I lay with Hades in the waters that cradled us, reveling in the play of the sun’s warmth and his hands gliding up and down my body. I’d held him for hours, letting him get it all out, knowing how much he need the catharsis of release, not just physically, but spiritually.

“Do you regret what we’ve done?” he asked into the heavy silence that had descended between us some hours later. But the silence hadn’t been oppressive as much as calm and peaceful.

I rolled onto my side, propping my chin on the palm of my hand as I slowly and heatedly memorized the strong planes of his gorgeous body.

“Should I?”

He shrugged, grinning at me and causing his eyes to sparkle like polished gems hidden beneath the dark curls of his hair. “You would have before, I think. You were a virgin goddess, after all, a trait you all seem to value so frighteningly above all else.”

“Is that so?” I asked, finding it hard not to swirl my fingers over the graceful lines of his pectorals.

He’d awakened a ravenous beast in me, one I’d never known existed before. I liked flesh. His, anyways. Liked its hard, steely strength and its smooth silky heat covering mine, making me feel oddly small and vulnerable in a way I didn’t believe I’d ever have liked before.

I wet my lips, and his delectable mouth, which had just wreaked havoc on my senses, curled up most wickedly. Oh yes, I enjoyed his body very much.

“Mmm,” he said with a nod as he shaded his eyes with one hand. Apollo had bathed Hades in a ring of a light, making him glow golden. Apollo had always had a thing for Hades, not that I could blame him. By far, Hades was the most glorious of all the pantheon, a dark and ravenous beast who took delight in the strange and unusual, just as I did. But where Apollo was ashamed of his desires for the death god, I was not.

If I were Apollo, I’d always keep the spotlight on Hades.

“Athena has as much as said that, should any male dare to consider defiling her, she’d—”

I scowled, not wishing to hear him utter the name of any female but mine while we lay together. Only ever mine.

Refusing to think any more about right or wrong, or should or shouldn’t, I rolled onto his body. I took the dominant position, shutting him up instantly.

The wave within me had been strangely silent, but now I could feel it awakening again, and I wondered if it had not given me a gift—the time to learn, truly learn, that the male I called mine was truly a magnificent beast of strength and wonder.

“Thalassa,” he hissed as I began rubbing my unbearably wet center over his now-rising cock. We’d made love so many times that I was raw and aching, but still I wanted him with a desperation that bordered on madness.

“Will I never not want you?” I mumbled, tossing my head back as I rubbed myself off on him, feeling that spiraling tingle rush through me all over again. Now that I knew what it was, I couldn’t wait to experience more of it.

I squeezed my eyes shut, mewling like a contented kitten as the heat and wanting converged into a thing of beautiful madness inside me. I was lazy as I rubbed myself off, willing to take my time, to drag it out for as long as I possibly could.

“Oh, goddess,” he hissed. “Goddess.” He whispered the word like a reverent prayer. A prayer to me.

My soul trembled within me, stirring me, moving me and clarifying things for me that I couldn’t quite focus on yet.

“Gods, I love your body,” I whispered, feeling drunk on lust.

“Then look at me, beautiful,” he murmured tenderly, voice a husky drawl that made me feel bathed in fire. My skin sparked like a faceted diamond.

I looked at him, only to see him looking right back at me. Intently. Heatedly. Animalistically. His breathing was rapid, and his gorgeous olive-toned skin was flushing with blood again, making him appear molten bronze instead of the gold he’d once been. When I was high on godhood, I burned bronze, and now he did too. Had we somehow merged ourselves?

Was that even possible?

But honestly, the answer didn’t even matter to me anymore. I was done overthinking what Hades was and wasn’t to me, only that he was mine. All mine. Only ever mine.

I cried out. I hadn’t even slid down his thick, gorgeous cock yet, and already I was close, so damn bloody close.

“I never knew,” I murmured heatedly. “I never knew it could be like this.”

“It has always been so for us, my priestess. Only you. Only ever you,” he growled and then sat up, startling me and making me gasp as he clutched at my biceps with the preternatural strength of a god.

