Chapter 59
My cheeks were wet.
It was the first thing I noticed as I blinked awake. There were tears sliding down my face. The beams of the ceiling swam into focus above me, familiar patterns etched in wood I had traced countless times in restless nights.
Slowly, I pushed myself upright. The furs slipped to my waist, pooling heavy in my lap.
My fingertips drifted to my cheeks, brushing the damp tracks there, as if touching them might explain why I had been weeping in my sleep.
The silence pressed in around me. For once there were no voices or footsteps in the corridor.
My gaze moved around the chamber, taking in the gilded shutters and the bronze lamp by the door. I was back in my room in the palace.
But how?
I blinked again, and then it struck.
Sidon’s burning walls and their cry of surrender twisted into slaughter.
Menelaus’s contempt curling like smoke.
My scream tearing the air apart.
Achilles’s arms locking around me as I thrashed.
Theron’s sigils sparking, light blotting out the world until it went dark, dark enough, strong enough, to hold me senseless for the entire journey home.
And Amyklai.
I folded over and clutched at the furs until my knuckles ached.
My tears were never-ending, streaming down my cheeks, dripping onto the silks, soaking them through until they clung damp against my skin.
I couldn’t stop. Each breath only broke me open further, spilling more of me out into the silence.
I had given everything for them. I had bound myself to Menelaus, endured his scorn, played the queen in a court that devoured me—all for Amyklai.
To shield them from Sparta’s hunger, to give them a future untouched by the king’s cruelty.
And now they were gone. Wiped away in a single night, their blood soaked into the soil, their voices stilled.
Anysa’s death … pointless. Everything I had surrendered … worthless. Everything I had borne … meaningless. My crown was nothing but a hollow trinket, my sacrifices were nothing but ash.
Faces rose unbidden, one after another … but my mother’s lingered longest.
Her green eyes had been dulled by a sorrow that never lifted as she’d stared after me in the hall that last day, hoping and praying I could save our people.
And now I saw her in the dust, writhing as the red mist poured through her, blood flooding her eyes, her mouth, her nose.
I saw her gaze fix on me even as death claimed her, lips shaping the question I could never answer.
Why didn’t you save us?
The sobs tore from me in waves, racking me until I could hardly breathe, until I thought my chest might cave in from the weight of it. I pressed my forehead to my knees, but nothing could hold me together. Not now. Not ever again.
The stillness pressed against my ears until I could hear nothing but the uneven rasp of my own breath.
And then, cutting through it, came a sound.
It sounded like an animal’s snarl and I gasped as the growl deepened, reverberating and creeping at the edges of the room until it felt as though the chamber itself were alive and breathing.
My head lifted and my gaze snagged on the faint seam in the wall, the one that led to the hidden tunnel and the makeshift graveyard beyond it.
A cold prickle crawled up my spine.
Was that where the sound was coming from?
I swiped the back of my hand across my face, dragging tears instead of banishing them. My legs trembled as I slid from the bed. The furs trailed at my ankles like they were begging me to stay, and the floor’s chill bit hard through the soles of my feet, warning me with every step not to go closer.
The growl came again, louder this time, like the creature was distressed. It sounded like … like Roz did in its beastly form.
Alarmed, I raced toward the wall. My palms found the hidden seam and pressed. Stone groaned in protest, then yielded, the panel yawning inward on unseen hinges. A breath of air spilled out to meet me, the cold brushing across my tear-streaked cheeks like an exhale.
I leaned forward, peering into the black throat of the passage. The growl came again, ghosting through the dark. This time accompanied by the faint echo of a man’s voice, warped and indistinct.
Seizing a torch from the wall bracket, I struck flint until flame licked to life, stepped across the threshold, and moved down the stairs as quickly as I could without slipping on the worn steps.
The voice echoed again, somewhere ahead. I swallowed hard, tightened my grip on the torch, and walked deeper. Corridors twisted at unnatural angles, and it took me a minute to realize when I’d strayed into a section of the tunnel I hadn’t walked before.
Was that the same pillar that I’d just seen?
