Chapter 24
There was nothing that could’ve kept me out of the garden that night—not reason, not fear, not the burn still throbbing beneath the bandage on my arm.
The garden loomed before me, hushed and grim.
Roses sagged on their stems, heavy with heat, and the air carried the thick scent of salt from the sea.
Cicadas screamed, a relentless tally of sound.
I stepped into the clearing, the grass slick beneath my sandals, the veil brushing my cheeks like a tether I wanted to rip off.
And there he was.
Achilles stood by the olive trees, back half lit by the moon, arms crossed over his chest, every inch of him relaxed. Like he didn’t feel the fire that was burning me alive. Like he’d been waiting.
“You didn’t cut anyone else,” I said, my voice edged like the slap I wanted to give him.
Achilles’s gaze was unreadable. “I didn’t?”
A cold, humorless sound broke from my chest. “Don’t insult me. You know exactly what you did.”
His silence scraped at me and something in me snapped.
I stepped in, reached forward, and seized his sword by the hilt before he could react. The metal thudded against my palm as I wrenched it up and leveled it at him, the point hovering inches from his chest.
Achilles froze. For the first time since I’d met him, true surprise flickered across his face.
“You drew blood,” I said, my breath tight with fury. “You cut me open and then looked furious when I didn’t fall.”
“No one has ever dared to seize my sword from me,” he said quietly, watching the blade instead of my face.
“Answer me,” I snarled, stepping closer, the sword pressed against him now. My voice shook with my rage. “Why did you cut me?”
When he didn’t answer, when he just stood there with that infuriating calm, I jerked the sword, a sudden, angry motion, and the tip skimmed across the bare skin of his chest.
A thin line of red welled instantly.
His breath caught as the first drop of blood slid down his chest, carving a dark path across the hard lines of his abdomen.
So even demigods bled. Good.
“You told me not to flinch,” I whispered. “You warned me like you cared. And then you treated me like I was nothing.”
The sword pressed harder against him, the point digging into his skin with every word I forced out. “It even looked like you were in it with Menelaus … or the High Priestess. Like you wanted me to lose.”
I held his gaze, searching for anything—denial, anger, regret. Some shred of truth that might make this make sense.
But there was nothing. Just silence.
Heavy. Unmoving. Infuriating.
A bitter breath slipped out of me. I stepped back, the heat in my chest collapsing into something colder. The sword slid from my hand and hit the stones with a clatter.
“Forget it,” I said tightly, even as everything inside me still burned.
“I did want you to fail.”
The words slammed into me with more force than any weapon he’d swung. I staggered a fraction, breath catching hard, as if he’d driven something straight into my ribs.
Gods.
My hands curled into fists, nails biting my palms. Heat flared up my neck, and my veil swayed with the sudden shift of air, brushing my cheek like it was trying to hide me from this … or hide him from what I was about to do.
“How dare you,” I growled. “This isn’t only about me.
It’s about Amyklai. About every child who goes to bed hungry, about every villager who loses their loved ones and still wakes up to fight another day.
They’re counting on me, and you almost made me fail them today!
Why?” The last word came out devastated, trembling with everything I couldn’t contain. “Why would you try to make me lose?”
I wanted the truth. I wanted to understand him … so I could hate him properly.
His jaw flexed, a muscle jumping hard, and then the words tore out of him before he could stop them. “Because you broke me!” Achilles snapped. “In front of Menelaus, in front of everyone. And I wanted to break you back. I wanted you to feel it, this thing inside me you’ve infected me with.”
The confession hung between us.
He looked away, as if wrestling something down. When he spoke again, the words came slower, drawn from a place he clearly didn’t want touched.
“And because passing means staying,” he whispered. “And staying … means you’ll marry him.”
The words landed hard. Not like the cut he’d given me, but deep, like roots sinking into the soil. Something treacherous stirred in my stomach, rising like a warning. Not a feeling I could name, just heat and the unbearable, devastating truth of it …
He wasn’t just a threat to my crown.
