Desperate Housewives of Olympus by Saranna DeWylde Read Free Book Online Page A

to admit her husband didn’t want her any longer. “Zeus hasn’t touched me. Not since before you took Persephone.”
    At his silence, a heavy weight fell over her and she realized with a dawning horror he didn’t want her either. Hera eased to her feet and clutched the edges of her corset together. She wouldn’t shatter here, not where he could see her. She’d said things; begged him to… and he didn’t want her. “I shouldn’t have come.”
    Hades wouldn’t let her turn away; he caught her wrist behind her back and held her against him again. “No, you shouldn’t have come here, but it’s not because I don’t want you.”
    “Then why else?” she demanded.
    He tangled his other hand in her hair, twisted her newly colored locks between his fingers.
    “I’m not stupid, Hades. I know if Persephone comes back to you, it’s over.”
    “See, that’s where you’re wrong again,” he whispered against her ear.
    “Don’t…” she tried to twist away from him again. Hera would never believe he wouldn’t take that golden beauty back in a second if she wanted him.
    He released her and shoved something into her hands. “No, Persephone will never have power over me again.” Hades laughed bitterly.
    Hera looked down at what she held. It was a box, simple. Nothing special about the carving, just a wooden box. Hades twisted the key in the lock for her and the lid popped open. Inside was a small, black thing. It was charred and somehow desolate, lying in the box as if it were a coffin.
    “What is this?” she whispered.
    “It’s my heart.”

 
     
    ABSTINENCE
     
    Before Abstinence had been become Abstinence, her name had been Merry. Yet, she hadn’t been at all joyous. She’d always known it was her lot in life to become this goddess of Have Not. She’d accepted it the same way an adult accepts the pain of a needle when they need the medicine inside to get well. She’d borne the trepidation, the certainty it was going to suck, but forged ahead anyway.
    On her thirtieth birthday, she’d ascended, having never known what it was like to be in love, the taste of chocolate frosting on graham crackers with a milk chaser, or what it was like to feel a good cashmere sweater against her skin.
    She’d inured herself to hunger, cold, and most importantly, luxury. Simple pleasures mortals accepted as their everyday due were denied her. When she was Merry, she’d thought it was okay. It had been, until she’d met Zeus.
    He made her feel warm in places that didn’t know touch, let alone warmth. He made her hunger for things she didn’t know the taste of, but inexplicably craved. She thirsted for the ambrosia wine like her body was made of desert sand and the wine was sweet water from the heavens. She’d never known this longing.
    It was more than sexual. That was something she’d promised her mother she would experience before her ascension. It had been nothing but sticky fumbling in the back of an old Mustang, the high school football star rutting between her thighs and rubbing at her labia because he thought it was her clitoris. His ham-fists had been rough on her small breasts, but at least he’d said all the right things.
    She’d never touched herself then because she knew she’d later have to deny herself whatever pleasure she’d taken. There was something in Zeus’ voice that made her remember that so clearly, like it’d been yesterday. A resonance beneath everything he said that tempted her to every pleasure she could think of, every vice and every excess.
    Abstinence had never craved these things before; she hadn’t known much of what she was sacrificing. Perhaps that nullified the act itself. She’d sipped the wine and nothing had happened to her. She’d abstained from a full glass—but how long would that last? She knew it was a slippery slope. First it would be abstaining from a full glass, then it would be the full bottle, where did it end? When was she indulging instead of abstaining? She