Promises and Pomegranates (Monsters & Muses, #1)

by Sav R. Miller

Persephone to my Hades, as some used to call me.

A woman I scorned until I found myself blinded by a new obsession.

And though I left the way Death usually does—silently, before dawn—it was never my intention not to return and collect.

There’s something magical in the act of holding another’s life in your hands. A kind of symmetry found in nature, where you’re given the opportunity to bring beasts to grisly fates or heal them instead.

You can’t conquer what doesn’t fear you, and with us, it’s always been the other way around.

“Or all that time she spends with her nose buried in a book.”

All that matters to la famiglia is that I keep my head down and abide by my duties.

wait i didn’t know this was a crime family book….

Tousled inky-black hair sweeps back over his head, like he’s spent his time combing through it. His jaw is sharp enough to cut glass, covered in a thin layer of stubble and framing Adonis-style bone structure, while his dark eyes are more reminiscent of the evil he’s rumored to be.

love me an adonis

Perhaps it’s the context: her, in a wedding gown, standing over her fiancé’s dead body. Yet her only real reaction was to me, as if his death bears no consequence to her.

I didn’t see or speak to her except in passing over the years, but I kept watch over her after she turned eighteen, fulfilling a favor owed to her father before allowing my depravity to take hold, giving in when she asked me to ruin her.

Therefore, I know everything there is to know about the woman before me:

I know she’s drawn to darkness, having watched her bask in the low hum of the stars as moonlight spilled across her pale skin more times than I care to admit.

“What the fuck are you doing?” she hisses, jerking her shoulder against my chin. “I am not marrying you.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have a choice.”

Dr. Kallum Anderson and Miss Elena Ricci together in marriage.”

I’m hyperfocused on every move she makes, my body so used to studying her from behind a screen that the openness of our interactions now feels somewhat alarming.

“But do not ever speak of my wife and her former fiancé, unless it’s to say what a good pair we make in comparison.

the one I got because I wanted nothing more than to be his Persephone.

There’s never been anyone else.

Her leggings cover the K carved into the inside of her thigh,

Then Rafael asked me to watch her, and poetry became the only way I could communicate with her.

How I’d drag her to the depths of hell but convince her she’d gone to heaven,

All the ways I’d treat her right, if I could.

If I thought I could actually love her and not just use her as a pawn in my twisted games.

“I didn’t marry you so you could fuck around and get yourself killed, so when I tell you to do something, I expect you to listen. Don’t make me regret trying to protect you.”

“You’re a pawn. That ring on your finger makes you my pawn. Don’t forget that.”

“This isn’t the first time you’ve suggested our union is less than legitimate,”

“We’re married. Husband and wife before the good Lord himself. It’s as legitimate as yours to Mateo would have been, except maybe even more so since we know each other so intimately.”

“It’s the subject of my every goddamn nightmare,”

“Every time I close my eyes, I see you.

“Would that prove to you that this marriage is real?”

Do you still crave my darkness, little one?”

“I will find you. And you will regret it.”

Her hatred would be so much easier to deal with than the liquid heat blazing in her gaze every time she fucking looks at me.

I lost my fucking mind and showed up to demand she tell me what happened anyway.

If Rafe wants a war, I’ll bring the fucking battle to his feet.

He’s wearing navy scrubs, leaning over a huge wooden desk, one palm flattened on the surface to support his weight, the other curled around a crystal tumbler.

“You’re not my prisoner,”

I know that scar. Dragged the dermaplane tool that created it through his thin flesh myself.

If Elena is even half as divine as the fruit in the Garden of Eden, I absolutely understand Eve’s surrender.

“You’re thirty-two with a Halloween birthday. You like reading poetry and memoirs, though you don’t write at all.

“You’re going nowhere, my little Persephone.

I didn’t bring you back to my island just so you could leave, and I’m certainly not relieving you of your sentence.

You’ll serve it at my goddamn side as the queen of my little Underworld, and all your family will ...

“I grew up very poor, so I suppose in some ways, the volunteer work is how I give back. Health care in this country is outrageously expensive, and free clinics are notoriously understaffed and overworked, so it’s just me trying to help a bit.”

“I’m your wife. I’m supposed to like you.

Maybe Hades was lonely too, and he brought Persephone to his realm because he knew she’d bring the light with her.

The K carved into the inside of her thigh is visible the way her dress sits and partly reopened;

I’ve kissed less than a handful of women in my life.

like a holy scripture written to absolve me of my sins, something sweet and succulent and entirely too pure for her own good.