25. Penelope’s Daughter
Penelope’s Daughter
Andie
The day before
It was almost funny. Even though I’d been bracing myself for Orion’s betrayal since I’d first jumped off that plane, the reality of it still took me aback.
The cure is the connection that should have existed all along. I’m asking you to choose this, Andromeda. Not as a patient accepting treatment. Not as a prisoner accepting terms. As a woman deciding her own future.
What a joke. Orion wanted to bind me, too. Of course he did.
He sat across from me in the window seat where I’d spent weeks reading and pretending I wasn’t a captive. His dark eyes were soft and certain. Everything he’d just told me still hung in the air between us, waiting for me to accept it.
The Charybdis energy in the Strait has been forming an incipient bond between us. Since the night you arrived. The longer you stay, the stronger it becomes.
I stared at the man who was supposed to be my savior and wondered how I’d been so stupid.
The bond was there. A low hum beneath my ribs, warm and steady, nothing like the jagged electricity of Alexander’s presence.
It had been growing for days, feeding on the calm I’d mistaken for healing.
Orion hadn’t needed to seduce me. He’d just needed to keep me here long enough for the Strait to do its work.
Every Alpha I had ever known wanted to own me. They just used different chains.
The thought landed like a stone in still water, and something cracked open beneath the weight of it.
The waves froze mid-crest, foam suspended like sculpture. The breeze died against my skin. The creak of the hull went silent. Even the light changed. The Mediterranean gold thickened into something amber and ancient, as though the sun had stopped bothering to move.
Orion’s mouth was still parted on his last word. The rise of his chest had paused between breaths.
“Do not judge him too harshly.”
The voice came from behind me, low and warm, carrying the particular authority of someone who had spent decades being obeyed.
“Poseidon’s children have always been romantic, even when their patron is not.”
I turned.
She stood at the stern rail as though she’d always been there.
She was tall, with silver threaded through her dark hair, held motionless by the frozen wind.
She wore an elegant Grecian gown, the kind that might have been right at home on one of the engravings at the Heraion.
She was beautiful, but in a sharp way, like a statue that had been worn thin by time.
Her eyes were the same color as mine.
“You’re Penelope.” I didn’t know where the instinctual knowledge came from, but I had no doubt it was true.
“And you are Helena’s daughter.” She crossed the deck toward me, her soft footsteps somehow both soundless and heavy. “I have been watching you for some time. You are very much like her, though I imagine that is not what you want to hear.”
“It isn’t.”
She stopped beside the frozen Orion and studied his face with a strange expression.
There was tenderness in her eyes, but also a faint, aching disappointment.
“He believes he is correcting a cosmic error. That if a Hera Omega chooses a Poseidon Alpha freely, the wound between our Houses will finally close.” She touched Orion’s frozen cheek with two fingers.
“He has been telling himself this story for so long that he no longer sees the woman in front of him. Only the symbol. Perhaps he doesn’t even see himself. ”
She turned back to me. “But you should understand what actually happened before you decide anything.”
She gestured toward Orion’s motionless body.
A man stepped out of him. One moment there was only Orion, frozen and beautiful. The next, a second figure peeled forward from the same space and stumbled onto the deck.
He was covered in blood. It darkened his arms to the elbows and streaked the torn fabric across his chest. His hands glowed green at the fingertips, faint and guttering. Where his bare feet met the deck, moisture beaded and pooled. I knew him immediately. Odysseus.
Around us, the yacht shimmered. Bodies appeared on the deck, translucent and drifting, sprawled across the polished wood like drowned men washed ashore.
I counted a hundred of them before I stopped trying.
Some had faces twisted in terror. Others simply lay still with thin trickles of brine leaking from their mouths.
“The bodies of my suitors.” Penelope kept her gaze on the frozen horizon, her hands folded at her waist. “He killed them all with seawater. Every cup, every basin, every drop of moisture in the palace. They drowned on dry land.”
The phantom Odysseus moved through the carnage without seeing it. His eyes searched the space above him. His body leaned upward, pulled toward something he had not yet found.
“I watched from the gallery.” Penelope’s chin lifted, and the phantom light played across the bones of her face. “And part of me was glad.”
