Summer Queen by Amelia Wilde

Author:Amelia Wilde [Wilde, Amelia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-03-30T18:30:00+00:00

14

Persephone

I’ve been here before, more than once, but never alone. Never like this. I feel rushed, like there’s not enough time, but there is. He won’t be back soon.

Hades’ office, like everywhere else, was made for him. That makes all the furniture—his desk and two chairs across from it, and the overstuffed chair by the fireplace—too large for me. One of the books my mother approved was Through the Looking Glass. In this moment I’m Alice, but there’s no magic tea cake that will make me fit into this world.

I’ll fit myself in, then.

But first I listen for any sign that Oliver’s back in here. There is none.

This part is easy. If Oliver appears, I can say that I was only exploring. That I was revisiting the site of my contract signing. That I was doing almost anything but snooping.

The next part isn’t so innocent.

Well, fine. I’m not innocent. I’m not the girl in white linen who came here with Hades on the train. That girl is gone now. It’s a new person who steps behind Hades desk and bends low to try his drawers.

My pulse thrums in my ears. Not now, anxiety, this is important work. My nerves don’t cooperate. Why should they? They’re trying to warn me that this is reckless, this is dangerous, that any number of things could happen to me from taking this chance. Any number of things have already happened to me. That’s my answer to my stupid feelings. I need more of those things to happen.

In the narrow top drawer, I find an empty pill bottle. I roll it curiously in my palm. There’s no label on it, so it could belong to anyone. But it doesn’t—it belongs to Hades. I don’t need to second-guess that. What was in the pill bottle is another story. He’d make me pay for it. I don’t know how much more payment I can take today.

I put the bottle back.

The second drawer down is locked.

The third door pops open to reveal...

Files.

Lots of files in a neat, thick row. This is the kind of thing my mother used to have in her filing cabinet. She kept her files under lock and key and she kept the key under her pillow. I was never allowed to know what was in those cabinets, on those papers. Maybe that’s why I sink my hands down into them so I can feel the heft. There is so much here to know. My fingernails make a zipping sound along the top of the files. It’s business documents, not personal things, but I could sit here and read them all day. Hades has read them. If I did too, we’d finally have a similarity between us.

An off-white page at the bottom of the cabinet catches my eye in the middle of separating the folders from one another so I can peek inside. I shove them farther apart. There’s not much extra room—too many documents—but I manage to reveal more of the paper.

The logo at the very top makes my breath catch.

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