Persephone could not be moved so easily. “I saw my marriage contract. The one you made with Zeus.”

“So?” Hades began to write, her pen scratching out a few short words before she glanced up again. “What?”

Persephone was no longer the little girl who’d been awed by Hades’ reputation, who could be cowed by a voice raised in anger. She refused to be that girl. “You traded Zeus’s lover for me,” she said.

“Among other things.”

“You never let the dead leave the underworld.”

Hades sighed. “Usually.”

“You never let them leave.”

“Clearly, that is untrue,” Hades snapped. “You have seen the evidence.”

The enormity of that decision gnawed at Persephone. “Why?”

“Why the moon and stars?” Hades asked dryly. She stared longingly at the wine jug.

“Why break your word... for me?”

Hades wiped clean her reed pen. “I never gave Zeus my word that he could absolutely not have her; I only said he had nothing worth my time.”

“But then...”

“After that day... I could not stop thinking of you.” Hades crumpled her sheet of papyrus, ruining it. “The echo of your pulse haunted me.”

“You signed that contract over a hundred years ago,” Persephone said.

“And if I were prescient, I might not have bothered and saved us all a world of pain.”

“Why did you wait so long?”

“It matters not.”

“It does to me.”

Hades threw her hands in the air. “I was not yet certain of my intentions. To condemn another soul to this life—I had to be sure.”

“What made you sure?”

“Fortune. You were there, so close to my domain, and for once, without your mother’s protection—it was fate. I could not ignore the workings of the Moirai.”

“That’s not it,” Persephone said, biting her lip in frustration.

“What do you want?” Hades demanded. “Do you want a ballad, something flowery and charming in the voice of Erato?”

“I want the truth. You owe me that much.”

Hades clasped her hands together and pressed her lips to her knuckles. She did not speak for some time, but Persephone waited, unwilling to be the first to break the silence.

“You have always had—a light about you,” Hades began slowly. “As your powers have matured, it has only grown. It called to me that day I saw you.”

“The day you refused Zeus.”

Hades nodded. “And if not fate, then what should I name it? There is no death without life and no life without death. Something in each of us yearns for the other. You have felt it, too.”

Persephone labeled her fascination with Hades a sick obsession. Her weakness. “I don’t know what I’ve felt.”