Without the blankets, the room was cold, and I shivered.
The mattress shifted underneath me, and Henry wrapped his arm around me and pressed his chest against my back.
He was warm, and his hand searched until he found mine.
“Please don’t leave,” he said, and his lips brushed my neck. I trembled again, but this time for an entirely different reason.
For the rest of the night, neither of us said another word.
I stayed.
As the weeks passed, we didn’t talk about anything I’d said to Henry or anything he’d said to me. Sometimes he didn’t come back at night, but those were the days when he would reappear exhausted the next morning, and I let myself assume that he was working. We acted friendly toward one another during the few minutes a day we saw each other, but that was all we were. At night, I waited for him before I went to bed, and when he crawled in, he embraced me without a word. He never kissed me and he never apologized, but he wanted me to stay, and that was enough for now.
I made myself scarce as the others prepared for war. I explored the palace, f inding each room more or less exactly where it had been in Eden, which made things both easy and dull. One day I attempted to f igure out how many rooms there were, but after losing count twice, I stopped.
Sometimes James or Ava found me, and we would spend the day together, talking about nothing in particular and pretending they didn’t look terrible. The upcoming battle was already taking its toll on everyone, but whenever I brought it up, they assured me that they’d been through worse.
I avoided Persephone like the plague, and I didn’t bother to hide it. Whenever she entered a room, I walked out, usually with a ready-made excuse. On the few occasions I was forced to be near her without escape, I kept my head down and stayed quiet, and she never said a word to me. If she felt guilty—or if she thought she’d done the right thing—I didn’t want to hear about it.
Despite how useless I felt, I did get some satisfaction in knowing that at least I wasn’t burdening anyone. I read, I explored, and I kept my word to Henry. I also spent countless hours struggling to harness my ability. Twice I managed f lashes, but it was never in the right place. When I wanted to go to Cronus’s cavern, I wound up at Persephone’s cottage, where Adonis tended to the f lowers as he waited for her to return. And when I wanted to see what was going on in the meeting, I wound up in the room full of windows again, the one where Henry had kissed Persephone. Or Persephone had kissed Henry. It didn’t matter.
Other than that, I had no success. Whatever step I was missing, I couldn’t f igure it out, and despite my mother’s insistence that I would get it eventually, I felt like a failure.
No wonder the others didn’t want me helping out in the battle. I wouldn’t want me to help, either.
The closer we got to the winter solstice, the more anxious I became. Whether or not anyone was saying it aloud, all of these preparations were my fault. I’d put Henry in a position where he’d been forced to open the gate. If anything happened to them, it would be on me, and I couldn’t bear that guilt.
Ingrid was the only other thing Henry and I fought about. He didn’t want me to go anywhere near Cronus’s prison, and I insisted on keeping my promise to see her.
Finally we compromised, and Henry brought Ingrid to the palace for an afternoon the week before the solstice.
While the others were in the midst of preparing, Ingrid and I wandered through the jeweled gardens, which extended to the edge of a black river that ran through the stone walls on either end of the monstrous cavern. The River Styx.
“I was so close to living here forever,” said Ingrid with a sigh, and we made ourselves comfortable under a golden tree with rubies the size of apples hanging from its branches.
“You’re so lucky.”
“I wouldn’t call it luck,” I said, digging my toes into the black sand. “More like nepotism.”
She laughed, and as she settled beside the trunk of the golden tree, I picked one of the rubies and sniffed it. Nothing. If Henry could create these beautiful jewels, why couldn’t he at least give them the illusion of having a scent?
I kept the f lowers he’d left for me in the Underworld in a crystal bowl in the middle of my closet, and even after all this time, they still smelled like candy. Then again, they were real. Sort of.
I hesitated. “What would you have done if Henry never loved you as much as you wanted him to?”
“We can’t choose how much someone else loves us,” said Ingrid as she dipped a toe into the river and shivered.
“He picked me for the test because he thought he’d come to love me like that in time. He wouldn’t have picked you if he didn’t think the same, you know.”
“It doesn’t feel that way,” I mumbled, and when Ingrid pressed me, I told her everything that had happened since we’d returned from Cronus’s cavern. The f ight we’d had, what he’d said to me, how he’d told me to leave—and then changed his mind when he’d found out that James and I hadn’t done anything after all. How we’d been cordial since then, but hardly husband and wife. How afraid I was that we never would be.
By the time I was done, Ingrid had her arm around me, and I stared at the jewel in my hand as if it held the answers to every question I’d ever had. “I met Henry when I was seven,” she said as she toyed with a lock of my hair. “It was the early twentieth century, and my parents were German immigrants. We didn’t have any other family in America, so after they died, I lived in an orphanage in New York City.”