Chapter 33 #2
She was being buried beneath red silk and duty, and no one would mourn her.
When I reached the base of the platform, the music faltered, one sour note trembling in the air before cutting off entirely.
The silence that followed settled around me.
I knew I was supposed to kneel; Nomiki had explained every step.
But my body remained still. My spine held. My chin stayed lifted.
For a suspended moment, we stared at each other … until a shift in the light caught his face.
His eyes changed.
It was the only way to describe what I was seeing.
The color in them darkened, sinking into shades that twisted my stomach.
The flames around us didn’t catch in his gaze, they disappeared into it, swallowed by a depth that shouldn’t have existed.
Something shifted there, as if an unseen presence had stirred awake and turned its attention toward me.
And I knew it. I’d seen this during the Trial, when I’d tried to tell myself it was exhaustion or fear or imagination.
But it was here again … watching me with a cold focus.
Awareness slid across my skin, tightening every muscle in my body. No one else seemed to notice. But I saw it. And knowing I wasn’t imagining it this time made the fear burrow deeper.
“Kneel, my lady!” Alcmene’s frantic hiss sliced through the rising panic.
The words snagged inside me like a hook, dragging me downward before my mind caught up. My knees hit the marble, hard enough that pain sparked up my legs. But it was nothing compared to what I saw when my gaze dropped.
The floor.
That part of the floor.
Scrubbed clean and polished to a shine now … but I could still see it. A memory of red staining the cracks, a pattern my mind refused to release. A body that had been dragged away. A life ended so carelessly that its echo still pulsed through the stone.
Fear tightened around my lungs. Anger coiled beneath it. How dare he make me bow here where he’d let her bleed out. Where the ghosts of last night clung.
My head lowered slowly, the movement scraped from me rather than given. Terror held my spine in place, but the defiance burned right beneath it.
I bowed because I had to. But every part of me shook.
The High Priestess glided forward, her movement cutting through the air with the same soft sweep I had heard in the seconds before Anysa was led to the altar.
The sound scraped at old terror. For a moment the room wavered, the incense bending into the memory of burning oil, the brightness into the recollection of blood spreading across stone.
I forced myself back to the present, to the woman before me and the gold-threaded scroll in her hands.
But I felt him.
Menelaus’s gaze stayed fixed on me, unblinking and unnervingly still, a weight that settled along my skin with a strange, watching pressure.
Something inside those eyes had shifted again; I did not need to turn my head to sense it.
That same unnatural depth nudged at the edge of my awareness, patient and intent.
Fear crept upward through my chest, tightening my breath, and I lowered my gaze to the scroll, praying my hands would not shake.
“We gather before our god,” she began, her voice carrying through the hall. “To witness the sacred union of Menelaus, Son of Atreus, King of Sparta … and Helena of—”
The king lifted his hand in a careless sweep, though something in the motion felt mismatched, as if his body and voice belonged to different creatures. “Enough. We know who she is. Start the binding.”
The High Priestess’s head snapped toward him, the barest flicker of offense tightening the line of her mouth.
Her grip on the scroll shifted, the gold thread biting into her fingers as if she were weighing whether to chastise a king in front of his court.
In the end, she swallowed whatever words burned on her tongue, her gaze dropping like a curtain.
His words seemed fitting to me though. My identity was being taken over.
A rustle stirred the air behind me, the faint scrape of wood against marble followed by the soft creak of wheels.
I turned, my veil shifting with the movement, a shiver of gauze between me and the two servants pushing forward a low cart draped in white linen.
On it sat a blade and a shallow bowl filled with clear water, a chunk of salt, and a sprig of asphodel—the ritual symbols of purity, fidelity, and death.
The priestess dipped the salt into the bowl, murmuring a blessing I didn’t care to decipher …
because I wouldn’t believe the words anyway.
The High Priestess reached for the ritual blade. Her fingers hesitated on the hilt, a small betrayal of composure, and when her gaze lifted to mine, the moment shifted around us. This wasn’t the soft fog of ritual in her eyes. She was seeing me.
And woven through that look was the memory of her warning from the choosing, a verdict she had tried to hide but hadn’t forgotten:
She will be our ruin.
My heart thudded beneath the glittered paint and black sigils marking my skin, each beat a reminder that she still believed it, believed me capable of ruin.
With the king next to me, with his strange gaze and shifting depths and the power he claimed as divinity …
how could she look at me and see the threat?
How could she think the danger wore my face?
Her fingers finally closed over mine, and she turned my palm toward the ceiling as though laying me bare for the gods. The blade’s kiss was swift, a sting that bloomed heat, followed by the warm spill of blood tracing the curve of my lifeline.
She moved to the king next, her hand steady as she cut him as well. His spine stiffened at the sting, teeth clicking together in a small, controlled snap.
