Divine

Chapter 3: No Way Back

Persephone

When I woke up I wasn't in the carriage anymore, I was in a bed. At first, I thought it was my bed and I smiled, thinking that everything had been a bad dream.

Then I heard someone else breathing.

And it killed my daydream right there and then.

The smell of the room was different from mine, too. It didn't smell like lilies, it smelled like nothing and everything at the same time, like it was empty and full. There was the cold smell of rock and the smell of sweat and . . . anxiety? Maybe? I shook myself; I must've hit my head harder than I thought.

I opened my eyes to see the man who was in the room with me. I was dumbfounded when I saw him sitting a few feet from me in a chair. His thick, dark hair caught my eyes first. Then those eyes that were light and dark at the same time got me. The shine shone so much brighter than the dull lantern on the wall. There was so much about him that tried to pull in my eyes that I was getting a little dizzy. He was just beautiful, more beautiful than anyone I had ever seen in my life. He was beyond anything I had seen before and it made me want to be close to him.

However, he had also kidnapped me from my life, I realized, which kind of put a damper on me wanting to be close to him. That's when he leaned forward because he had seen that my eyes were open and opened his perfect mouth to talk.

And I would bet my life that he wasn't expecting it when I punched him in the jaw.

It wasn't right, I know that now, but it just felt so good to let out some of my anger and to feel his body lurch back from me as my balled up fist made contact with the smooth skin of his jaw. It felt so good that I didn't even care that his jaw immediately began to turn dark crimson. Self-satisfied, I sat up and looked him straight in the eye.

"Well, Tiger, did that make you feel better?" he asked quietly as he rubbed lazily at his jaw. His voice floated on the air and sounded like a melody. Moreover, the way he said tiger wasn't the way normal people would; the I wasn't pronounced correctly so he sounded like a two-year-old. "Got quite an arm for someone who's never fought before," he added indolently.

I had a strange longing to reach back and punch him again, but I managed to keep my fist in check. Which was weird, having to keep my fist in check wasn't anything along the lines of normal for me. "My name isn't Tiger," I said fervently as I tried to pull my messy curls out of the ponytail I had tied up, well, what seemed like forever ago.

My captor raised his dark eyebrows. "Really? Well, I didn't actually know your name so I thought Tiger might fit, especially since you just punched me, and what with that tiger lily you had when you got here." He pointed over at the flower sitting on the dresser on the far side of the room. The bright pink petals were speckled with dark brown blotches, and somehow all of those petals had survived my experience.

As I looked at it, I realized that the background of the room was made of stone. The cold gray walls were rock, not plaster. The ceiling and floor was a cold dungeon of rock. However, a weird thing that I noticed was that the bed I was in was off-white. Somehow, I expected there to dust from the rock walls covering the comforter but it was still pure and clean.

There were other things in the room besides the expensive bed. There was an expensive wooden desk against the wall and the bulky, hardwood dresser off to the side. A beautiful gilded mirror was hung on the rough wall of the room. The one real bit of color in the room was my tiger lily, with its bright pink almost shining off the bland, colorless walls.

The man was still staring at me and waiting for some kind of response to escape my mouth. "Well," I began. "You thought wrong; Tiger is definitely not my name."