Cold! Something wet popped her on the shoulder and she gave a little gasp. Hades’s eyes opened at her jerk and she looked to the ceiling just as another drop of water pocked down against her skin.

The overhead landscape of the chamber still hung heavy with descending stone, but there was no way to mistake it for the same dead cavern she’d seen on her way in the door. There were stalactites and stone curtains, yes, but they were new, and in different locations. Where before, there had been dry relics of the space’s forming, now there were wet inverted spires of living stone, dripping humid life onto their knobby counterparts rising from the floor. Onto her. The bones of the earth in Hades’s private rooms almost seemed to blossom, for lack of a better word.

“My Lord, is this normal?”

He huffed amusement and gathered her close at the hip. “Little flower, not a single piece of this is normal. Not you, not this”—he made a lazy gesture around the room with his free hand—“not any of it.”

She cast a wary eye around the altered space, the potential violence she saw now in the columns of stone. “Will it”—she bit her lip—“will it happen every time?”

The hand at her waist moved up into her wild hair, gripping and drawing her down near his face. “I have no idea, Persephone,” he said, awakening to mischief again. “But your assumption there will be other times is most encouraging.”

So was the hot tongue in her mouth, the scrape of nails at her scalp. If this was the ‘ruin’ to which obedience brought her, Persephone would obey and let him raze her to the ground, then beg to be remade so he could destroy her again.