Chapter 35
The morning came like a punishment.
Pale light filtered through the windows, thin and cold, and I lay unmoving as a corpse on the edge of the bed, my limbs aching, the linen wrapped around me heavy with sweat and silence.
I felt him stir before I heard him. A shift of weight, a drag of breath … and then his hand clamped around my thigh.
I didn’t have time to recoil before he was on me again.
There were no words or ceremony. Just flesh and power and the sickening rhythm of a man who believed this was his right.
After making sure it was still just him, staring down at me lustfully, I kept my eyes on the ceiling and counted the cracks in the stone above us.
One.
Two.
Three.
I imagined I was somewhere else. Someone else.
He grunted and pressed into me, his breath hot against my neck, and I did my best to follow his movements, to pretend once again.
When it was over, he rolled away with a few faint praises, already sliding back into sleep, sated and snoring like a glutton who’d fed too well.
I didn’t even move when the hinges of the door whined. The sound barely reached me, muffled as though I were buried deep underwater. I couldn’t summon the strength to turn my head, not even to see who had come.
It wasn’t until a voice broke the silence, soft, familiar, and cutting through the haze, that something inside me stirred.
“Your Majesty,” Alcmene whispered, and the sound of her struck against the empty place in my chest.
I forced myself to turn my head, my neck locked, every muscle screaming to stay still.
Her face came into view, and in the flicker of lamplight, I saw her flinch.
A flinch she tried to hide, but not quickly enough.
Gods, what must I have looked like? My hair undone, my body exposed, his sweat still damp on my skin. A ruin of a queen.
Alcmene tiptoed closer, careful, as if moving through a field of glass. She lifted a robe in her trembling hands. I pushed back the sheet and stood, every muscle protesting. My body didn’t feel like mine. It felt like a thing—used, sore, unwanted even by the spirit trapped inside it.
Without a word, she eased the robe around my shoulders, guiding my arms into the sleeves. The cloth settled over me, and I almost sobbed at the feel of it covering me, hiding me, granting me back some of my humanity.
Menelaus still lay sprawled in the tangle of blankets, his mouth open. His chest rose and fell with the vacant rhythm of oblivion, as though he had not just gutted me and left me a shell.
A surge of bile burned the back of my throat. Rage and shame that cut deeper than the pain between my thighs.
I turned away before it could crush me, before I could shatter in front of her. I followed Alcmene into the hall, my bare feet slapping softly against the stone, each step echoing like a confession in the narrow dark.
We turned the corner and I almost tripped at the sight of Achilles.
He stood like a sentinel at the end of the corridor, flanked by two guards. His armor shone in the torchlight, helmet tucked under his arm, posture set. His gaze snapped to mine the instant I appeared.
His eyes widened, a lightning flash of recognition and horror as he took me in, and then his voice cracked the silence. “Avert your eyes.” The command thundered. The guards jerked their heads down, shame flooding their faces as they obeyed.
Only he looked.
His stare pierced me, twin flames of blue fire, searing into me.
A muscle jumped in his jaw, his fingers twitching near the hilt at his side. For a moment, he looked as though he might strike someone—anyone—if it could undo what had been done. But there was no undoing. No saving. Only this: his agony reflected in mine.
The air between us throbbed with words unsaid. A silent scream. A vow. A plea.
My chest locked tight, my hands curled into fists at my sides … and I forced my feet forward. Past him and the guards with their downcast eyes. All while I tried to ignore the fact that they’d most likely heard every sound that tore from my throat behind those doors.
I didn’t look back.
Because there was no solace to be found. Not in him. Not in anyone.
The blood on my thighs had dried sticky against my skin, the ache in my body a constant throb I carried with me down the corridor.
His gaze burned into my back, branding me long after I had gone.
The air was warmer in my rooms. Cleaner. But it didn’t reach the chill beneath my skin.
Steam rose from a newly drawn bath, scented with lavender and rosewater. The sight of the water should have been soothing. But it wasn’t. Nothing could soothe this.
Alcmene stepped forward, sponge in hand, her eyes damp with unshed tears. “Come, Your Majesty,” she murmured, and I let her help me into the bath.
