It had to be at least twenty-four hours later. And I wasn’t safe. I knew I wasn’t safe. But all my adrenaline abruptly stopped pumping, and exhaustion crashed down on me. An ocean wave that couldn’t be outswum.
When I awoke, I was no longer on a toilet but curled up on top of a soft bed. And my hands were zip-tied again. This time behind my back.
The first thing I saw was bars.
But not like jail cell bars. They were thin, really thin. Almost like…
I blinked. No…No, they wouldn’t have.
I scrambled into a seated position—and banged my head into another set of thin bars.
What in the ever-holy hell?
“Good morning, ma belle. Or should I say good evening? You slept the whole day away.”
I craned my neck to see Hades sitting in the throne chair. I hadn’t been able to budge it, but he now had it set up in front of my latest prison.
A cage. Bile rose in my throat. They’d placed me inside a dog cage.
And just in case I wasn’t getting the message that I was now something this monster owned, he said, “By the way, I’ve decided to rename you.”
His tone was friendly enough, but his silver eyes glittered with hatred as he informed me, “We’ll call you Persephone from now on. Persy, for short.”
CHAPTER 10
PERSEPHONE
“Oh my God, you’ve got a girl in a cage! That’s so hot. Is she going to watch us the whole time?”
Hades, as it turned out, was a big-game hunter. His quarry of choice: ladies who didn’t even blink an eye when they came back to his place and saw a grown woman in a dog cage.
Tonight’s game was a redhead, and she was rubbing herself against him as if the thought of being watched made the prospect of sex with him even hotter.
“Maybe. Depends on her time of the month.” He answered her, but grinned at me.
Then he spun her into the closest wall and put on a condom.
I’d say I’d lost count of the days. But the truth was my grasp of date and time had been shaky from the start of the year.
I was pretty sure the second semester at Tulane had already started, though. My period had come twice, and my imprisonment had taken on a sort of routine.
Morning—wake up in a dog cage and eat a breakfast of granola and what I suspected was some kind of protein-laced yogurt on my hands and knees. Ellie had taken off the zip-tie handcuffs a few days into my imprisonment but had put them right back on the next morning when I tried to eat with my hands. Like a human being.
My breakfast had been swept away, and I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to have food again until three days later. By that time, I was half-starved, and my pride was all the way gone. Humiliated and defeated, I made a fool of myself, inhaling the granola with just my mouth and licking the doggie bowl clean.
Ellie had watched me do this from behind a phone screen the whole time. She occasionally made videos of me. Maybe she sent them to my father. Maybe she and her big brother watched them together after dinner, like family movie night. I didn’t dare wonder too hard on the subject. I was barely hanging on to my sanity as it was.
“You learn your lesson?” Ellie asked the third time she cut off my handcuffs.
Yes, I had. And the lessons kept coming.
My afternoons were possibly nights. I had no idea since Hades kept the curtains drawn.
Anyway, the time I called afternoon was mostly spent in his throne room, watching as he conducted business with criminals who made the Bulgarians who killed Mama Fairgood look like Boy Scouts.
Cartel, Russians, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Asian Triad members—just about every character I’d ever seen depicted as the bad guys in movies—they all entered the throne room to kiss Hades’s proverbial ring.
I watched him grant favors, give orders, and negotiate the finer points of deals from the dog cage at his feet. Sometimes underneath his feet. When the underworld king felt lethargic or just wanted to make a particularly droll point, he kicked back and used my cage as an ottoman.