He was a threat to me.
“You don’t want me to win,” I said, still trying to comprehend his words.
He watched me with that maddening stillness of his. “I don’t want you to belong to him.”
The words didn’t echo. They didn’t need to. They simply lived there, suspended between us, stark and unvarnished.
I looked at him, and I saw it.
The longing.
It wasn’t loud or obvious. It lived in the small betrayals of his body, the way his jaw clenched after the words left him, like he hated that he’d said them and needed me to hear them anyway.
It was in the way his gaze roamed across me …
reverent and greedy in the way a starving man might look at a feast he had no right to touch.
His chest rose like he was holding something in, something aching. His fingers curled into fists at his sides. Gods. He looked at me like he would tear the world apart stone by stone if it meant keeping it from touching me.
And it undid me.
I felt it everywhere, behind my eyes, down my spine, pooling hot and frantic in my belly. A dozen feelings warred beneath my skin: fury, confusion, something too much like want.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I wasn’t supposed to feel … anything.
But I did.
I did, and it was going to destroy me.
Achilles exhaled slowly and looked down at the ground.
“My mother—Thetis—was warned I would live a short life,” he said suddenly. “Glorious, but brief.”
His voice dropped, almost lost beneath the rustle of the olive branches. He studied his hands again, then let them fall. “She tried to save me … dipped me in the Styx. Hid me behind false names and in strange cities. But you can’t outmaneuver prophecy … not when Olympus is watching.”
He looked so human in that moment. Not the polished legend whispered about in palace corridors, not the ruthless soldier they called invincible. Right now, he was just a man, shaped by a destiny he never asked for.
“So I stopped running,” he said. “If I’m to die young, then let it be spectacular. Fire in my lungs, blood on my blade. I’ll carve my name into history—not as a ruler. As a reckoning.”
He paused, breath shifting as his gaze lifted toward the pale curve of the moon.
“You know I helped him,” Achilles said quietly. “Menelaus. I helped cast out the same gods who cursed me. Drove them from Sparta until not even their shadows dared linger.”
A dozen questions surged up in me, how, why, what price he’d paid, but they tangled on my tongue. I couldn’t force a single one out. His words wrapped around me, dark and compelling, and I was too caught in the sound of them to speak.
A muscle in his cheek tightened, regret flickering like embers in ash.
“I thought it would save us. Save me.” He exhaled roughly.
“But I think it’s too late. Whatever destiny they gave me, it’s already set.
” He swallowed, tension working down his throat, and for a moment he looked impossibly young …
too young for the doom he was convinced the gods had marked him with.
“But sometimes,” he whispered, “sometimes I wonder what I could’ve been. If the gods had passed me over. If I’d lived quietly.” His eyes dropped to mine, raw longing tucked in their depths. “If I’d found someone worth living for.”
My chest tightened. “You don’t seem afraid of death, Captain.”
“I’m not. When death is promised before your first breath, you learn to make peace with it. Dance with it. Laugh in its face.” His voice softened. “But I do fear something else.”
“What?”
“Being forgotten.” His jaw clenched again, his breath leaving him in a low exhale.
“That my name will disappear like smoke. That I’ll die screaming into silence.
” He stepped closer, heat pouring off him like a forge stoked too high.
“So I make them remember. I train. I fight. I burn. And I hope … that when the end comes, someone will speak my name and it will still mean something.”
Then, softer, almost wary, “Do you want to be remembered, Helena?”
The question rooted itself in my chest. I looked down at my hands. Pale in the moonlight.
“I don’t know,” I said. But even as I said it, the lie cracked open. “That’s not true.”
His silence tugged the truth from my lips.
“I think … if saving my people were not my destiny … I would still want to matter. But not to a city. Not to the gods. To someone. Even if it’s only for a moment.” My voice thinned. “I want someone to look at me and see—not a beautiful face. Not a prize. Just me.”
