Chapter 22 #2
He didn’t seem to share space. He devoured it.
“I think we still have to hope,” I said slowly. “We have to win and start from there.”
“Do you think you’ll still talk to me after the Trials?” Anysa asked, a sudden hint of vulnerability in her voice.
“Will you still want to when you are queen?” I teased.
She snorted. Something our instructors might have fainted over if they’d heard. “Depends. Will you still laugh at my jokes?”
“Only if you keep telling them.”
She was quiet for a long time. “I hope it’s you. If it’s not me. I hope it’s you,” she whispered.
The words sank deep, slipping past armor I hadn’t realized I still wore. I stared at the wall, at the uneven seam between the stones, and pressed my palm to it like I could reach her somehow. Like the force of my hand might carry the weight of what I wanted to say.
“I hope, if it isn’t me, then it’s you too,” I whispered back.
My stomach soured just thinking about what I’d overheard from some of the other chosen. Whispers of how they’d drape themselves in jewels, and all the feasts they would throw. Not one word about Sparta. Not one word about the hunger, the dust, the children with sunken bellies and broken spirits.
It had to be one of us who won. It had to.
But even as the words left my lips, his face flickered behind my eyes again.
Once again, I pushed it down, hard, reminding myself of what mattered. About the mothers boiling moldy grain. About the sons starving before they ever picked up a sword. About the people still waiting for someone—anyone—to save them.
So I forced the ache back into its cage and said, steadier now, “And if it’s me, I won’t waste it.”
Anysa tapped a final rhythm on the stone. “Get some sleep, Helena. Tomorrow’s going to be worse than balancing grapes on a spoon while curtsying.”
“Impossible.”
“Just wait.”
I pressed my palm flat to the wall. “Goodnight, Anysa.”
“Goodnight, Queen of Our Ruin.”
I laughed softly and listened to the rustle of fabric and fading steps as she moved away. Roz shifted in my lap, its slight snoring the only sound left in the room.
For a while, I sat there in the quiet, letting my fingers drift through its fur, eyes trailing over the flickering shadows cast by the lone oil lamp on my desk.
I should’ve gone to bed …
But I couldn’t stop the feeling creeping in under my skin. Restless and simmering … growing louder with every passing breath. I told myself it was leftover energy from training, from too much stillness after too much pressure.
But I knew the truth.
It was him.
The memory of his gaze. The feel of the rain between us. The heat that had gathered in that narrow alcove … where everything had nearly unraveled.
I clenched my jaw and stared harder at the flame, willing it to be enough. This was what I should be focused on. Control. Victory. If I let anything, anyone, pull me off course, I could fail everyone. My village. Calismae. My mother.
But the thought of him was a hook beneath my skin.
I felt it tug. Once. Twice. I tried to ignore it, to sit still. I tried to breathe.
And then … I was standing.
Roz gave a sleepy grunt of protest as I slipped out from under it and crossed the room before opening the door.
I stepped into the corridor.
The wing was quiet. No footsteps. No voices. Just the hush of distant wind moving through the narrow hall.
I stood there for a breath too long, my body tilted slightly toward the direction of the garden, toward the memory of rain and his voice and the way he looked at me.
But I turned the other way.
I couldn’t go back. I wouldn’t.
Instead, I made my way down the hall, past the statue alcoves and shuttered windows, until the door to the common room creaked open beneath my hand.
The air inside was warm, thick with the scent of herbs and papyrus from the letters they’d allowed us to write after our lessons today. A few candles still burned down in their holders, forgotten. A half-empty pitcher of wine waited on the tray near the hearth.
I needed something. Milk. Wine. Anything to dull this ache, anything to remind me who I was. I poured a cup with trembling fingers and sat by the dying fire, sipping slowly and pretending it was enough.
“You’re sitting like someone waiting for their execution,” a voice said behind me.
I froze. The cup in my hands stilled mid-sip, the firelight catching the slight tremble in my fingers. Heat stirred low in my stomach, unwelcome, wild, and I forced it down as I turned toward the voice.
