Chapter 34 #2
I fought for air as he yanked me forward, my body stumbling against his strength, nothing but a puppet on his fist. Then the world spun, and I struck the bed hard, the frame rattling like it might collapse beneath the violence of his claim.
He stroked the line of my jaw, but it seemed like a mockery of tenderness. A promise wrapped in gentleness that felt far more dangerous than violence.
While he touched me, his eyes shifted. For a moment, they were simply Menelaus’s—dark, mortal, hungry.
Then the surface changed and once again something deeper was looking out at me. Something aware. Ancient. Intent. The two gazes flicked back and forth.
“I see it,” I whispered, the words shaking out before I could stop them. “I see what’s inside you.”
His fingertip paused at my cheekbone, tracing the ridge as though memorizing the shape of me.
“Do you?” he murmured, never sounding more intrigued.
“Who are you?” My voice was barely a breath. “What are you?”
This time, the smile that cut his mouth was unguarded, devastating in its honesty, chilling in its ease.
It did not belong to a man. Not even a king.
“I am the man who made himself into a god,” he said softly, as if bestowing a secret meant only for me.
His thumb traced my cheek with another touch far too gentle for the monster beneath.
“Soon, Helena … you will learn what it is to be held by the power I forged for myself—and the ancient thing that chose to share its strength with me.”
A dark understanding sank into me, deeper than fear.
Whatever lived behind his eyes had chosen him, and had no intention of letting go.
There was nowhere to run. No path out. Only the fate I had agreed to, thinking I understood what waited for me on the other side.
Resignation tightened around my ribs, a constriction I could neither fight nor outrun.
He bent over me with the weight of a conqueror, power strung tight in every line of him, his eyes glassy with triumph.
I fixed my gaze on the faded fresco above where a painted woman in flowing robes was reaching out her arms in worship, her head tilted back in ecstasy.
It was supposed to be a symbol of divine union, of supposed purity.
But a crack had splintered her throat, running right through her painted skin. I fixed on it, clung to it like it was the only real thing left in the room.
Menelaus’s teeth sank into my neck, pain sparking white behind my eyes, and still I didn’t move or flinch. His hand closed around my breast, and he tried to stroke, to cup, to coax a response he wanted from me. His thumb grazed the peak in a slow circle meant to draw shivers, meant to unravel me.
But my body stayed cold beneath his touch. There was no warmth or stir of want, and nothing he sought found purchase in me. As the seconds stretched, a new terror crept in—not of what he was doing, but of what he would notice.
I should react, I thought distantly. If I want to make anything of this crown at all, I should give him something.
He had to enjoy this. He had to believe he was taking pleasure, not resistance disguised as stillness. Kings did not tolerate indifference in their beds. Gods least of all. If I wanted a chance to do anything with this crown, I had to try.
His touch lingered, patient in the way of someone who expected compliance eventually, but I was sure that would change.
So I gave him something. A breath, drawn a fraction too fast. A sound I didn’t recognize as my own.
I let my head tilt, and my shoulder soften.
I forced my body to shift in a way that suggested yielding instead of recoil.
I shaped warmth into my voice when I gasped his name, and coaxed my muscles to loosen as if pleasure were building.
It felt like a betrayal of myself, but I held to it. And his touch became more confident, satisfaction trilling through his movements … he was believing me.
Thank gods.
Menelaus growled in my ear. “This is how a goddess is made,” he panted, his breath slick against my skin. “You’ll thank me one day.”
I let my soul slip far from my body, to a place beyond the sea, to the cliffs where the winds sang and no one could find me. My eyes stayed locked on the fresco. That crack. That broken throat. I memorized every angle of it while my body lied for me.
Because if I let myself feel what was happening—I wouldn’t survive it.
His hand clamped down on my hip as his other hand freed himself, his length heavy and hot as he pressed it against me. My breath caught, a stutter of alarm surging up my throat. There was no warning, no pause, no chance to steel myself.
He surged forward, driving into me in one brutal, unrelenting thrust. The stretch was immediate, vicious—my body resisting for one searing heartbeat before it gave way with a tearing burn that ripped a cry from my throat.
I felt every thick inch of him forcing past the tight, untouched barrier inside me, claiming what no one else had ever reached.
I bit the inside of my cheek until copper filled my mouth, until I tasted myself instead of him.