The words spilled out, and once they were loose, I couldn’t take them back.
He didn’t mock me. He stepped close enough that I could see the flecks in his storm-blue eyes. “I see you, Helena.”
Just like that, the world felt quieter, and even more dangerous. Not because he lied … but because he didn’t.
My eyes slid shut, like the words had struck somewhere too tender to bear. Gods, I knew better.
The air between us thrummed with a kind of silence that didn’t feel empty. It felt expectant. Fragile. Burning. His voice still echoed through me, threading into all the places I’d tried to protect.
I see you, Helena.
It would’ve been easier if he’d laughed. If he’d scoffed or turned away. But he didn’t. He looked at me as if I was something beyond my face, beyond the destiny others had created for me. As if I meant something.
And that … that was the cruelest part.
I didn’t know why I spoke. Maybe because he’d stripped himself bare first. Maybe because I wanted him to understand the cage waiting for me. Or maybe, worse, because some part of me wanted him to know the one piece of me Menelaus could never touch.
“If I win, maybe my body will belong to a king. Maybe my nights, my duties, my womb will all be claimed.” My hand pressed to my chest, feeling the wild, stubborn beat there. “But this—this will never belong to him. It will always be mine.”
The truth settled between us, exposed and impossible to look away from. And maybe I should’ve turned, but I didn’t. Because the truth ran deeper than I meant it to: I wasn’t only declaring what Menelaus would never claim.
I was hinting, quietly yet recklessly, who might.
His eyes darkened as we stared at each other, understanding sparking there.
“You hurt me today,” I whispered.
He flinched. Barely. But enough. Enough for me to see it land.
“Don’t do it again.”
The wind caught the edge of my veil, pulling it gently as if it wanted to drag me toward him. My hands clenched at my sides. I needed something that would save Amyklai; I needed strategy, authority, the kind of power that could reshape a starving kingdom.
And Achilles—demigod or not—was none of those things.
He wasn’t a king.
He wasn’t the god Sparta prayed to.
He wasn’t the salvation my people were dying for.
Achilles was the downfall oracles warned kingdoms about.
I turned. Each step away from him felt harder than the last. I didn’t look back. I couldn’t. If I did, I might stay.
But the moment I stepped beyond the edge of the garden, past the roses and into the cold hush of the corridor, the ache inside me bloomed like a wound I couldn’t close.
Behind me, beneath the olive trees and moonlight, the warrior who’d never lost a battle …
Let me go.
I woke with the taste of salt on my lips and the ghost of his voice still tangled in my mind.
The sky beyond the window was streaked with early light, washed-out and skeletal. The silk sheet slipped from my shoulders as I sat up, my heart still sore from what had been said last night … and what hadn’t.
A servant entered without ceremony. Her fingers were brisk as they yanked the comb through my hair. She worked my hair into a single braid and pinned my veil into place with clipped motions. When she pulled my sash tight and stepped back, I nodded my thanks and made my way toward the door.
I paused with my fingers on the handle, steadying myself with a deep breath. The door groaned as I pulled it open … and then I froze.
The breath I’d just drawn snagged at my throat as my gaze locked onto the figure standing just beyond the threshold.
There was a guard at my door.
He stood motionless, silent, a figure sculpted from bronze and duty, all gleaming armor and the rigid poise of someone who would not be moved. He didn’t glance at me, and my heart throbbed as I stepped into the hall.
It was for the best.
Everything with Achilles had been a lapse in judgment. I knew that. But still … as my footsteps echoed down the corridor, a tight ache gathered in my throat. It unwound painfully, mourning a possibility I’d never touched but somehow already felt the loss of.
That guard wasn’t just protection.
It was his answer.
His agreement with every word I’d thrown at him beneath the olive trees.
It was a line drawn in the sand.
The door between us had closed.
There would be no stepping back through it.
And gods help me … I missed it already.