He took my moment of distraction to full advantage and slid his tongue and his cock deep inside of me. His tongue was silky, hot, and demanding. I gave him mine without thought or question, yielding to him in every way, completely lost to him. Lost to myself. As my pending orgasm spiraled higher and higher, I knew this one would be so powerful that I’d obliterate if he didn’t catch me. I would become a million particles of life, scattered to the winds, unable to gather myself again for the gods only knew how long. The last one had felt like it had killed me, and each time, it only got better. More intense.

“I never knew, my Death. I never knew,” I whispered drunkenly into his mouth, and his answer was a deep-throated chuckle.

All around us, life bloomed, everything so altered from the empty forest it had once been. We’d created our own world, our home.

The wave in my head was fuller, growing wider and deeper. But I was no longer certain I wanted to give it dominion over me.

I could treasure Hades just as she’d once done. I could be his mate in every way. I could be good for him. His perfect other half. I did not want to share him. Not even with another version of myself. I was too bloody greedy for that. I wanted him, and I wanted him only for me.

So I shoved back at that wave, pushed it hard with my will. It burned, and it raged, growing furious and angry, but I was furious and angry too. It was my turn now. He was mine. All mine.

“Then let me show you, forever. For always. Trust me again. I want you, Thalassa. No matter who you are, or who you will be, it will only ever be you that I want, need, and cannot do without. Tell me you feel the same. Tell me that you need me as I need you, tell me that—”

“Well, isn’t this touching?”

A male voice, full of hubris and smug laughter, cut through our mating. “I come to see why my waters have decided to stop obeying me, and this is what I find—a porpoise and a skeleton screwing. Lovely.”

My eyes grew wide, my stomach trembled, and a rage like I’d never known boiled through me. I recognized that voice instantly.

The voice of the male god, Poseidon, my very own offspring who fancied himself the actual ruler of the seas.

I didn’t stop to think what I was doing. I whirled on him and caused the waters that Hades and I had created together to rise and heed their mother’s call.

Poseidon didn’t have the sense to leave be and swim away. But I was angry. Angry in that same kind of way I’d been ever since my reawakening into this new world full of people who I no longer knew or cared about.

“Thalassa, no!”

I heard Hades’s cry, but it was too late. I’d lifted Poseidon into the air on a powerful pillar of rushing water, keeping him suspended in it as I aimed a spear of it right at his heart.

He was in god form, and his tentacle legs twitched and curled spasmodically. The ridiculous triton that he always carried around with him because it was the only way he could actually force the water to obey him, went spiraling down, down, down into the depths of the deepest, blackest parts of my newest seas.

His face was handsome, but cold. Cruel. His eyes as blue as sea glass, his mouth thin but well-suited to his masculine features. Gold-encrusted crustaceans dropped from the crown of his head, skittering across the water and swimming toward me.

His eyes were wide, his jaw slack, as though in shock that I’d so easily unmanned him.

“Hello, son,” I hissed, and my waters trembled and began to heat up.

I grinned, and he swallowed hard, maybe realizing for the first time that, though he’d dubbed himself the god of the seas, I was the mother of all water.

Because he wore his god form, I decided to wear mine. It was more alien than human, with slanted pitch-black eyes, ebony tentacles for hair, skin slightly tinted the green of sea foam, and with a form and shape so perfectly built it that would even put Aphrodite to shame.

As I saw the light of awareness began to take root in him, as I tasted the sweet ambrosia of his fear tickle the back of my tongue, and as I thought of all the vanity, hatred, and arrogance of those debased gods who liked to delude themselves and mortals into believing they were the pinnacle of all that was good and right, I swelled with fury and seething, nasty, hatred.

My hands curled into tight fists, and a grin as wickedly sharp as a sickle blade curved my full lips into something cruel and almost twisted.

I’d wanted to make those high and mighty gods pay for what they’d done to us elementals, for daring to forget about us, for daring to believe that they were in anyway our equal.

Here it was now, my chance to take it back, to kill him and take my rightful place as the true mistress of the deep. To make the prayers all mine. To force the puny, pathetic gods of Olympus to see me for the great and awesome power that I truly was.

“You’ve forgotten,” I said, voice silky and deadly. “You've all forgotten who I really am. But no more. No more. I will end you. You and all your siblings. I will take back what is ours, mine and my sisters’.”