The air grew colder, and the stones beneath my feet were damp. Moss clung to the walls as I descended farther down. The tunnel narrowed as I passed under a low archway etched with symbols I didn’t recognize.
The growl swelled louder with every step until finally I turned, my torchlight swinging wide and …
Up ahead, Roz was hunched in its nightmare form, bark and stone plating its hide, sealing it in a carapace of earthbound horror. Another growl thundered from its throat, and dust and chunks of dirt sifted down from the ceiling, peppering my hair and shoulders.
It crouched, every joint coiled as if it was about to spring.
“Roz!” I cried. The torch wavered in my grip as my gaze dropped, and I blinked hard. Roz’s claws didn’t meet the stone. They hovered inches above it, suspended, scraping uselessly at the air.
“What are you doing awake?” Theron’s voice slid out of the dark.
I spun toward it, pulse racing, as he stepped forward with one hand lifted. Sigils smoldered along his skin, their pale light pulsing in rhythm with Roz’s convulsions. Each flicker tightened the invisible bonds, pinning the beast where it hung mid-lunge.
In his other hand, he held a length of bone as if it were nothing more than an idle accessory.
“What are you doing to it?” I gasped, stumbling closer.
His shoulders lifted in a faint shrug, the grin that followed as careless as ever. “Trying to calm it down, obviously. It found me in a rather precarious position, and it won’t let me explain.”
“Let it go.” My voice broke sharp in the close air, scraping against the tunnel walls.
He laughed softly. “I’m sorry, Your Majesty … but I can’t do that for you. Not right now. Because—” His gaze held mine, unwavering. “I’ve finally found a clue to all this.”
Disgust surged up, acrid and burning, choking the back of my throat. “Roz is mine,” I spat, the word tearing out of me like venom.
That grin widened, a glint of mischief sparking. “Yes,” he said, unbothered. “You playing house with it all this time while I searched desperately for it is so typical of our relationship. Don’t you think?”
Something ruptured inside me.
My chest seized, that alien rhythm hammering through me again, too fast, too loud, as if another heart was beating against my own.
Images tore through me: his lies, his sigils burning in the air, Achilles collapsing under his spell, Amyklai drowning in red mist. All the games, all the torment.
All of it consumed me, filling me until there was no room left to breathe.
The pressure swelled until my ribs felt like they might crack, each breath scraping thin and shallow.
Heat surged through my veins, molten and uncontainable, building higher and higher until my vision blurred white at the edges.
My body trembled, shaking apart under it, and I swore the next heartbeat would rip me open, scatter me in a spray of blood and smoke.
“Let it go,” I growled again in a strangled voice, my whole body shaking with emotion.
And then …
Something burst out of me, invisible but immense, like the air itself had been ripped. Power slammed through the tunnel, rattling stone from the ceiling. Theron was thrown back, crashing to the floor, his sigils sputtering under the blow.
Roz shrieked free. The bonds shattered with a sound like splitting ice, and the beast lunged forward, claws gouging the stone as it soared for him.
Theron’s eyes flared. He thrust out his hand again, sigils reigniting in a violent blaze. The air seized. Roz froze mid-pounce, one massive claw suspended an inch from Theron’s face, trembling with the effort to reach him.
I stood rooted, torch shaking in my grip, my breath shuddering in and out. My skin still hummed and my bones ached as though something had ripped its way out from inside me.
Gods. That had come from me.
Dust still spiraled in the air when my gaze locked on him. Theron lay sprawled across the flagstones, bone still in one hand, Roz suspended above him mid-lunge, claws straining for his throat.
His eyes weren’t on the beast though.
They were on me.
For a heartbeat he was bare … shock holding his features still, stripped of the arrogance he wore like armor. Truly unguarded, for the first time since I had met him.
Then it shifted. His mouth edged into a hungry line, his stare no longer startled but consuming, lit with a fire far more dangerous than surprise.
“There it is,” he murmured, his voice a dark caress that slid down my spine.
“There what is?” I whispered shakily back, still trying to grasp that some impossible force had just burst out of me.
His gaze burned hotter. “What I’ve been looking for.”