Promises and Pomegranates

In this section, the alternating first person point of view offers insight into Kal and Elena’s mindsets as their relationship progresses. First-person narration provides direct access to Kal and Elena’s thoughts and feelings, even those they hide from others. Without a window into Kal’s thoughts, readers might think, as Elena does, that he doesn’t care about her at all. Without a window to Elena’s thoughts, readers might not understand that she craves the combination of pain and pleasure Kal offers her sexually. Her first-person narration demonstrates that her attraction to Kal is intense and complex. In addition, these alternating first-person points of view create dramatic irony, where the reader knows more about Kal’s feelings and motives than Elena does, and more about Elena’s conflicted feelings than Kal realizes. This heightens the narrative’s tension as readers watch the characters fail to understand one another. It also underscores the unreliability of both narrators, as their accounts are shaped by desire, shame, and fear, forcing the reader to piece together a fuller picture from their partial truths. The dual narration therefore mirrors the mythic split at the heart of the story: Hades’s possession and Persephone’s resistance are not told in a single voice in Ovid or Homer either, but emerge piecemeal, filtered through competing accounts. Kal and Elena’s alternating voices replicate that tension, situating readers in a liminal space where truth is unstable.

Kal and Elena’s relationship is often characterized by violent language, drawing attention to The Boundary Between Obsession and Love. Although Kal occasionally speaks to Elena with warmth, seeking to comfort or protect her, the intensity and aggression that often typifies his feelings for her suggest an obsessive impulse rather than a loving one. He describes his feelings about her body as a desire to “[f]east on it, conquer it, ruin it” (56). Notably, Kal talks about her body parts as objects; he doesn’t foreground her personhood but describes her like a thing. The escalating triplet also enacts his compulsive drive, with each verb moving from indulgence (“feast”) to domination (“conquer”) to destruction (“ruin”), showing that his desire naturally tends toward obliteration. Likewise, he tells her, “Every time I close my eyes, I see you. Spread out and bleeding beneath me” (71). He is attracted by the sight of her blood, which feels animalistic and dangerous, conveying the violence of his feelings rather than affection or tenderness.

Elena is deeply aware of this ferocity. She describes Kal’s kiss as him “crash[ing] his mouth” to hers, even calling it an “assault” (31). She calls his kiss “[p]ainful in the way being with Kal has so far proven to be—[…] like being torn open and ripped apart, but your body craves the sensation. Like you need it to survive” (32). Elena even switches into a second person point of view here—using the pronoun “you” instead of “I”—as if to distance herself from the danger, or the realization that she is obsessed with him. The violent diction not only dramatizes their passion but also reveals how closely linked destruction and desire are in the novel’s treatment of intimacy. This blurring of violence and intimacy echoes the darker readings of the Persephone myth, where the language of ravishment is entangled with the language of union, and it highlights how Elena simultaneously experiences Kal as a source of ruin and as a necessary object of survival.

The repeated allusions to the myth of Hades and Persephone demonstrate the way mythic symbolism can operate as a psychological framework. Kal seems to use the myth as a way to justify his behavior while Elena uses it as a means to understand his feelings. He says to her, “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” (105). Kal feels a sense of entitlement, the same a god like Hades might. He keeps a dark, empty, and cavernous home that feels empty, further evoking Hades. Elena, on the other hand, attempts to use the myth to humanize her obsessive, violent, incomprehensible husband: “Maybe Hades was lonely too, and he brought Persephone to his realm because he knew she’d bring the light with her” (131). When she finds herself unable to understand Kal emotionally, she uses the myth to theorize his reasons for forcing her into marriage. The myth thus becomes a shared language through which both characters rationalize coercion and reinterpret their bond, illustrating how cultural stories can both mask and expose the imbalance of power in intimate relationships. By leaning on myth, Kal frames coercion as destiny while Elena reframes it as loneliness, but both strategies conceal the violence at the heart of their union. This demonstrates how myth can serve as a coping mechanism as much as an explanatory framework, allowing both characters to avoid confronting the implications of their choices.

These chapters also emphasize surveillance and exposure as central to Kal and Elena’s dynamic. The appearance of multiple flash drives, including one that captures their movements in real time, destabilizes their already fraught relationship by introducing the gaze of an unseen watcher. Kal interprets this as Rafael’s control, while Elena imagines her parents witnessing her sexual submission, transforming her defiance into spectacle. The invasive recordings symbolize how their intimacy is never private but always subject to the judgment of family and enemies. This ties directly back to Elena’s earlier sense of being a porcelain doll on display: Even her rebellion and desire are not entirely her own but are staged against an audience’s gaze, further complicating her efforts to reclaim agency within her marriage.

Kal’s backstory, revealed through his reflections on his impoverished childhood, his absent father, and his mother’s death, complicates his violent persona by grounding it in rejection and loss. His attempt to reconnect with his sister Violet suggests a longing for familial redemption, even as she continually rebuffs him. This subplot mirrors his obsession with Elena, as both relationships embody his need to claim intimacy as a way of repairing abandonment. Violet’s refusal reinforces the idea that not all bonds can be forced, casting doubt on whether Elena’s eventual attachment will be genuine or coerced. By pairing Kal’s longing for Violet with his fixation on Elena, the novel suggests that his compulsion to dominate is rooted in unresolved grief, turning love into a cycle of reenacted loss.

Elena’s attempted escape from the Flaming Chariot and subsequent drugging at the bus station further develop the theme of Reclaiming Agency Within Forced Marriage. Her violent self-defense against Vinny proves that she is not a passive victim, yet her vulnerability to capture underscores the structural limitations she faces. Her thought that perhaps Hades was lonely when he abducted Persephone reframes captivity as companionship, revealing how she negotiates her lack of choice by reinterpreting coercion as mutual need. This is complicated, however, by Elena’s intense sexual desire for Kal. She is not resistant to intimacy and, in fact, asked him to be her first partner before their marriage. Throughout these chapters she repeatedly dwells on how much she craves his touch, underscoring that while the marriage is forced, the sex itself is not. The juxtaposition of her physical desire and her psychological rationalization highlights the contradiction of her arc: Elena’s body refuses marital submission even as her mind constructs myths to endure it, illustrating the tenuous line between reclaiming agency and surrendering to obsession and love.