“Thalassa.” The voice was not Poseidon’s, but Hades’. It was deep, sure, calm as the deepest waters I called home.

I trembled, remembering all we’d done. All I’d allowed him to do. All that I’d wanted him to do. And all that I now felt for him. My love. My lover. My world. The wave in my head grew warm, and it didn’t use power against me as I’d used against it just a while ago. But I felt its power rippling in larger and larger waves. I released a tiny puff of air.

I blinked, fighting the drugging lure of my Death as he tried to reason with the monster that was me.

“Don’t try to stop me, Hades. He has it coming. They all do.”

And because I’d given Hades the gift of water the moment I’d taken him into my body, he walked next to me and stood beside me as an equal, unafraid of the sheer and mighty power that I was and that I wielded.

Poseidon gasped, trying to squirm out of my invisible grip, but the harder he tried, the tighter the knots of water grew around him. I felt the crushing of his ribs vibrate back at me, heard the small, quick gasps of air he was forced to take, and saw how his eyes bulged and grew wide from the pressure bearing down on him from all sides.

I felt nothing. No shame. No twinge of doubt. He deserved to die. They all did. They’d screwed everything up. And I was ashamed of them all, save for my Death. The Olympians had acted like babies and ruled the heavens with a sadistic iron fist. I could do better. My sisters and I could do far better than these brats we were forced to call our own.

My nostrils flared as the scent of patchouli and darkness enveloped me in a heady fog bank. It was the smell of him. My lover. My only lover.

The only male I’d ever known, in this life or the previous one.

I closed my eyes. They weren’t all monsters.

“You say we’ve all forgotten,” Hades began in that throaty whiskey drawl of his that never failed to elicit a violent reaction in me. “But not all of us have. I remember. I will always remember who you are. You are power. You are beauty. You are fierce. And you’re all mine, as I have always been all yours.”

I trembled, as did the watery cage in which I’d suspended Poseidon. He gurgled, and I scowled, clenching my fingers and moving the prison in on him just a little bit more. His flesh was wavering, turning soft and pliant, becoming the very water I’d once fashioned him from.

If I let Hades keep talking, I would break. I knew I would.

Knowing my eyes glowed like heated magma beneath the crust of my lake beds, I twirled on him and shook my head. “I am all-powerful. I am the water. The life. I could kill you.”

The words were clipped. Hard. But they shook, too, because I knew I could never do that to him. Not now. To everyone else, sure. But not him, not ever him.

His face was impassive, but his eyes burned with tenderness that I’d never expected to see. His smile was beautiful and full of warmth and love. My knees shook, the monster in me burned, but the man who had become my entire world was burning brighter.

I’d thought I’d beaten the monster that was Thalassa, thought I’d controlled that vengeful, wrathful side of me. But I could see now that I hadn’t. Only with Hades did I find my calm, my peace. But let another intrude on the sanctity that was us, and I was once more the creature of darkness and fury. I dug my fingers in deeper.

Poseidon gasped, writhing like a fish on a hook, and my lip curled in disgust. I hated him.

Hades stepped toward me and reached for my face. I knew I shouldn't let him touch me because every time he did, I forgot myself all over again. Forgot the anger, the pain, and the destruction. But even though I had plenty of time to side step him, I didn’t. I was like a deer frozen in the glow of a bioluminescent barbell as death literally bore down on me.

He framed my jaw in his massively large hands, and I swayed, pulled to him like iron shavings toward a magnet, against reason, against my will, or any kind of rational thought. I only knew that if I didn’t feel his touch again, I might literally wither and perish. Whatever dregs of humanity remained in me were tethered to this man, and if I walked away now, I would be abandoning any possibility or hope of ever exploring this… this inexplicable thing we had between us.

“You wish praise?” he whispered and leaned in toward my face, forcing me to close my eyes as I felt the sweetness of his breath play over my mouth. “Then I will praise you every chance I get.”

“Hades,” I said, voice shaking. “Don’t… don’t do this.”

