sweetening the very air on my tongue.”
My mouth fell open in shock. I fought to school my face so my reaction wouldn’t be what made the decision for him. If he knew just how much I would hate that, it would make him that much more likely to do it.
“But you don’t have to hurt or embarrass me to take the power you need,” I reasoned, hoping my words were actually true. “Don’t you ever want to be gentle?”
“At times,” he acknowledged, with a different sort of heat in his eyes. “I always want to have you, in all the ways that it would be possible for one person to take complete ownership of another. But the finer details shift with my mood.”
If I’d had any doubts he wanted to fuck me, they were gone. It was all the other things he wanted to do that made me want to run away screaming.
“Is it because you hate me?” I asked, genuinely curious despite my unease.
Hades seemed to consider that for a moment. He lowered his head so that a fall of pale blond hair covered his face and hid his expression. After several silent moments, I became convinced that he wasn’t going to answer.
When he finally did, some unnamable emotion had entered his voice.
“I hate what you have allowed yourself to become as much I loved who you used to be. I don’t know if my former love for you can overcome how very much I want to see you writhing in pain. But we will discover the answer to that question together in time.”
I still had no memory of this other life he seemed convinced that I had lived, or this other person I used to be. The Tale of Hades had been my favorite fairy tale until it became real. It would take a lot more evidence to convince me that I’d lived a previous life as a goddess, but I would play along for now.
And if any of this were true, I needed to explain to him that he’d picked the wrong answer to an obvious existential question. If I couldn’t remember being queen of the Underworld, or whoever, then that made us two distinct people in every way that mattered. A person was defined by what they’d experienced, what they knew about themselves. And she and I had led very different lives, apparently. Yet here I was, paying for whatever wrongs Hades believed she had committed.
It simply wasn’t right. Or fair.
But saying that out loud would probably only piss him off again.
“I can apologize, if you want.” I watched his face for signs that his anger had returned. “But it wouldn’t be sincere. I can’t truly be sorry for something that I don’t remember doing.”
“Perhaps I can be sorry enough for us both,” he mused, surprising me. “That’s what made you leave in the end, I think. When my darker urges finally became too much for you to bear.”
The tormented look on his face made me want to offer him something, an olive branch.
“I read the story, The Tale of Hades, even though I don’t know how much of it was true. His queen loved Hades, that was obvious on every page.”
Hades studied my face with sudden intensity, as if trying to discern some difference between what he saw now and his memories of before. I tried to stay relaxed under his scrutiny because I knew he teetered on the edge between hate and love, anger and obsession. And I had no idea what might eventually tip him to fall on one side or the other.
He finally touched me then, making my breath catch in my throat when I tried to inhale. Gloved fingers stroked my cheek, lighter than the fluttering wings of a butterfly against my skin. The touch was uncharacteristically gentle, especially given the storm of emotions barely held in check that I saw in his eyes.
Without warning, he gripped my chin bruisingly hard between his fingers. He forced our faces together until our lips nearly touched. This close up, I saw that his eyes were so much more than a silvery blue. The iris was multi-dimensional, full of dozens of shades between the deepest blue and the brightest argent. I saw the froth of crashing waves against a crystalline shore and the luminescent silver of scales moving underneath the inky blue of deepest ocean.
Deep enough to drown in.
My own eyes widened as I tried to pull away, and his grip tightened. The war he waged with himself was visible on the battlefield of his face, his expression alternating between lust and rage.
His lips brushed against mine as he spoke. “We are both prisoners here, make no mistake. And we will suffer this imprisonment together, neither of us the better for it.”
Hades kissed me then, teeth pressing hard into the tender flesh of my lower lip with only slightly less force than it would take to break the skin. It was enough pressure to force my mouth open as he used the crushing strength of his fingers on my jaw to keep it from closing. This was something that could barely be described as a kiss, not when that same word was used for gentle pecks on the forehead from your grandmother. He owned my mouth, obviously unconcerned with whether I got any pleasure from it.
He meant this to be a preview of how he would own the rest of me. Maybe even a warning.
