Chapter 20
Menelaus leaned forward, his goblet hanging forgotten in one hand as his gaze fixed on a girl a few places to my left. His lip curled, a flicker of distaste crossing his face.
He didn’t bother to lower his voice. “That one,” he said to the High Priestess, flicking his fingers toward Maris with idle disdain. “Too wooden. The Athenians would mock our court for the rest of my days.”
Maris’s veil fluttered as her head jerked toward the king.
But it was too late as the High Priestess nodded once and two guards appeared from the edges of the chamber, stepping forward. Maris fell back, almost hitting the girl behind her, her arms half raised in confusion.
“No, please,” she whispered, her voice barely audible beneath the music. “I can—just let me—please.” Desperation seized her limbs. She tried again. Tried to sway, to make it sensual, to roll her hips the way we’d been taught. But it was too late.
The guards reached her before the music hit its next breath. One guard grabbed her by the arm, the other took her elbow, and together they turned her toward the door like a misbehaving child.
She wailed the entire way until her cries were abruptly cut off by the doors thudding shut with a muffled boom.
The king leaned back, stroking his chin as he continued to study us. His eyes gleamed with musing delight … and hunger. So much hunger.
The music was greedy against my skin as everyone in the enormous room stared at us.
My body continued to move. The herb curled around my mind like steam over water, softening thought until it barely stirred. I didn’t decide to dance. I simply was. Heat gathered, aching and urgent, guiding every shift of muscle, every drag of fabric across sensitized skin.
Veils clung to damp skin, concealing faces but betraying the fever of the room. Women arched into one another, hands gliding over silk and skin. Some sank to their knees, crawling across the polished floor with a feline grace, their hips swaying like pendulums, spines bending in offering.
A veiled woman with long obsidian hair fell into a kneel before the king, her back arched as she trailed her fingers up her thighs, her tunic riding high, the sheer fabric hinting more than concealing.
Another chosen twirled in a spiral, her body a ribbon of gold and silk. She reached for the ceiling, then dropped to the floor in a ripple of limbs and breath, rolling onto her back and sliding one hand across her breast, the other between her thighs.
Menelaus’s fingers drummed once against the throne and then stilled.
His gaze lingered on a girl across the chamber, one who swayed without rhythm, her steps faltering, her movements mechanical in the midst of fevered chaos.
He exhaled, long and loud. “That one bores me,” he said, not even bothering to point this time.
The guards moved instantly.
She didn’t beg like Maris had. Just froze, her veil trembling with her breath as they took her by the arms and led her out.
The doors closed behind her with another heavy, echoing thud.
And the dancing never stopped.
I moved with the others, caught in the tide of hips and breath and moving limbs, my body no longer my own.
The music guided me, pulled me deeper. I arched, I spun, the ache in my core driving every motion.
This wasn’t just a dance; it was a plea wrapped in rhythm.
Every sway of my hips was designed to catch his gaze.
Every turn, every sweep of my hand along my throat and down my ribs, was a promise, a lure.
But … it wasn’t working.
Menelaus wasn’t watching me.
His gaze drifted unhurriedly across the hall, from one girl to another, lingering for seconds, never long enough to matter. He drank. He laughed. He said something to a soldier behind him, his attention fractured, lost among the glittering swarm of bodies.
No matter what I did … I was nothing more than movement and color. Just another body spinning in the crowd, unseen, unchosen, forgettable.
No.
The thought cut through the drugged warmth in my veins. If he wouldn’t look, I would make him. I had to find a way. My gaze swept the hall, searching for something, anything, that might set me apart.
Every woman around me gleamed like a jewel. There had to be another way to be seen. My eyes drifted over the room, the blur of glittering bodies and painted smiles, until they caught on movement that wasn’t movement at all.
Achilles’s arms were crossed, his face completely void of emotion.
While every other man gawked and gorged himself on the sight of us, adjusting themselves under their robes, he still looked like he’d rather be doing anything else.