“Easy, my beauty,” he murmured, his tone gentling as if he thought it comfort. “So tight … you make me so proud. You’ll give Sparta fine sons.”
His hand drifted across my chest, and it was clumsy in its attempt at tenderness, like he was laying claim to territory instead of touching a living body.
Moving without rhythm, he rutted like an animal, seemingly oblivious to the tears I refused to let fall.
The room swam, and the colors all seemed to bleed in a dizzy haze.
He mocked the gods under his breath as if they were watching.
They weren’t.
Or maybe they were.
Maybe that was the worst part.
I lay silent, forcing myself to breathe, to pretend. My soul floated above, into a sky I would never reach, as a groan rumbled in his chest. Heat spilled inside me, and revulsion turned my stomach. His seed. His claim. His victory.
I had never felt so defiled.
He collapsed on top of me with a grunt, still half inside me, his breath shuddering against my neck.
His weight pressed me into the mattress, heavy enough to steal air, heavy enough to make my ribs ache.
Sweat slid from his chest onto mine, hot and suffocating, pinning me as neatly as a carcass laid out for a feast.
I stared up at the ceiling, numb, until he shifted, just enough that our faces aligned.
Our eyes met.
And for the first time since the ceremony, his gaze was completely … human. There was no flicker, no ancient watcher staring out through him.
Just Menelaus.
Just a man with flushed cheeks and trembling satisfaction softening the lines of his face. As if whatever lived inside him had gone quiet, sated, perhaps. As if the god had withdrawn, leaving only the vessel behind.
Relief loosened something tight and painful in my chest before I could stop it. Maybe that was how it worked, I thought dimly. The monster rises … then recedes.
And in the hollow it left, there was only him.
The realization wasn’t the most terrible thing.
Because if this was Menelaus without the god pressing through him, if this mortal man was what remained, then perhaps there were moments when he would not be something to be survived.
Perhaps there were moments when he would merely be someone to be endured that I could still use for my purposes.
I had to at least hope for that.
Menelaus’s lips parted, and his breath hitched into something that almost resembled awe. “You were perfect,” he murmured, brushing a damp strand of hair from my cheek with a touch that pretended gentleness. “Exactly what a god deserves.”
A minute later, he was asleep. And snoring.
Loud and grotesque, like some monster settling down in its lair.
His body was still pressed into mine, heavy and slick with sweat, his length still lodged inside me.
And yet … he slept. He had taken what he wanted and then drifted off within me, as though my body were nothing more than a vessel to be filled.
My fingers spasmed against the sheets, my nails scraping the linen. A shiver traveled the length of my spine until my teeth ached with the force of it.
The fresco above swam in and out of focus. The crack in her painted throat fractured into two, into three, the whole ceiling tilting and reeling as though the world itself had turned against me.
I could feel the ache in my hips already. The sting between my thighs. The places on my skin where his hands had bruised me in the shape of possession.
I had to move. Had to get out from beneath him, or I would choke on my own breath.
Slowly, silently, I braced my palms against his chest—damp and heaving—and pushed.
He stirred with a rough sigh, but didn’t wake as he rolled onto his side, collapsing into a deeper snore. The sheets were tangled around his legs like vines, streaked with red paint and the darker proof of my first blood.
I slipped from the bed like a ghost. My body was trembling, slick with sweat, bruises already rising where his hands had unintentionally pressed too hard. I didn’t think he’d meant to hurt me, but gods can’t help themselves. Or at least I’m sure that’s what he would have said.
I pulled a sheet from the corner of the bed and wrapped it around myself as though it could sew me back together.
It didn’t.
I curled against the side of the bed.
And then … I broke.
The sob burst out of me before I could swallow it. Then another. And another. My body curled in on itself, knees drawn to my chest, and I wept the way a body does when it’s trying to survive something unspeakable.
Not a queen.
Not a bride.
Just a woman who had been drained and left vacant.
I buried my face in my knees and wept. For Sparta. For Anysa. For the version of myself that was still trying to have hope in all of this.
I wept for the gods who had left us and the king they had left us with.
And I wept because there was nothing else I could do.
My skin felt foreign. My name felt foreign. I didn’t know who I was anymore, only that something in me had been taken and might never return.
The torches hissed.
The king snored.
And I stayed in the corner of his bedchamber until the night was nearly gone, trying not to drown in the ruin of what I had become.