Once at the bottom landing, I saw him standing in the foyer dressed in another dark, three-piece suit, his hands in his front pockets, the material unable to hide the definition of his masculine body.
He was stealthy as he glanced down at my suitcase before looking back at me, an eyebrow cocked the closer I came. I stopped when I was only a foot from him, my shoulders still pulled back, my head tilted so I could look at him in the eyes.
The sunlight streamed behind him, and I could hear workers outside. It was just another day for everyone else. Yet, for me, my entire life had changed in a matter of days.
Being this close to Hades, I could see that his eyes, ones I had once thought were black as night, upon closer inspection were actually more of a deep amber color with flecks of honey and red swirled within them.
It was a beautiful color, even if the man standing before me was ugly as sin on the inside.
“I’d ask if you’ve made your decision, but the suitcase sitting beside you answered that.” His voice was so deep and rough, it was almost painful to listen to, like a blade going over my skin.
In my other hand, I had the paperwork and held it out to him. He only looked at it for a second before Hades took it from me, flipping through each sheet to make sure I undoubtedly signed in all the spots.
He tucked the forms into the inner front pocket of his suit jacket, smoothed his hands down the lapels, then turned and headed outside to the sleek, black car waiting.
I stood a moment, just staring at him, and turned to glance around the only home I’d ever known. I’d never see this place again. I knew that in my heart. And although I’d grown up here, at some point, this would just be a place I’d lived once.
And today was that day.
Chapter5
Hades
At three years old, they found me sitting in a pool of my mother’s blood, her gunshot wound self-inflicted, and her arm covered in track marks. I’d been sitting there so long her blood had congealed in a pool around my small body. Her lifeless eyes fixated right on me.
I knew I’d been the last thing she saw in her miserable life.
By my fourth birthday, I’d been in three separate foster homes before being adopted by Michael Cronus.
I learned at a very young age that money was nothing, that it caused more problems than it solved. It had been used to buy me, as if I were nothing but another item Michael could own.
And by my tenth birthday, I had so many scars on my body, I didn’t know what “normal” looked like anymore.
The girl sitting in front of me on my private jet knew nothing about pain, heartache, or humanity slowly being ripped away from you.
She was innocent in every single sense of the word. Her father coddled her, had protected her to the point she was naïve about how fucked up the world and life really was.
Did she know what a piece of shit bastard her father had really been? She’d never be able to comprehend the horrors her father put me through.
But she would.
The bastard was still just as depraved as he had been until the very day he died. And all the images, the phone transactions, and the credit card receipts I dug up on him confirmed that.
No, sweet, little Persephone didn’t know the first thing about who her father truly was or what he did to people.What he’d done to me.
She glanced over at me; her eyes the shade of whiskey when the sun hit them, her hair dark tendrils curling at the ends as they fell over her shoulders. She looked nothing like Zachariah and, instead, resembled her mother heavily in face shape and coloring. But that was where any similarities ended.
I closed my eyes and rested my head back on the leather seat, the sound of the jet engines drowning out everything else as I tried to clear my mind.
“Go on, boy. Take the switch and show Hades that he’ll never truly be a Cronus, not like you.”
The first time I’d heard my adoptive father, Michael, say those words had been the first night I spent in my new home. They had adopted me out, and I now had a permanent family. It should’ve been the happiest day of my life.
Instead, I’d been thrust into hell itself and was met with cold, uncaring eyes, a list of rules that had been longer than my small body, and had looked into the faces of the people who should’ve been my family but were now just so in name.
“Please don’t, brother,” I whispered as I stared at Zachariah holding that willow branch. His fingers were tight around it, his eyes taking on the same apathetic gaze as our father.
The first time our father had made my brother hit me, Zachariah had hesitated. He pleaded that he didn’t want to. Zachariah looked into my eyes, tears streaming down his cheeks a second before Michael had backhanded him, shoved the switch against his little chest, and told him to “man up and be a Cronus”.