Then he reached for me.
I flinched before I could stop myself. A quick recoil of instinct, because for a breath I wasn’t afraid of the blade, but of him. Of whatever lurked behind his eyes. Of whether it might slide into me through this touch, this ritual, this mingling of blood.
But there was no choice. Not with the entire hall holding its breath, not with the priestess watching, and certainly not with Menelaus waiting.
Calismae’s words rushed through my mind: We are saved, Helena.
My people fed. Thalessa free.
This was the price.
I forced my trembling hand forward. His palm met mine, warm and heavy, and our blood slipped together.
Something stirred through my veins, a faint rush that felt borrowed rather than mine.
It moved up my arm in a single unsettling sweep …
then vanished. The red drops spilled into the waiting bowl, swirling into one indistinguishable stain and making the binding complete.
I lifted my gaze.
Menelaus was already watching me.
He grinned, his eyes still holding that strange, depthless shine that made my stomach knot. The same wrongness. The same impossible shift.
As if whatever lived behind them was savoring the moment our blood became one. I yanked my gaze back to the priestess as she swirled the bowl once and raised it to the sky.
“By the decree of Menelaus, god of this realm, by the strength of Sparta, by the breath of every warrior who walks its soil,” she proclaimed, “this is the union of king and chosen, of command and future.”
The High Priestess’s voice cut through the murmurs of the crowd. “Let the bride be unveiled for the sight of Sparta’s god.”
Menelaus’s grip stayed locked around my hand as we rose. His head tilted, the faintest curl of a smile tugging at his mouth. “Finally,” he murmured, low enough for only me to hear. The relief in his voice was confusing, like he’d been thinking of this moment every second.
He stepped closer, the laurel crown catching the torchlight in its leaves. Possessive fingers found the edge of my veil and lifted it, baring my face as cool air brushed my skin. Around us, the hall seemed to lean forward, eager for the reveal.
His gaze swept up my face in a consuming drag, lingering with a hunger that had nothing to do with desire. When our eyes met, I could see that presence inside him watching me openly.
I heard some gasps from the crowd, but I didn’t think they were for my beauty this time. They were for whatever had twisted across my face, whatever terror I hadn’t been able to choke back.
“You are mine now, my beauty,” he rasped, lifting my wounded hand. His thumb grazed over the cut, smearing our mingled blood as though sealing a claim. On the last word, he leaned closer, exhaling a thin breath that carried a faint, undeniable red mist before it faded into the air.
My heart hammered and I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t speak through the scream in my throat.
A breeze suddenly stirred through the throne room.
Not the kind that slipped in from an open door or drifted from a passing servant’s steps … but something cold and strange. It wound its way through silk banners and golden laurel leaves, sweeping over the back of my neck like a breath from a forgotten god.
The roses in my hair trembled.
Above the laurel arch, the high windows shifted in my periphery. At first it seemed like nothing, just the sunlight tilting across the glass. Then the brightness dimmed twice in quick succession, as if something had passed before it.
A shape moved behind that brief distortion—too quick to catch clearly, too large to be a bird, too precise to be the wind.
A hush crept along my spine.
Menelaus squeezed my cut hand, but his gaze stayed fixed on the crowd, smug and triumphant, seemingly unaware of the movement above us or of the way my pulse stuttered beneath his touch.
The urge to run crashed into me. I scanned the hall in a desperate sweep, as if an escape route might appear in the torchlit haze.
But instead … I found Achilles.
He was half hidden beyond the line of guards, and the sight of him hit like a blow.
Every muscle in his frame held taut, but it was his gaze that pinned me, unguarded and relentless.
Pain lived there, spilling into me before I could look away.
I didn’t see hatred or envy. I saw grief, the kind that comes when something sacred is surrendered to an altar and you are powerless to stop it.
The instant our eyes met, it felt like the floor gave way beneath me, like I was falling, pulled down by everything he wasn’t saying. By a choice I couldn’t make.
The blare of horns split the air, deep and shuddering, and Menelaus’s hand closed harder around mine. It took a beat for my breath to catch up, for the truth to land heavy in my chest. Those horns marked the start of the ekdosis.
The giving away.
Ekdosis was the moment a woman was passed like property from one house to another, her name and loyalty struck clean from her father’s hearth and bound to her husband’s instead.
It was the moment her life ceased to belong to her.
I would drive a chariot by myself three times around the palace, each turn sealing me deeper into that fate.
The hall stirred, silks swaying and bronze greaves shifting, as if the sound itself had set every body in motion. Priestesses moved in from the edges as they took their places. Guards closed in, sealing the aisle ahead.
Achilles was swallowed by the movement, lost to me.
The horns called again and the path yawned before me, red and gold and inescapable. Every step I took now would carry me from the life I had known … straight into the king’s bed to face whatever lived inside of him.