Chapter 50
Alcmene perched on the edge of my bed and pressed a cold poultice to my cheek. I flinched as the chill bit into the tender skin. The green scent of crushed mint mingled with lavender and willow bark, but none of it softened the sting.
“I did as you asked,” Alcmene murmured. “I sent Elias with one of the servants I trust. He’s already on the road with him to Amyklai.”
Relief stuttered through me. After leaving Theron, I had found Alcmene crying in my rooms and I’d instructed her to find the boy.
The guards had already thrown him beyond the gates.
She had acted at once, arranging for another servant to escort him to my village and carry a letter for Calismae.
I felt guilt for putting her in danger, but it couldn’t be helped.
“You’re certain we can trust the servant?” I asked, searching her face.
She nodded, though her eyes flicked with something like worry. “Yes. I’ve known him since I got to the palace.” She blushed and looked away for a second. “I would trust him with my life.”
I nodded, realizing there was something more there but not having the energy to press. “I hope Amyklai will be better than here,” I whispered.
Alcmene smoothed a stray curl from my forehead, her gaze gentle but firm. “The people there know and love you. They know what you’ve done for them. They will do this for you.”
I swallowed hard, guilt and hope tangling like threads. “I just—” My voice faltered. “I want him to live. To have a chance.”
“And now he does,” Alcmene said softly. “Whatever else you doubt, hold on to that. You gave him a future he would never have found.”
She pressed the poultice a little firmer against my cheek, and pain flared beneath my skin. I sucked in a breath.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured, and sighed. “It’s hard to believe that in the old days, a whispered word could make bruises vanish, flesh knit, pain be gone in a breath.”
“They were lucky,” I muttered.
She adjusted the poultice against my cheek, and I hissed. “Now we make do with willow bark and mint. But Theron …” Her voice dipped. “If he can melt steel, do you think he could do this too? Call back the kind of magic that mended instead of destroyed?”
I didn’t answer. I didn’t want to think about Theron. I didn’t want to think about any man at the moment.
The room held its silence, broken only by the crackle of the fire. Shadows crawled long across the walls.
The door creaked open, and Achilles filled the threshold.
Alcmene shifted as if to rise, but I caught her wrist, the weight of her presence the only thing keeping me steady. For the first time, I didn’t want to be alone with him. “It’s fine,” I murmured.
He stepped inside and stopped cold. His eyes went first to the poultice in Alcmene’s hand, then to my face—to the bruise spreading dark across my cheek, staining my skin like crushed violets. His mouth parted.
And then he flinched.
Not in shock … in shame.
He stepped inside, each step careful, as though the floor itself might give way. “I could kill him for that,” he said roughly.
I kept my silence. My throat locked, my voice a prisoner I couldn’t release.
Alcmene shook my hand loose and rose quietly, laying the damp cloth on the bedside table. Her hand brushed my shoulder once, and then she slipped out. The door clicked shut, leaving the room hollow with the weight of what remained.
Achilles didn’t sit. He stood rooted, every line of his body stiff, like a man staring into an abyss, knowing the next step would drag us both over the edge.
“I’m beginning to wonder if this is forever,” I murmured, my voice thinned by everything I’d held back. “You visiting me in shadows, but bent at the king’s knee by daylight.”
He swallowed hard, the muscle in his jaw flexing. “I’m coming up with a plan. But in the meantime … he is the king.”
“And I’m your queen,” I whispered.
That silenced him.
He looked down, and the firelight caught on the angles of his face.
The gold of his armor was gone, replaced by a dark tunic cinched at the waist, simple and unadorned, but somehow more striking.
His shoulders were drawn tight, tension radiating from him.
There were lines under his eyes, not from age but from strain, and the set of his mouth looked carved from something close to breaking.
“I’m trying to protect you,” he said after a moment, each word uneasy, like he wasn’t sure of them.
“By standing beside the man who did this?” I gestured faintly to my cheek, where the pain still burned beneath my skin.
He growled. “There’s more at play here than you realize, Helena. There’s so much that I cannot tell you. You think if I’d attacked him today that either of us would have walked out of that hall alive?”
“You wouldn’t have died,” I said bitterly. “You are the great Achilles. You could have defeated every soldier in there, and Menelaus knows that!”
He ran a hand through his hair. “And then what? Leave you with him even angrier, even crueler. He wouldn’t have trusted anything else I said. There would be no one left between you and his wrath!”
I stared at him. “I don’t need you to be between us. I need you to be better than him.”
That seemed to sink in.
Achilles took another step forward, hands at his sides, open, as if he didn’t trust himself to reach for me. “Helena, I swear to you, it kills me. Every time. Watching him lay hands on you—gods, I wanted to cut him down in front of everyone. But I couldn’t. Not yet.”
“Not yet?” I asked, my voice rising. “So there’s a schedule now? When are you going to let me in on that?”
His eyes burned. “I have to survive him before I can end him. Menelaus commands the armies of Sparta—every sword, every shield, every grain of sand on the shore. If I move too soon, it’s not just me he’ll crush. It’s you. It’s everyone. Menelaus is more powerful than you know.”
The truth hit hard. Menelaus’s power ran deeper than the crown on his brow, deeper than his armies, deeper than any story whispered behind palace doors.
I could feel it. I’d seen glimpses of it.
And gods, how I loathed that I didn’t understand it yet.