Unwanted desire surged through me. In a moment of what I could only describe as pure insanity, I wanted him to bite me and draw enough blood that both of us could taste it. I wanted to know exactly what he worked so hard to hide behind that veneer of mockery and disdain.
It didn’t take long for me to realize just crazy that sounded.
I tried to fight him off, suddenly terrified of where this savage kiss would lead. My hands came up to beat against the muscled wall of his chest, but I would have had better luck trying to move a brick wall. He didn’t even try to control my arms, just let me pound my fists against him as if he didn’t even feel it at all.
A moment later, he let me go as abruptly as he had snatched me up. His nostrils flared as he glared down at me. It was only after he released me when I understood the true effect his touch had on me. Weakness made the room spin around me as I fought off a wave of dizziness and my vision blurred.
“Your breakfast is getting cold.” His face had returned to the familiar mask of indifference. He withdrew from the bed, even though his gaze never left my face. “I will allow you the rest of the day to collect yourself, but you will present yourself in the great hall for dinner. After that, we will begin.”
And with those ominous words left in his wake, Hades swept from the room and slammed the door shut behind him.
Chapter Three
It took the better part of an hour for me to summon enough strength that I could leave the bed. The weakness had made it almost impossible to move, though not enough to let me return to the peaceful oblivion of slumber. I had to stay awake and afraid of whatever might come through the door next.
Thankfully, Hades didn’t show up while I was unable to move and neither did any daemons.
I couldn’t decide how to think of him, even in my own mind. Hades was cold and cruel, but also completely obsessed. It was him that wanted me to see me writhing in pain underneath him. Hades, god of the Underworld, was the man who had fallen in love and mourned the loss of his queen. I wondered if there were any parts of that version of him left.
In the moments he looked at me without anger, I could almost convince myself that I saw the smallest glimpse of where that love used to be. That might have scared me more than Hades’s threats, because I wanted to follow that thread and see where it led.
Hades from the stories and the dark god who had stolen me away. They were like two sides of the same coin, an even more fantastical version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. When one side was revealed, the other one had to be hidden. The incarnation that would show up next was anyone’s guess, and I couldn’t be sure which one I wanted it to be.
Both scared me, but for very different reasons.
As soon as I placed a bare foot on the frigidly cold floor and moved to stand, an unwelcome sound froze me in place. Footsteps echoed on the stone just outside the door, the stride heavy and deliberate. I was still wrapped in a section of bedsheet. When I tried to yank more towards me, the ends caught underneath the mattress so I barely had enough fabric to cover the upper swell of my breasts.
I watched in mounting dread as the door slowly swung open, imagining a whole army of slavering daemons or Hades returned to torture me. Both of those options would be equally terrible.
When Cerberus stepped into the room and turned to search for me in the darkness, I felt a relief so profound that I nearly passed out. Again.
“Lock it,” I said, waving my hand frantically at the door. “I don’t think I can take anymore unexpected visitors right now.”
Cerberus complied with a confused shrug and then turned back, expression changing when he finally saw me standing there wrapped only in a black sheet. He immediately looked away to gaze intently at the ceiling directly above my head.
Even Ryn would have taken a look at the goodies, I realized. Cerberus was cut from a different cloth. His stoic but protective nature was exactly what I needed at the moment. It made me want to walk buck naked across the room and wrap my arms around him in a hug, but that probably would have just made him even more uncomfortable.
Everything about him reminded me of restrained strength and discipline. His brown hair was cropped shorter on the sides of his head so nothing distracted from features that would not have been out of place carved onto a statue of a Greek warrior. He would have just looked like a gorgeous human man, if not for the faint patterns of stone and granite imprinted on his body, giving a slightly grayish cast to his tanned skin. Eyes the rich brown of mahogany stared at me with obvious concern in their depths.
“I would have knocked if I had known that you were awake,” he intoned, and there was an apology in his voice. Obviously, Cerberus was the one person in the Underworld who believed in acting like a gentleman. “The last several times I came to check, you were in a sleep almost as deep as death. Had I not watched you breathe, I would have easily become convinced that you would never wake.”