“No, Thalassa. In this, I will not obey you because you must hear me. You say none of us remember, but I do. So if you wish worship, then let me worship you. If you need adoration, then let it be my mouth that adores you always. And should you desire love, then let mine be enough. I have felt the worship of others, so I know its allure, its intoxicating appeal. But there is something in that praise and adulation that you never expect to find, and that is emptiness. Praise from those who do not know you, truly know you, or love you soon becomes little more than words, empty and meaningless. They mean nothing at all.”

He took my hand in his and pressed our fists to the spot where his heart should have been. “But all my worship would come straight from the very depths of my darkest heart. You are in me, all the way in me, Thalassa. You always have been and you always will be. In our old life, we never needed others to find our fulfillment, for we’d become one whole together. I know that it can be the same in this life, but you must trust me. You must believe in me, in us, again.”

He held his breath, and I could see him shaking, so tense was he as he waited to hear my response to his impassioned words.

On my tongue rested a plethora of responses, some fiery and fierce, full of my own arrogant anger, fueled by the fury that I was just beginning to understand had been flamed by a great loss I’d never fully comprehended until recently. And others… well, others were quite the opposite.

I slipped my hand out of his, and his eyes widened, filling with such a welling of pain that I felt it cut through me like a dagger to my chest. He was already imagining my rejection, and in that one subconscious action of his, I finally understood what it was I’d really been seeking all along.

I shook my head. “I came to you to find my heart.”

He swallowed and nodded slowly, but I could feel him withdrawing from me, feel him pulling up the armor he’d use to keep me at arm’s length, to try in any way to protect that part of him that had just been open and honest with me and that he now felt had been flayed wide.

I palmed his whisker-roughened cheek, gently scrapping my fingers against his coarse, dark hairs. He gasped, clutching tight to my wrist, as though both to toss my hand off him and draw me closer.

“But I didn't realize until just now that I already had.”

He blinked. “What? What are you saying, Thalassa. You must spell it out for me, female, in exacting detail.” His voice was a sharp, tight growl that pulled at things down low in me as I remembered just what that silky tongue of his had done to me mere hours ago.

I rolled my eyes, but grinned broadly. “You are a pain in my ass,” I murmured tenderly, finally feeling free to open myself to him fully. Completely.

He snorted. “I’m pretty sure those should be my words to you. You always were a giant pain in my arse, female. The biggest. And I love you for it.”

I didn’t think there would ever come a day where I would get tired of hearing him say so. But even still, even though I knew and believed he was speaking from his heart, I had to hear him say it again. The arm I held Poseidon with was slowly lowering, the anger that’d burned through me was dying out, and it didn’t matter.

That was how I knew how much he meant to me. He meant more to me than destruction, than fury and rage. He meant literally everything to me.

“You do?”

“Gods, Thalassa, do you not yet comprehend the depths of my devotion to you? I pursued you to get you back, and maybe at first, I thought I had to regain your old self, but I wouldn’t have cared if you’d come back to me as beast, man, or woman. You will always be the keeper of my heart and my soul. You are the only thing that truly brings me joy, you and the family we built together. Our children. Our friends. But you are my truest and only love. I would follow you to the ends of the earth, into hell itself and even into death a thousand times over if it meant keeping you with me always. There is nothing I wouldn’t do for you. Nothing.”

I clenched my jaw, and looked at the pathetic excuse for a god still trapped in waters he’d once believed to be his to command. And even close to death as he was, I could read the hatred in his eyes as he boldly returned my stare.

Then I turned and looked at the darkly handsome face of the only male I would ever want and asked softly, “Would you kill him for me?”

At first his eyes widened with shock, and all the color leeched from his face. It wasn’t that Hades feared death—he was the ruler of it after all. Of course, he didn’t fear death, but I’d learned one truth about him during my time trekking through the wilds with him. For the god of death he had a great respect for life.

But then I saw his jaw set and watched in awe as the rising swell of his power gathered around his body like a dark and dangerous storm cloud. It crackled with lightning and rolled with thunder. His eyes began to change colors as he slowly lifted his hand toward his own brother, and I had my answer.

Hades lived under the shadow of his own powers. His command of death made him reviled by his peers, an outcast amongst the glittering throng. They did not understand him, and therefore turned him into an object of hate and ridicule. I had the sense that he’d always wanted to be seen as more.