I took the sponge from her with a trembling hand. My voice scraped out like a blade. “I’ll do it.”
She flinched but nodded.
I stepped into the bath. The water closed over my skin with a hiss of heat, but it wasn’t enough. Not enough to strip away what clung to me. Not enough to erase the stench of him. I scrubbed—harder than I should have. The sponge dragged over my arms, my chest, my thighs.
Again.
Again.
And again.
Until my skin bloomed red and raw, until the steam blurred with tears I refused to shed.
The sponge grated over my skin like penance.
Pain flared beneath each pass, angry and hot. I welcomed it and relished the sting. At least it was mine. At least it was real. I scrubbed harder, dragging it across the curve of my hip, the back of my neck, the insides of my thighs—everywhere he had laid claim. Every place that felt destroyed.
Alcmene stood nearby, silent, her hands folded at her waist as steam curled in the air around us.
“My mother used to tell me stories,” Alcmene suddenly said, and I stilled, the sponge clutched in my hand, drops falling from it into the bathwater like blood into a basin.
“What?” I rasped, my voice faint and strange. It cracked in the middle, like it was struggling to be a voice at all.
Alcmene nodded once and knelt beside the bath. “She told me about Antheia,” she said quietly. “The forgotten daughter of Demeter. Not a goddess of wheat or hearth—but of vengeance.”
She grabbed a pitcher from the table beside the bath and dipped it into the water before pouring it over my burning skin.
“She was born in the spring,” Alcmene continued, her eyes distant, as if seeing the tale unfold before her.
“Raised among fields of wildflowers and soft fruit. Gentle. Kind. But when her village was raided—when her sisters were taken and her mother silenced—Antheia went to the gods and she begged for help.”
She dipped the pitcher in the water again but didn’t reach for me.
“They told her no,” she said, her voice harder now. “They told her grief was natural and she would heal.”
“What did she do?” I whispered.
“She tore the petals from her own hair,” Alcmene said with a steady gaze. “She twisted them into a crown of thorns. And she hunted every man who touched what didn’t belong to them. Every raider. Every merchant who turned a blind eye. Every king who praised her beauty but ignored her pain.”
The bathwater sloshed gently around me, the surface shimmering red from the remnants of yesterday’s paint.
“She became a goddess that day,” she finished. “Not because Olympus above welcomed her. But because the women below did. Because someone needed to wear a crown made of fury.”
I let the sponge fall and it hit the water with a muted splash. My throat felt like it was closing. Not from sadness, from something else. “I wish she were real,” I murmured finally in a barely audible voice.
Alcmene stood and grabbed a towel, keeping her eyes on me. “She is,” she said softly. “She just hasn’t remembered her name yet.”
Something inside me fractured.
I trembled, softly at first, a subtle shiver in my shoulders that gave way to a violent quaking in my chest. And then more tears came.
Hot, silent, unstoppable. They spilled down my cheeks without permission, cutting through the steam, through the red-flecked film of the bathwater, through everything I had tried so hard to hold together.
Alcmene didn’t speak again. She simply moved behind me and began to wash my hair with careful hands. Her fingers worked through the tangles as if they were thorns, each stroke patient and kind. The water streamed down my back in rivulets, rinsing away what little red paint was left.
When she was done, she held out a hand.
I took it.
The air bit at my skin as I rose. Alcmene wrapped a linen around me, whispering nothing, just humming low in her throat in a way that reminded me of what Calismae used to do when I was small and fevered. Alcmene dried my skin in silence, and I let her, numb and weeping and beyond exhausted.
Then came the paint.
The bowl waited, already prepared, the same shimmering red. But this time it wasn’t ritual. It was armor.
As Alcmene dipped the brush and brought it to my skin, I felt the shift. Like an edge hovering just above flesh. Like iron being pressed, not hot, but holy. Each stroke carried its own intent. A curse. A branding. A memory written in metal and grief.
The red seared across my chest. Down the curve of my arm. Across the bruises on my ribs from Menelaus’s frantic fingers.
I stood there, tears still streaking down my cheeks, as she turned me into something that glittered. Something I hoped was unbreakable.
Even if that word tasted like an impossibility.