Series: Willow Winters
Total pages in book: 81
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 74198 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 371(@200wpm)___ 297(@250wpm)___ 247(@300wpm)
Now I stand in front of the mirror, looking into the face of a woman I do not know.
I turn my head from side to side, letting my eyes travel over my eyebrows, my nose, my mouth. The braid in my hair, which curls down over my shoulder and meets the clasp of my gown.
My features are the same. I cannot pick out any obvious differences. The slope of my nose and the bow of my lips—the same. The point of my chin—the same. The pink in my cheeks—
It’s the same, isn’t it? Perhaps, under my eyes is slightly darker from the lack of sleep.
I lean closer. My cheeks are pinker than they were when I left, but then—I had not been well when I arrived in the Underworld. And I had not been well for some time before that. Fear can make a person unwell. It can even make a goddess unwell.
Shouldn’t I look unwell?
I don’t.
I step back from the mirror and lift my hands to my hair, patting carefully at the braid so I don’t disturb my mother’s work. Her fingers had been so gentle. So loving. She sewed protection within the braids. Chanting her love and that I am divinely protected, divinely guided, and being shown the best of all the worlds and nothing less.
No matter what happens, I will treasure this, at least. It is a sign of her love for me as my mother, and I cannot be ungrateful for that. Even if I crave a world she’ll never know. Even if I could not find the courage to tell her I’d fallen in love with the god she loathes.
I take a deep breath and close my eyes, turning my mind to how I felt when Silvie came to my rooms in the Underworld. I didn’t know what to think of her at first. I worried she had been sent to—
I’m not sure. Spy on me, or encourage me to do dangerous things, or control me.
But she did not.
She taught me what she knew of the powers in the Underworld. She guided me through the knowledge I was missing, again and again until I understood it for myself.
It was because of Silvie that I was able to enchant the bells on my door and light fires in the hearth. It was Silvie who gave me the confidence to walk on the path in Hades’s realm, speaking to those I met and learning from them, too.
I may be in Olympus, but I will be just as confident here. I will demand my magic. I will demand that my will be heard…but at what cost?
A soft knock at the door brings me out of those memories and back into the light.
“You may enter,” I call.
The doors to my chambers open, and Beatrice hurries across the threshold, her skirts in one hand and her eyes wide.
A well of emotion floods me once again. The damned emotions coming and going like a righteous storm commanded by Poseidon himself.
I rush for her and throw my arms around her as the door closes softly behind us. Beatrice embraces me back just as tightly, her face pressed to mine and her hands clutching at my back. Her warmth and relief are evident.
“You are here,” she breathes as if in prayer. “Persephone. You’re here. I could hardly believe the news when I heard. I thought—”
“I should have come to you.” My heart aches with guilt. “When I arrived…I was not thinking, Beatrice, or I would have come to see you—”
“Are you all right? Are you hurt? What happened? You were gone in the night, and by the time I realized—” Her questions come one after the other, each just as desperate to be answered.
“The Underworld,” I whisper. “I was in the Underworld with Hades.”
Beatrice pulls back, looking into my eyes with a shocked expression and something else in the depth of her gaze that I cannot place. “It is true, then?”
“Is that what was said? That I had gone to the Underworld?”
“Yes, but…” She lifts one of her hands to cover her mouth, then squeezes me again before she straightens. “I thought it could not be. You are a goddess of Olympus, and—”
“It is true! And I…” I take her hands in mine, wishing I could tell her everything in a single breath while also wishing I did not have to say out loud the truth of how this reality came to be. “I don’t know how to describe it to you. It is a realm like—you can only imagine it, Beatrice. It is like the stories, but so much more.”
“I’ve heard the stories, but once you were gone…” She shakes her head, her chest heaving with a deep breath as her expression turns somber. “Once you were gone, Olympus became a hell of its own. Your mother’s grief and sorrow clouded the skies. Everyone had their say. So many whispers—”