His jaw was tight and his eyes were cool and unmoved by the spectacle around him …
as if all this beauty barely deserved his notice.
He was the king’s most loyal blade. The God-Slayer’s favored one. The one man in Sparta who bent for no one but his ruler.
If I could make him look—if I could pull even his gaze to me—then Menelaus would have no choice but to notice.
The music pulsed, winding through my blood. I turned my body toward Achilles, my hips finding a slower rhythm, my hands rising to trace the air. The haze made everything feel softer, dreamlike, but the intent in me was certain.
My hands grazed down my torso, over my thighs, my breasts, my sides.
Still, he didn’t look.
I sank to my knees, feeling the marble’s chill against my skin, then rose in one fluid motion, spine arching, breath trembling.
My hand slid between my thighs, the other tugging the hem of my tunic higher, a whisper of skin flashing in the torchlight.
The rhythm owned me now; it pulled and demanded, urging me to tempt harder, to command the gaze I’d been denied.
Nothing.
He might as well have been cut from the same stone as the throne in front of him. His arms remained crossed, his gaze fixed straight ahead. Unmoving and unmoved as if I were no more interesting than dust on the floor.
Frustration curled in my chest. I needed to break him.
Each movement I made was both shame and worship, sin and sacrament.
My hair slipped from its binding, cascading down my shoulders in golden waves.
I let it fall, let it brush my back the way I remembered his gaze following it in the garden, how they’d darkened, pupils blown wide, as if he were already imagining the silk of it wrapped around his fist while he pulled my head back and took my mouth.
The thought sent more fire licking low in my belly and I gathered the strands and tossed them over one shoulder with a sharp flick, baring my throat, and the long, vulnerable line of it.
I knew he’d noticed that too. I knew his gaze had lingered on the frantic beat of my pulse like he was already tasting it against his tongue.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the king’s head lift. His attention, at last, turned toward me.
But my body wasn’t performing for him.
My thighs parted as I sank onto my heels, the silk of my tunic clinging to flushed skin.
Every shift of fabric chafed across my nipples, already peaked and aching for rough hands—his hands.
I moved with care, aware of the way Achilles’s eyes watched movement, how it was always cataloguing threat and weakness and want with the same ruthless focus.
My hands glided up my sides, tracing the dip of my waist, the flare of my ribs, stopping just beneath the swell of my breasts.
I didn’t touch them.
I let my fingers hover, trembling, close enough that the absence became its own kind of torture.
Close enough that my own breath stuttered.
I remembered the way his jaw had clenched in the garden when I’d crossed my arms, pushing my breasts higher …
how his gaze had dropped, fixed and burning.
How his throat had worked on a hard swallow before he’d pulled his eyes away like it cost him.
He wanted them in his mouth. He wanted to suck and bite until I was sobbing, and begging him to fill me.
The thought made me throb, another gush of slick heat pulsing between my thighs.
I bent forward, pressing my palms flat to the stone floor and bowing low.
My spine arched, rear lifting into the air, hips rolling slow.
The position was pure offering, indecent, instinctive, and exactly what I needed.
I rolled my hips just enough to change the line of my body, just enough to offer an angle I knew he liked, because his gaze had bit into it as I’d walked away last night.
Something ignited across my back, a burn that climbed my skin and stole my breath. I didn’t have to look to know whose eyes were devouring me.
Achilles was watching me now.
The air between us tightened. The weight of his focus cut through the noise, the music, the crowd.
I risked a glance, the smallest flick of my eyes beneath the veil, and found him no longer still.
His jaw was set, his arms lowered to his sides, and his gaze …
his gaze seared through the space between us.
Menalaus’s head turned slightly toward his captain, one brow lifting, a knowing smirk crossing his lips.
I rose again, spinning, arms lifting above my head like a priestess offering herself to her god. My hips swayed in rhythm, the movement drawn from someplace deeper, shaped by the heat of their twin gazes, one burning, one amused.