Maybe because they’d rejected him, tossing him into the darkness of the Underworld, they had caused him to be so very different from those who lived on Olympus. He was more thoughtful and kind, the very opposite of what one might imagine Death should or would be.

His hand glowed the dark of ebony, and I felt the air tense with the tight coiling of his power. He would shoot that bolt into his brother, and the gods only knew the war that would be unleashed upon us all for it.

Now, finally, the foolish water god had the good sense to look terrified. And though I knew he deserved no better, I also knew I could never allow this sin to weigh upon my lover’s soul.

“Stop,” I said softly over the din of chaos and grabbed his hand, the hand that sparked with death and the end of all things.

But the burn of that power only made me love him more because, though I was twenty times more powerful than him, I finally understood that, in all ways, Hades wasn’t just my equal, he was truly the better part of me. He was my absolute better half and always would be.

He swallowed hard, shaking powerfully as he turned to look at me. I read the anguish in his eyes. He’d have done that terrible deed for me alone, but in the end, I think he’d have hated me for it.

Leaning up on tiptoe, I gently kissed his mouth. No tongue. No heated caresses. Just a tender touch of lips on lips, and as he exhaled, I took his breath into my lungs. Now, he was truly a part of me.

“Forgive me, my darkness,” I begged of him softly.

“Forgiven,” he said simply, and I knew he meant it.

I smiled. “I never wish to give you cause to hate me. I can deal with the hatred and contempt of all others, so long as you never cease to look at me as you do now.”

“Oh, my heart,” he whispered for my ears only. “I am your slave in every way.”

“And I am yours, my dark king.”

And to show him just how much I meant what I said, I snapped my fingers, releasing Poseidon from his prison.

He gasped, sinking into the waters and looking at me through different eyes.

I shook my head. “I spared your miserable life today because my lover wished me to. Though why he should care for a worthless bastard like you, I’ll never know. But hear me well, god of nothing. If I ever catch you skulking about in my domain again, I will end you. And I will smile as I do it. Now, be gone from my sight.”

And with a flick of my wrist, I sent him back to Olympus, making sure that the trip would be most unpleasant, filling any and all orifices with several gallons worth of sand.

Leaving Hades and I alone.

I felt almost shy when I looked back up at him. But I didn’t mind it anymore. There was strength in feeling, great strength. It would have been all too easy to kill Poseidon. The hard thing had been letting him live, and I’d only managed to do that because, for some unknown reason, Hades believed that I was a far better creature than I actually was.

A creature that I hoped someday would truly be worthy of him.

“Did you mean all of that?” he asked gruffly.

Biting the inside of my cheek because being open and honest with my feelings toward another was foreign territory for me, I nodded slowly.

“Yes, Hades. All of it.”

“Your heart?”

I shook my head. “I’ve learned to live without one already, and I’m not sure I relish any more of this long, arduous journey. I just wish to be with you alone, my king. I wish to know you again, know all of you. And learn about our family. Our life together. I do not need a heart to know that I do need you.”

He traced my cheek with his finger, and I leaned into his touch like a woman starved and desperate, practically purring at the callused feel of his strong touch.

Hades was a man. I was a woman. His woman.

My body warmed to think it. I belonged with him, and I was pretty sure that I always had. No matter how much I’d wanted to give into my darkness, I knew that with him by my side, I could overcome anything.

“I love you. But the journey ended here anyway.”

I frowned. “What?”

He laughed. “My beautiful, Thalassa. Your heart was never that far.”

I blinked, wondering what madness he was getting at. “Then what was this silly journey you took us on? And where is it? I do not sense it.”

“The journey was to force you to get to know me again. It was an excuse, my reason for being and staying with you. But your beautiful golden heart has always been just under your nose.” He pressed his palm to the flat of his stomach, and my brain seemed suddenly incapable of working.

I stared at his muscular abdominals and shook my head. “Are you saying that you—”

“I swallowed them,” he said.

I laughed, then wrinkled my nose, and then laughed some more. “Oh, that’s terrifyingly diabolical. What would induce you to do such a thing, and… why?”