I didn’t understand the note of worry in his voice until I remembered that Cerberus had spent years trapped inside of a stone wall. That was probably even worse than an enchanted sleep. It made me want to ask if he had been aware of what went on around him while he was the Hunter, but I didn’t think I’d like the answer.
“I’m fine. Okay…maybe not fine, but at least I’m awake and unhurt.”
At least, relatively unhurt. My jaw ached in the places where Hades had dug his fingers into the bone, but it was a small thing compared to what he had wanted to do. Or whatever he might be saving for later.
Shivering, I wrapped the sheets tighter around myself.
“I am very happy to hear that.” His relief obvious even though his placid expression did not change. He continued to regard the ceiling, blinking rapidly as if it took effort not to let his gaze shift back to me. You’d think the secrets of life were written up there. “You had us all very worried.”
“Some more than others, I’m sure.” There was a sarcastic note to my voice that I didn’t try to hide. Hades didn’t seem capable of worrying about me. Hating, obsessing, controlling? Absolutely. But not worrying. “Why are you here now?”
“Hades has commanded me to stand guard over you. I’ve spent most of these many hours as sentry outside the door.”
I hated to sound aggrieved, but really? “Where were you when that snake daemon was in here trying to bite a piece off me?”
“Called away on a worthless errand. Believe me when I say that it will not happen again.” Cerberus’s lips tightened with anger, although I understood it wasn’t directed at me. “Our king may yet regret naming me as your personal guard, but that is my duty now and I will not give it up.”
There was something more to it than what he was saying, but I had no idea how to ask for an explanation without upsetting him more. “Did Hades task you with protecting me from the dangerous creatures here, or from himself?”
“That is only for him to say.”
Cerberus’s tone made it clear that he had no more to add about Hades, or his motives.
“Can you at least tell me what the hell is going on with the daemons? The one that brought my tray definitely acted like he wanted to have me for breakfast.”
“Daemons have always been carnivorous, even cannibalistic when the mood strikes. In the past, the castle daemons knew to behave themselves.” His heavy shrug both said much more and also nothing at all. “It would not be a sign of anything good if the king lost control of them.”
“No, shit.”
He glanced at me and immediately shifted his gaze back to the ceiling. “Perhaps it would be easier to have this conversation if you were clothed.”
“Uh, right. Sorry.” Even though I had no romantic feelings for him, I felt comfortable around Cerberus. It was like he was a long lost pet that had finally returned to my side. “Could find something for me to wear? I’m a little stuck here.”
I sat gingerly on the edge of the bed while he made a circuit around the room, obviously looking for my discarded dress or anything else that could be used to cover up my wobbly bits. His shoulders were set with tension and I wondered if it was because we were in Hades’s bedroom. There was a good chance that he’d never been in here before I arrived.
“It would have been nice if Hades had left my dress somewhere obvious,” I grumbled.
Cerberus froze. His back was to me so I couldn’t see his face, but there was an obvious note of embarrassment in his voice as he cleared his throat. “It was I who removed your clothing after laying you in the bed. But your dress does not appear to be where I left it.”
My eyebrows flew up into my hairline. I schooled my expression as he turned back to me so he wouldn’t see the shock on my face. “Uh, why?”
“I apologize, profusely, for taking liberties without your consent. But Hades commanded it. He said that you would rest better without such a constricting garment on your body.” His normally measured tone was rushed, as if he was trying to get the words out as quickly as possible. “I promise you that I looked, and touched, no more than was absolutely necessary.”
It was a relief that Hades hadn’t been the one to undress me. I’d trusted Cerberus from almost the moment we met, right after he tried his hardest to kill me. But that had been the spell forcing him to be the Hunter and guard the way to castle with violent force. I knew in my gut that Cerberus would die before hurting me, or allowing anyone else to do it.
Now he seemed so legitimately concerned about my besmirched honor that it made me want to laugh. I resisted that urge because I didn’t want him to think he was the butt of some joke.