Anysa moaned softly nearby as she ground against one of the concubines guiding her, her leg hooked over the other woman’s hip. The concubine kissed down her neck, her hand roaming with practiced ease. A soldier in the crowd groaned audibly and cupped his groin.
A woman to my right pushed aside her own tunic, exposing the soft swell of her breasts. She cupped them as she danced, eyes wild and mouth slack with pleasure, offering herself to the room with fearless hunger.
But the king didn’t spare her a glance. His attention was fixed on me, his gaze flicking between Achilles and the path my body traced. There was still amusement in his smile, and intrigue, the kind that turned watching into sport.
He wanted to see if I could do it. If I could make his captain, his perfect, unbreakable soldier, fall prey to what no command or battlefield ever had.
As Menalaus watched, that amusement began to change. Curiosity softened into hunger, fascination into something deeper. The predator in him had gone still, waiting to see what I could do.
Once again, I was bending Menelaus to my will. And even in my drugged state, I could feel that heady sense of power.
I could feel that seductive control I’d been so desperate for.
The ache between my legs spiked, pleasure spreading so fast it nearly stole my balance.
My body moved on instinct, hips tilting, breath deepening, skin alive beneath the heat of their eyes.
The king watched like a man studying his own power reflected back at him …
but it was Achilles whose gaze held me fast.
It was like I could feel his touch.
His stare dragged across my skin like a hand. A mouth. A promise. I felt like I could come just from the way he looked at me.
He took a step forward. His chest heaved, the veins in his forearms standing out as his hand twitched near the hilt of his sword, not in threat, but because he didn’t seem to know where else to anchor himself.
His gaze clung to me like a man caught between worship and war, like the sight of me was undoing something he’d spent years trying to lock away.
Menelaus leaned forward on his throne, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction, the corner of his mouth curving in delight. His gaze darted between us like he was watching a performance.
The sight of that smile burned through the haze. I forced my focus back to it, to him. This wasn’t about Achilles. It never had been.
I was doing this for the king, to make him see me, to make him want.
The music shifted and darkened. Another girl was dismissed, then another.
Somewhere in the back of my mind, there was a sliver, a grasp of clarity. I realized what I must look like and how shameless my body had become. Embarrassment flickered, bright and mortifying. But the herb rose up like a tide to meet it, washing the thought clean away.
All that remained was sensation. Willing limbs. And the way their eyes hadn’t left me once.
The drums sank into a throbbing rhythm, their echoes vibrating through the floor, through me. The air itself felt alive, trembling with tension.
Achilles’s chest was heaving, every muscle drawn tight. His eyes traced over me, full of something that looked far too human for Sparta’s legend. And I knew, in that dizzying rush of realization, that I had done it. I had broken him.
Menelaus saw it too.
His head tilted, the gleam in his gaze intensifying as his expression turned feral.
Power hummed off him. He leaned back in his throne, bronze catching the firelight as his hand slid lower, adjusting his cock with the careless satisfaction of a man who’d claimed the world and was deciding what to conquer next.
He looked between us, between the captain who couldn’t look away and the woman who’d caused it, and the pleasure in his face was unmistakable.
I met Menelaus’s eyes, the smirk still touching his lips, and continued to dance. Each shift of my hips said what I couldn’t through my veil: Do you see me now?
A murmur threaded through the court, slipping from mouth to mouth. Some watched in awe, others in disbelief, but no one dared to interrupt. Achilles’s gaze never faltered. Menelaus’s grin only widened.
The crowd had vanished; there was only them. The king on his throne, his fingers digging into the cold marble he sat on, and the captain of his kingdom standing rigid, undone by everything he wasn’t supposed to feel.
The song eased, but the intensity in the room didn’t. They continued to watch me as the final drumbeat died.
The herb still hummed in my veins, blurring the edges of the world, but this, this wasn’t its doing. Their attention was mine. And the rush of it felt like power rising in my blood.
But even as I lifted my chin in victory, a shiver threaded through the heat—what happens to the flame once the gods notice it burning?