By the time I returned to the bedroom, I half expected to see him on the bed, waiting for me. Instead it was Pogo who greeted me with an excited yip and wagging tail. As terrible as I felt, I scooped my puppy up and cuddled him, and he licked my cheek. It wasn’t enough to completely chase away my fears and worries, but it was good enough to hold them at bay for now.
“I missed you,” I said, giving him a good scratch behind the ears. My mother wasn’t there anymore, undoubtedly having joined the others, and I sat cross-legged in the middle of the bed I was supposed to share with Henry. “Wait until you hear about the month I’ve had.” But before I could get another word in, a familiar sensa-tion washed over me, and I once again plunged into darkness. This time, instead of reappearing in the cavern where Cronus worked to escape his prison, I found myself standing in the middle of a dimly lit room that stretched for twenty feet in either direction.
One side of the room was nothing but a continuous window that looked out across the vast cavern, and a f ire crackled in a marble f ireplace opposite the view. There were no curtains, and the sole piece of furniture was a white armchair. Henry sat in it, clutching the armrests so hard I feared they would break.
“Henry?” I whispered, unsure if he could hear me or not.
For a moment at the entrance to Tartarus, I’d thought he could, but now when I tried to brush my ghostly f ingers against his, he didn’t so much as blink.
The door on the far side of the room opened and shut.
Persephone padded across the marble f loor, barefoot and wearing a simple cotton dress. In the soft light, she looked breathtakingly beautiful, and I bit my lip. With the possible exception of Ava, I’d never met anyone in my life who had the power to make me feel like a weed beside a rose.
“I thought I’d f ind you in here,” said Persephone.
“I come here to think,” said Henry distantly. “I thought you were on your way back.”
“I decided to stick around for a little while. You lot need all the help you can get. Especially you.” She took Henry’s hand, the same one I’d tried to touch moments before.
“Mother told me what happened. Kate is looking all over for you.”
Henry shrugged, and he didn’t pull away. “I would rather not face her yet.”
“Why’s that?” said Persephone, perching on the armrest.
Exactly the question I’d been dying to know.
For a long moment, he didn’t answer. “She could have died because I was foolish enough to put her in harm’s way,” he f inally said, his words heavy as they fell from his lips. “I have done nothing but put her in danger since the moment we met. I cannot do it anymore.”
That was why he’d run? Because he thought he was a danger to me? Something inside of me uncoiled. That was ridiculous, and now that I knew, we could talk about it. I could set things right.
Persephone rolled her eyes, and for once I agreed with her. “What Calliope tried to do isn’t your fault, and Theo said the tests were clear. Nothing happened to her.” The cords in Henry’s neck stood out from the tension in his body. “We don’t know for certain. Even if everything turns out all right, I agreed to put her in that position.” And I’d agreed to go. I wasn’t completely helpless; didn’t Henry understand that? I wasn’t mortal anymore. Calliope couldn’t kill me, and eventually he had to acknowledge that I wasn’t going to break if someone breathed wrong around me.
Persephone ran her f ingers through Henry’s dark hair, and a lump formed in my throat. I didn’t want to be there watching this, but I couldn’t look away, and I had no idea how to get back to my body. Seeing them act so close despite being separated for a thousand years—I ached. It was as if Persephone had never left, and Henry was simply conf iding in his wife about something that had happened during the day.
That was supposed to be my job, but I couldn’t do it when he was hiding from me. My sister knew him well enough not to need to search for hours in the wrong places though.
“She’s been through much worse over the past few weeks,” said Persephone. “Your new girl’s tough, isn’t she?”
“Yes,” said Henry. “When she decides to do something, it is impossible to change her mind, consequences be damned.”
Persephone snorted. “Sounds like someone else I know.
She loves you, you know. More than I ever did.” Pain f lickered across Henry’s face, but it was gone as soon as it came. “She does not know me. When she learns who I really am, she will go.”
“Just like me?”
He stared silently out the window.
Persephone slid off the armrest and into his lap, and she looped her arms around his neck as if she’d never left him.
My throat tightened, and I dug my nails into my palms.
I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to see this. I didn’t care how little Persephone loved him, and it didn’t matter what my mother or James or Ava said. Henry was still in love with her, and he would always choose her over me.
When he embraced her in return, a sob bubbled up inside of me, and I turned toward the window. Even then I could see their ref lection, and try as I might, I couldn’t look away.
This was it. Our relationship—our marriage—was dying before he’d so much as given it a chance.
“Sometimes I wonder what things would have been like if I’d stayed,” she said. “How our life together would have been different if we’d taken our time instead of jumping into things.”