Chapter 1

I spent ten years at Hades's side helping him, for love.

Ten years, from the moment he was nothing — a fallen son of a forgotten bloodline, wandering the mortal roads with cracked sandals and an empty stomach — to the day he ascended Mount Olympus and claimed his seat among the gods.

And through all of it, he called me Sister.

Then came the day he led his chosen bride through the golden gates.

And I fell ill.

On the night I lay dying, he knelt at my side and gathered my cold, wasting hands in his. His eyes were rimmed red, and his voice, for all his divine power, cracked like a mortal man's.

"If the Fates grant us another life," he swore, "I will give you your proper name. I will make you mine — before all of Olympus."

The Fates heard him.

They gave me another life.

I came back in the bloom of my sixteenth year, born once more into the House of Selen — a family of ancient and noble blood, revered across the divine realm. My father had decreed a sacred rite: I would stand upon the high balcony of our temple-house and cast the Golden Apple into the crowd below. Whoever caught it would become my husband.

The courtyard was full. Demigods, heroes, young gods in their finest robes — all of them jostling and laughing and craning their necks toward me.

And then I saw him.

He was standing near the center of the crowd, just as I had known he would be.

My fingers released the apple.

It arced through the air — golden, gleaming, falling precisely where I had aimed it.

Directly into his arms.

But he stepped aside.

A single, casual sidestep. And the apple tumbled past him and landed in the lap of a filthy, hollow-cheeked vagrant crouched in the shadows behind.

The cheering stopped.

Silence swallowed the courtyard whole.

Every eye moved between me on the balcony, Hades standing still as marble in the crowd, and the stunned vagrant clutching the sacred apple with shaking hands.

Hades lifted his face and looked up at me from across the distance.

And in that moment, the memory struck me like lightning.

I had lived this before.

In our first life, we had grown up together — two children of neighboring divine houses, running through the same sunlit gardens. When his family's power crumbled and he was cast out, left to wander without resources or patrons, I had quietly bled the treasuries of the House of Selen to fund his studies. I had fed him, sheltered him, believed in him.

And something had grown between us. Something that felt, then, like love.

He had promised me. He had said: I want to spend eternity with you.

So when my father announced the apple-casting rite, I pulled Hades aside and asked him — begged him — to stand in the center of the crowd and catch what I threw.

And I threw it perfectly. I calculated every breath of wind, every inch of distance.

But he stepped aside.

And the apple went to the vagrant.

Just as now.

In our first life, I had stood on that same balcony, burning with shame as the crowd murmured and stared. I had refused to honor the rite. I had rejected the vagrant — humiliated him, humiliated myself — and faced my father's fury for it. Father made me kneel on the cold stone steps of the ancestor shrine for three days and three nights as punishment.

And for what?

For Hades's sake. For his soft, practiced excuses.

He had come to me afterward with red-rimmed eyes, clasping my hands, and told me the story of the woman named Minthe — daughter of the noble House of Su, who had saved his life on the road to his trials. She had asked for nothing except that he honor her with marriage. He had given his word.

So he could not marry me.

He was bound. Honorable. Sorry.

And then he became everything I had helped him become. He won the Three Sacred Trials — the highest honor in the divine realm. He rose. He shone.

And the woman he brought home in her gleaming white robes and golden crown was Minthe.

I stood in the crowd and watched the man I had given everything to lead another woman beneath the laurel garland.

Before I even had time to grieve, disaster found my own house. My father, facing political ruin, arranged a hasty marriage for me — a man older than my father, but stable, safe.

And Hades appeared at my chamber door.

He extended his hand and told me I deserved better than a rushed union. He told me he would protect me. He told me the House of Selen — that I — had been too good to him for him to allow this.

So he brought me into his house.

Not as a wife.

Not as even a consort.

Only as his Sister.