He chuckled, twining a rope of my tentacle hair behind my ear. “Did you honestly think I could ever do without with any part of you? Put it out in the great wide world and hope and pray that some idiot didn’t cross paths with it? I would never endanger your life in that way.”

I pressed my hand to the flat of his stomach and realized that what I’d felt after our lovemaking had indeed been a beating heart. It was that same strange dual beating I’d felt when I’d laid my head on his stomach earlier, but I’d just attributed it to some quirk of the Olympians. A slow smile rolled over my lips.

“That is both disturbing and brilliant and a whole plethora of other adjectives,” I murmured. “Hades, is this why I like being near you? Is it my heart that makes me so soft toward you?”

The twinkle in his eyes dimmed, and the smile slowly slipped. “I suppose there is only one way to find out.”

His hand filled with a curl of that pearly black smoke that was his power, and he grunted only a little as he slid his hand inside of himself and tugged. In an instant, the glittering golden organs were freed—his much larger one and mine, completely fused together, and beating in tandem.

Heat gathered in my eyes, and a lump formed in my throat as I looked at the beauty that was us. My heart could never have twined so seamlessly, so perfectly, with his if we hadn’t been one whole to begin with.

With a deft flick of his wrists, he turned the one back into two and handed me my smaller heart.

I looked into his eyes as he looked into mine. In his, I read eternity and hope and fear. Fear that I would get my heart back and leave him forever.

I swallowed hard and took my heart from his hand. When it came to me, I felt flooded with warmth, but not just my own. It was his. His joy. His happiness. His love and tenderness.

Our hearts had been as one for so long that a part of himself had forever imprinted on mine. I turned my hand and shoved the organ deep into my chest and gasped as I felt the warmth of life, of verve, and true indescribable joy flood through me like a roaring wave. And it was a wave, the wave that had been gently pounding away at me all along. I let it flood through me, merging as one with it. Healing. Becoming whole again.

My lashes fluttered as I drowned in the sensation of memories that I’d always had in me but could find no enjoyment in, memories of home and hearth and love, indescribable, bountiful love that was overflowing and never-ending.

Through my tears, I looked at my beloved’s face, and realized that the other version of me hadn’t been weak at all. She’d known love. She’d changed completely because of it, and not because Hades had stripped her of autonomy, but because he’d given me the freedom to be wholly and fully myself, loving me exactly for who I was. When the wave was done with me, I felt like a different woman entirely. I was me. I was her. I was something else altogether.

“Bubble butt,” I whispered, and he gasped, almost dropping to his knees for a second.

I had to place my arms under his to keep him upright, And I wasn’t the only one crying. His tears were thick and silvery, and he was shaking his head.

“Who… who are you?” he whispered brokenly.

I smiled. “I don’t know. But I do remember. And I don’t know how. Only that I love you so much. You never gave up on me, Death Boy. You never gave up on us.” My words came out a reed-thin whisper. “But I’m not the same Calypso that I was. I am her, but I am Thalassa still too. I don’t know how you did it, made us both love you, but somehow, against the very will of nature, I am still dual.” I gasped, smiling through my tears, so confused and yet excited all at the same.

He trembled furiously as he hugged me tight. “And I never will give up on us. Not ever. You’re mine, Thalassa, Calypso, whoever. You’re all mine.”

“You may call me Thalassa,” I said softly, “for she is as much me as anything else, and though we have merged, in truth, both are still very much alive in me.” I placed my hands on his shoulders, drawing him closer. “And just so we’re clear, Hades, you are mine, my darkest love. My only love. Forever. For always.”

He nodded. “Kiss me, Thalassa. Forever. For always. For I know your soul, and that is the greatest treasure any man could ever ask for.”

So I did kiss him.

Passionately.

Ardently.

Those kisses lead to other, more glorious, more wondrous things. Things that healed me, that reminded me who I’d been, who I still was. It was a week before we finally came up for air again, but when we finally did, he turned to me on that lake bed of glittering waters and murmured, “It is time, my dark jewel.”

My memories were back, and I knew what he meant.

So I nodded. “Yes, lover. It is time.”