Chapter 38 #2
His grip crushed tighter, pinning my flailing arms against my chest, dragging me back into the realm of the living whether I wanted it or not. My body heaved, every nerve screaming, the red paint smearing off my skin and streaking across his arms.
“I don’t want this!” My voice cracked into a sob. “I can’t live like this—I can’t!”
For a moment he said nothing, only held me fast as I writhed, as though his silence itself was a wall I could never break.
“Please,” I whispered at last, the fight draining out of me, my throat hoarse. “Please … let me go.”
His answer came in motion. He spun me so abruptly I staggered forward into him, my palms smacking against him. His hands seized my shoulders, fingers biting into my flesh, and he shook me, hard enough to rattle the darkness from my skull.
“What in Hades’s name were you doing?” His eyes blazed down into mine, fierce, accusing, and terrified all at once.
My breath hitched. “What does it look like?” I spat, my voice trembling. “I’m ending it.”
“Ending it?” His jaw locked; his nostrils flared. “No!” His grip tightened on my shoulders, dragging me closer. “You’re letting him win.”
I shoved at his chest, pounding my fists against him, but he didn’t move. He didn’t even sway.
“I can’t do this!” My voice cracked. “I’m not strong enough.
I’m not like you. I’m not a soldier. All I wanted was to save my people.
I thought I could sway him, and look at what I’ve become instead.
I’m a thing. A body they dress in red and gold and parade like a prize.
But not a prize they want to keep or cherish …
a prize they want to use and then destroy. ”
The words tore out of me, shaking, but his eyes only burned brighter. His expression split, fury and anguish tangling in his face.
In a heartbeat his trembling hands were framing my face as if he meant to fix me there. His thumbs pressed hard against my cheeks, holding me so I couldn’t look away. “You think I don’t see it?” His voice rasped, hoarse with rage. “You think I don’t feel it?”
“Feel what?” I spat, choking on the words.
His breath hitched. “This. You. I watch you walk into a room, and the world forgets anyone else exists. I watch you kneel for a man who deserves nothing of you, and it burns me alive. I walk these halls like a ghost, waiting—praying—that the Fates might twist their weave and place you in my path. That one day, you’ll look at me and see what I already am … yours.”
I stared at him, stunned, the words striking deeper than any blade could.
His forehead pressed to mine, the heat of him searing. “I’m already lost,” he whispered. “But if you vanish—if you fall into the dark where I can’t follow—then everything I am, everything I’ve sworn to, burns with you. So go ahead, Helena. Step into the shadow. But know this.”
His grip tightened, fierce and desperate, his voice shaking with fear, and something I couldn’t name. “I will follow. Into silence. Into death itself. Because I am already yours. And I would rather be destroyed beside you than draw breath in a world where you’re gone.”
Something inside me split open, something I had fought so long to keep bound, and it came undone all at once. Like a scream wrenching free after being strangled in my chest since the day I was first paraded before the court in white.
And suddenly … I wanted to breathe.
Not for Amyklai.
Not for the king. Not for Sparta. Not for the cage of silks and crowns that had smothered me.
But for this.
For the fury in his eyes, the fire in his voice, the way his hands trembled against my skin as though losing me would unmake him. For the first time in weeks, something pierced the haze of misery. For the first time in weeks, something felt real.
I clung to it. To him. To the fragile, impossible thought that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t ready to vanish after all.
His eyes burned into mine, and then he fused his mouth to my lips like it was the only way to keep breathing.
There was nothing soft about it. Nothing hesitant.
He crashed against me like a dam giving way, like months of restraint had finally burst into a flood that neither of us could stop.
He kissed me like he was claiming what had always been his.
Like I was air and he’d been suffocating.
Like he was parched, and I was water spilling over his tongue.
Like his soul recognized mine and had waited lifetimes to come home.
The air trembled between us, alive with something that felt like it could shatter stone. My body seized, breath ripped from my lungs, the taste of him tilting the world off its axis. All I could do was clutch at him, clinging as the fire between us roared high enough to consume everything else.
My knees buckled.
He caught me and his mouth hovered a breath from mine. “Don’t ever do that again,” he rasped. “Don’t ever make me feel that kind of fear.”
And then he was kissing me again, searing and desperate. It was the kind of kiss that tore roofs from houses and split seas in two. Months of stolen glances, of words swallowed back, of longing honed sharp enough to wound—all of it poured out, burning hot between our mouths.
He moved us toward the bed with the relentless pull of a man starved, one hand buried in my hair, the other gripping my waist as though he feared I might slip back into the dark and vanish forever.
When the backs of my knees struck the mattress, he halted, but only for a breath.
His eyes swept over me with such desperate want, my chest locked, every breath snagging in my throat.
My dress tore beneath his hands, the sound like a seal binding, like a door closing on everything that had come before. Air rushed over my bare skin, but there was no chill. Not with him looking at me like that.
Menelaus had looked and treated me tonight the way a butcher looks at a carcass. There was no recognition there, no mercy. I was meat, something to consume, to use, to flaunt before others. A trophy polished to prove his power.
But Achilles—Achilles was looking at me as though I were something impossible.
A miracle he didn’t believe he’d earned.
His gaze stripped me bare, not with shame, but with reverence.
He reached for me slowly, his fingers still shaking as though the act of touching me might unmake the world.
As though laying his hand on me was nothing less than sacred.
Desperation clawed beneath the reverence.
He didn’t just touch; he claimed. His hands roamed my skin, red paint continuing to smear in thick, frantic strokes that still hid what lay beneath.
I was glad he couldn’t see the bruises, glad that nothing would interrupt his hunger, this wild, unrestrained need pouring out of him.
This was the unraveling my soul needed, the moment every stolen glance, every breathless pause, every night filled with unspoken longing ignited into something unguarded and real.
He leaned over me, his eyes ardent as his fingers brushed the curve of my collarbone, then down, slow, dragging, like he was learning what it meant to touch something he could never deserve.
When his hands cupped my breasts, I gasped.
Not from shock, but from the way it felt like worship and destruction bound together.
He kissed the swell of flesh where my heart thundered, the valley between, the ridges of my ribs, the arch of my hips. Each kiss more fevered, more urgent, as though he might lose me if he stopped.
“You’ve undone me,” he rasped. “You haunt every silence. I dream of you, painted in red, burning only for me.”
He hovered above me, his breath unsteady, gaze searing.
“You don’t even know, do you? What it does to me.
To look at you. To know they call you the most beautiful woman in the world, but none of them have seen the truth beneath it.
They see a prize. I see a miracle. You are the most courageous, exceptional, perfect woman I have ever met. ”
His lips grazed my throat. “Aphrodite herself would burn with envy.”
The words snagged, stirring the same unease I’d felt when Menelaus compared me to the goddess, something for men to worship, not a woman to be known.
But his mouth was moving lower, and I clung to the way the words felt different on his tongue. I forced the doubt away, let it dissolve beneath his touch as he kissed a path across my skin.
I trembled. Not from shame. Not from fear. But from the way he looked at me like I was already his religion.
“I’ve dreamed of this,” I whispered, broken and breathless. “And told myself it was madness.”
His hands framed my face, anchoring me. “Then let us be mad together.”