The phantom found a second Penelope, fainter and younger, waiting on the upper deck. He crossed to her in strides that were too fast and too fluid. His hands found her face, and blood and seawater smeared across her skin.
“He claimed me there.” Penelope reached for her own throat, fingers splayed across the place where a bonding mark would sit.
“In the corridor, above the dead. His teeth were on my bonding gland before I could stop him. The bond snapped into place, and I could feel everything. His relief, his love, and beneath it all, the ocean. Cold and patient and endless.”
The phantoms dissolved, and the bodies faded with them. The yacht was just a yacht again. Penelope stood beside me with her hands clasped together, her grief worn deep into her features.
“We tried.” Penelope unclasped her hands and let them hang at her sides, open and empty.
“For months, we tried to be what we had been. He sat at our table and ate our bread and asked our son about the olive saplings. He wanted so desperately to fit inside the life he’d fought twenty years to reclaim. ”
A new image flickered across the deck. Three people sat at a dinner table, eating together. Then the boy embraced his mother from behind, and every cup on the table exploded. Water and wine erupted into the air. A man’s hand locked around the boy’s arm. The Alpha command ripped through the room.
“The wife could endure it.” Penelope’s fingers brushed the phantom boy’s arm, passing through the five darkening bruises that matched the print of a father’s hand. “The mother could not.”
She let the image linger for a moment longer. Then it dissolved, leaving nothing but the deck and the frozen sea and the two of us.
“Orion tells this story as though the tragedy was something I was forced into.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t understand. Odysseus was dangerous. I severed the bond, but not because I was too weak to follow him. I severed it because I was a mother, and I had no other choice.”
She held out her hand. “Let me show you.”
I took it.
The yacht vanished. We stood on a sea wall at night, wind tearing at our clothes. Odysseus was already there, leaning against the stone. He was gaunt. The green in his eyes had nearly swallowed the color entirely.
“Do it.” The phantom Odysseus dug his fingers into the stone until his knuckles whitened. “Now, before I lose my nerve. Before the thing in me decides that keeping you matters more than keeping him whole.”
Penelope’s grip tightened on my hand. She was not watching the memory. She was reliving it, pulling me into the current of it so that the knowledge would settle into my blood the way it lived in hers.
She put her arms around him, pressing her face against his chest. Then she found the place where his heartbeat met hers—the knot of energy that pulsed with both their rhythms. The true form of the bond opened up to me through her touch.
It threaded through their two bodies like roots through soil, and it finally made sense.
Then, Penelope activated the power.
Purple-gold light flowed from her hands, and he screamed. His arms locked around her hard enough to bruise. The bond fought back. Every instinct in him thrashed against the severance. The sound that tore from his throat was not human.
She held on. The bond came apart under her hands, strand by strand, heartbeat separating from heartbeat. His presence in her mind dimmed and went out.
The world went silent.
I gasped. The knowledge was inside me now. The channels, the pathways, the precise architecture of how a bond could be found and cut. It lived in my hands the way a musician’s training lives in the fingers.
I blinked, and we were back on the yacht. Orion was still frozen. The sea was still suspended. Penelope released my hand and stepped back.
“I didn’t come to tell you what to do.” Penelope squared her shoulders, and the queen in her surfaced.
This was the woman who had ruled Ithaca alone for twenty years.
“Your mother kept you from your heritage. She thought she was protecting you. Perhaps she was. But it means you have been fighting blind, and I will not let that continue.”
“The curse.” I wrapped my arms around myself, shaking under the weight of all these revelations. “The Hera Curse. Is that what I’m supposed to sever? Am I meant to cut the bond with Alexander and accept what they’ve planned for me? House Hades, Elara, safety?”
Penelope’s expression changed. Her lips twitched, but the subtle gesture carried too much sorrow to be called a smile.
“You have it all wrong, child. The power I gave you is not only for severing. It is for understanding. For seeing the truth of what binds you and choosing what to do about it.” She stepped closer, and her hands came up to frame my face the way a mother’s would.
“House Hera’s power is only a curse if you fear it.
The rage, the bond manipulation, the ability to see what ties people together and tear it apart…
These are not afflictions. They are gifts. Your birthright.”