Achilles stood just beyond the firelight, shoulders broad and soaked tunic clinging to him in places it had no business clinging. He looked like he’d come straight from training, again. Arms folded across his chest and hair still damp, he watched me with shadowed blue eyes.
“Tell me why I always find you out of your room,” he said, stepping in with that effortless, quiet strength that made every inch of him feel like a challenge waiting to happen.
I lifted my chin, forcing composure into the way I held the cup. “Maybe I like exploring.”
He stepped closer, the corner of his mouth lifting. “Or maybe you enjoy being caught.” His voice dripped with amusement, the kind that made heat creep up the back of my neck.
My fingers tightened around the clay, the edge of the cup pressing into my palms. “If I wasn’t supposed to be here, maybe your guards shouldn’t make it so easy to leave.”
“I didn’t assign any,” he said simply.
That caught me.
“What? But the other night, you said they were in between shifts …”
He stepped closer to the fire, his face half lit in amber glow. “I lied. I never posted anyone at your door.”
“Why not?”
He was quiet for a beat. Then, in a voice rougher than before, “I didn’t trust them.”
A tight awareness threaded through the silence, real and dangerous.
“To do what?” I asked.
His eyes assessed me as they moved over me like a hand savoring my skin. “To stay away from you.”
Something lodged in my throat.
“I didn’t trust them not to want Helena the Beauty,” he said.
“To try and get a glimpse of you while you’re asleep.
” His gaze moved down my frame and back up again as if he couldn’t stop himself from another look.
“Because you’re the kind of temptation a man might ruin himself for …
and I didn’t trust them not to choose ruin. ”
There was that word again. The palace was rather fond of it.
My heart stumbled as I grasped his meaning and I looked away, back to the fire, pretending I was unaffected.
But I wasn’t.
He moved to stand beside the hearth, close enough that I could feel the warmth of him even next to the fire.
“So,” I said, reaching for steady ground, “is it true what they say?”
His brow lifted. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
“The rumors. That your mother’s a goddess.”
He didn’t speak immediately. Just stared into the fire, jaw tense.
“I’ve heard them,” he said finally.
“Are they true?”
He glanced down at me. “Does it matter? Gods don’t live very long around here, do they?”
“Yet you walk these halls, more freely than anyone it seems.”
His eyes lingered on me, unreadable. “Some things survive,” he said at last, “not because they’re blessed …
but because they’re too stubborn to die.
” A harsh laugh escaped him, nothing like a man amused.
“And some things,” he added, his gaze drifting back to the flames, “survive because creatures like our king would very much like to kill them … and haven’t figured out how. ”
The fire cracked between us. There was a lot to unpack in that statement. I hadn’t yet gotten a grasp on his relationship with Menelaus. Sometimes they seemed like friends, close ones even. Other times, like now, I wasn’t so sure.
And there was the fact that he’d just referred to the king as a creature …
I swallowed. “So it is true.”
His jaw tightened. “I didn’t say that.”
“But you didn’t deny it.”
I studied him, the flicker of firelight dancing over his face. And I could see it now, that impossible edge, the way he didn’t quite fit in his own skin, like there was something else inside him barely held back.
“If I was half a god, I would be above it all. Above temptation.”
I didn’t understand his meaning.
“And I never said I wasn’t tempted, Helena,” he murmured. “Only that some ruin comes slower. It chooses its moment.”
He stepped back, just slightly, but it felt like the fire had gone cold.
“You should sleep,” he said. “You’ll need stillness tomorrow. You’ll need to not flinch.”
I blinked. “Flinch?”
Achilles turned toward the corridor. “The High Priestess likes … a little theater.”
My mouth opened to stop him, to ask what that meant, but he was already walking away.
“For what it’s worth, Helena,” he murmured, right before he disappeared into the shadows, “if I had divine blood … it wouldn’t be the part of me you should fear.”
I stared into the dark long after he’d gone.
Don’t flinch.
Stillness.
Fear.
It wasn’t all of those things that stayed with me after I returned to my room though. It was the sound of my name in his mouth.
Helena.
And how this time, it felt less like a warning …
And more like a promise.