You can’t gut a monster until you know where its heart hides.
My gaze flicked to the wall and the bones that lay beyond it. I didn’t know why I hadn’t mentioned them to Achilles, it was just that every time I tried … it was like I couldn’t.
Achilles stepped closer, shadows catching the furrow in his brow, guilt etched into every line of his face. “I haven’t stopped thinking about this morning. About what I could’ve done. Should’ve done.”
I turned my attention back to him. “Maybe you should stop coming to me at night. Stop pretending this”—I slashed my hand through the space between us, that impossible chasm that suddenly gaped too large—“means anything if it vanishes with the dawn.”
The moment the words left me, I knew I didn’t mean them. But anger burned hotter than truth, and I wanted him to feel even a fraction of the torment splintering me apart.
Achilles stumbled back as if I’d lunged at him. Silence pressed in until it felt like we’d both drown in it. Then his voice broke through, quiet but fierce. “It means everything. You mean everything.”
The words should have steadied me. But tonight, they fell flat, thin as smoke, slipping through my fingers before I could hold them. I was too tired to reach for them. Too tired to keep carrying what he could not.
He reached for me instead, hesitantly, as though he feared I might pull away. But I didn’t.
Achilles’s fingers brushed along my jaw before settling at my cheek, his thumb ghosting the bruise with a touch so careful it hurt more than the blow. He touched me with reverence, with regret. And still, the ache inside of me stayed.
“I would trade every oath I’ve ever sworn to take this from you,” he whispered.
“Every victory, every accolade, every shred of honor they think I have.” His voice faltered.
“When I close my eyes, I see you like this, struck down by the man I swore to serve. And I can’t—” His throat worked, the words breaking apart.
“I can’t breathe, knowing what you endure just to stand beside him. ”
I turned to him fully, the firelight catching the shine in his eyes. The shine wasn’t from tears, but something hotter, fiercer. A vow pressing at the edge of his mouth.
“I swear to you, Helena,” he said, the words trembling but true. “It will not always be like this. I will bring him down. I will destroy him. Not for vengeance, but for you. For the life you deserve.”
My body stayed frozen, my voice locked somewhere deep, strangled by everything I wanted and everything I feared. His hands held me steady, framing me as though I were something important, something untouchable … when I felt anything but.
“One day,” he said, his voice a rough promise, “you will sit on a throne not beside a monster, but beside a man who worships you. Who fights for you. Who burns down kingdoms to keep you safe.”
His vow hit its mark, landing in every fragile place I’d hoped no one could see. And for some reason, it echoed, something in his promise brushing against the memory of another voice, another warning wrapped in flame.
Once again … I ached to surrender to that vision, to believe it could be mine.
“And when that day comes,” he said, his forehead lowering to mine, “I will not visit you in shadows. I will walk through the light beside you. Proud. Unafraid. Yours.”
My eyes fluttered shut. Just for a heartbeat, I let myself believe him. Let myself feel what it would be like if the world he promised could exist.
His lips brushed mine, tentative at first, then deeper, more certain, like a man trying to imprint something eternal on fragile skin. He kissed the corner of my mouth, my bruised cheek, my temple, his breath a trembling vow against every hurt he couldn’t erase.
His hands moved with worship as he undid the ties of my chiton, each motion unhurried, like he was asking permission with every brush of his fingers.
The fabric slid from my shoulders, pooling silently at my feet.
He kissed the hollow of my throat, the curve of my collarbone, a healing bruise along my ribs.
Each press of his mouth whispered, I’m sorry. I’m here. I see you.
When he laid me back on the bed, there was no rush in him. He moved over me as though the moment itself was holy, his body a vow pressed close to mine, his hands mapping every line of me with the certainty of a man who had always known the way.
And I let him.
Because part of me needed to feel wanted. Needed to feel like someone saw the pieces of me and didn’t turn away.
He made love to me with the same aching devotion, but something in me stayed untouched.
Not my body. Not my heart.
But a space deep within that I was struggling to let him reach.
His touch was usually enough to quiet the war in me. Tonight, it was reminding me that I was still in it.
And no amount of tenderness could change the fact that in the daylight, I bled all alone.
Even when he kissed me like salvation, it felt like a prayer given too late.
His breath caught as our bodies joined, and for a few aching moments, it felt like the world had narrowed to this bed, this firelit silence, this man who felt like a refuge. He whispered my name, and I held his face between my hands, searching for something I was struggling to name.
His touch was everything it had always been … gentle and adoring. But where it once unraveled me, tonight it no longer reached as deep. I responded to him because I knew how. Because I remembered the rhythm. But it almost felt like echoes, like dancing in the ruins of a temple that was collapsing.
He moved inside me like I was something fragile, something breakable, and it only made the ache worse. Not because of the pain, but because I kept reaching for that place we shared, unsure why it felt further away than it should have.
My fingers dug into his shoulders, desperate to tether myself to him. To remind myself that his love was my armor.
“Tell me again,” I whispered. “Tell me we’ll have more than this.”
His mouth moved over my skin. “You’ll be free. You’ll be safe. You’ll be mine.”
But the promises slid off my heart like water on glass.
And when we finished, tangled in sheets and sweat and silence, he reached for me, but I turned my face to the side.
Not cold.
Just tired.
And desperate for something I was beginning to realize I no longer expected.