Hades Rewound (Hades Series #2)

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Sixteen

"Why?" Kezia presses, sounding bewildered. "She's your queen Hades. And don't give me that look, because you know she is; you just don't want to accept it."

He doesn't say anything in response. With baited breath, I look around the corner just in time to see Kezia pick up her knife and point it at him.

"I will use this." She threatens. "Tell me Hades."

"You would not be able to come near me with that even if you tried." He scoffs, and she narrows her eyes at him.

"Don't tempt me, Satan."

I grin. Way to go Kezia.

He sighs again, and I can only imagine the look he gives her when she calls him Satan. "I am avoiding her because every time she looks at me, her big green eyes flood with melancholic pain, and I cannot stand that. I do not know exactly what I forgot, but from the way she looks at me, I know it must have been of importance to her."

"She's your queen Hades. You mean the absolute world to her; you can't expect her to just forget everything that happened." Kezia says.

"Yet, I cannot remember all the things she seems to hold dear." Hades replies quietly. "How can I expect to civilly interact with her, when she looks at me with such disproportioned pain in her eyes?"

"Can you blame her?" Kezia asks. "She loves you. It's gotta hurt when the person you're in love with forgets who you are and throws you across the room."

"And that was exactly what I feared." He says.

Kezia pauses, slowly looking up at him. "Why?"

"Because I do not think I will ever be able to love her in the way she appears to love me."

Even though Hades' words are spoken softly, they have an effect on me parallel to a nuclear explosion. My throat closes up, and my chest tightens so much that suddenly I'm unable to breathe. Tears spring to my eyes, and sting my cheeks with their heartbreaking betrayal. Suddenly, all thoughts of apologising to Hades for my behavior completely abandon my mind, and all I want to do is get out of there before I can hear anything else he has to say.

"Hades, I don't think-" Kezia starts to reply to Hades, but I bolt before I can hear the rest of her sentence. In my haste to get away from that wretched conversation, I bump into the door and send it skittering back into the wall with a loud bang, but my mind is so full of cotton wool that I barely register that it might have alerted the two to my presence.

The only thing rattling through my brain is that one calmly spoken sentence. I do not think I will be able to love her in the way she appears to love me.

By the time I make it back to my room, I'm almost fully hyperventilating. My previously loose cami top suddenly feels like it's choking me, winding around my body tightly like a boa constrictor, and I pull at the neckline with several loud gasps. I collapse on my bed, burying my face in my hands and letting my hair fall around me like a curtain, cutting me off from the rest of the world.

My heart races. He can't have meant that. Surely he didn't mean that. He's only known me for a few days; he can't think, after having met me only a handful of times, that he'll never be able to bring himself to love me again.

But... my heart stutters in my chest. I haven't heard him talk that genuinely since he came back down to the Underworld. It was almost like he was a completely different person; it was almost like he was the Hades that I know, the one that was always quietly sincere, and who didn't argue with me in caustic tones with looks that could only be described as downright glacial. When he was talking to Kezia, he seemed calm. He seemed comfortable.