CHAPTER 67 - I love you
I wake slowly, the way a person wakes after crying so hard their body gives up before their heart does.
There is no violent jolt, no sharp panic clawing me awake, no desperate moment where I forget where I am and expect pain to find me first. Instead, I rise in pieces.
In breaths. In the soft return of warmth and weight and the strange, unfamiliar realization that, for once, no one is hurting me.
For a little while, I don't open my eyes.
I just lie there and exist in the quiet.
The bed beneath me is warm. The blankets are heavy in a comforting way, not suffocating, not trapping just there, wrapped around me like something meant to keep me together.
My body feels drained, as though grief hollowed me out and left only enough strength behind to keep breathing.
There is an ache in my chest that has not gone away, not even in sleep, but it is not the jagged kind anymore.
It is deeper than that. Older. Like something has finally stopped pretending it isn't broken.
When I open my eyes, night has already settled over the palace.
The room is dim, painted in soft amber from the candlelight burning low along the walls.
Shadows stretch long across the carved stone, quiet and watchful, and for a moment I simply stare at the ceiling above me, letting the stillness hold me in place.
The silence here is different from the silence in the court.
It is not sharp. It does not wait for blood.
It does not listen for verdicts. It is gentle enough that I almost don't trust it.
And then I remember.
Not all at once.
Not in a single cruel wave.
But in fragments.
The trial.
The blood.
My father's voice raw, pleading, breaking open beneath the weight of a regret that arrived too late to matter.
My stepmother's hatred, still sharp even when death was already breathing down her neck.
The way I stood there and chose.
The way I did not hesitate.
My chest tightens, but not enough to pull me under. The memory is heavy. Real. It settles into me like stone. But it does not drown me.
I shift slowly beneath the covers, and that is when I feel it.
The other side of the bed.
Still warm.
My hand moves instinctively across the sheets, fingertips brushing the place beside me, and something inside me softens before I can stop it.
He was here. Not long ago. Close enough that his warmth has not fully left the linen.
Close enough that the space beside me feels more like a pause than an absence.
Achilles.
A quiet understanding settles over me.
He carried me here.
After I broke.
After my knees gave out and all the strength I had borrowed from anger and duty and survival left me in the middle of my chambers.
I don't remember him finding me. I don't remember being lifted, or laid down, or covered. But there is no world in which he would have left me alone on that floor. Not after everything. Not when I was finally too tired to pretend I was still standing.
Of course he brought me to bed.
Of course he stayed.
I push myself upright slowly, the blankets sliding from my skin.
Cool air brushes over me, waking me further, making me more aware of myself the heaviness still living in my limbs, the soreness that comes from grief more than injury, the strange sensation of being both emptied out and unbearably full.
My gaze drifts across the room, over the quiet luxury I once thought would always feel foreign to me.
The carved stone. The heavy curtains. The polished surfaces glowing softly in the candlelight.
This room used to feel like something that belonged to another woman someone born for crowns, someone made for silk and authority and rooms this large.
And then I see the bathing chamber.
The door are slightly open. Steam curls outward in pale ribbons, drifting into the room, carrying with it the scent of heated stone and clean water and something darker, something steadier, something that feels like him even before I see him.
My heart stirs.
I don't question it.
I don't hesitate.
I rise from the bed.
The floor is cool beneath my feet as I cross the room, each step quiet, careful.
I reach for my clothes without thinking, my fingers brushing the fabric before stopping.
For a moment I stand there, looking down at them, at the soft folds of silk and linen, at all the things I once used to shield myself.
And strip them away.
I don't need them.
Not now.
Not with him.
There is no shame in the thought. No fear.
Nothing trembling or uncertain. He has seen me at my worst. He has seen me bruised, shaking, broken open by pain and grief and things I did not think I would survive.
There is nothing left to hide from him. Not my body.
Not my sadness. Not the parts of me I still don't know how to carry.
The closer I get to the open doorway, the warmer the air becomes. Steam softens the edges of the room, turning everything hazy, intimate, unreal in the way beautiful things sometimes are when they arrive after devastation.
And then I step inside.
The room glows with low candlelight. Reflections tremble across the surface of the water, across the stone, across the walls.
The bath itself is carved deep into the floor, old and solid and wide enough to feel almost like a private pool rather than a place meant for washing.
Steam rises in slow waves from the surface, wrapping around everything like a veil.
And him.
Achilles is already there, half-submerged, leaning back against the stone.
His head rests against the edge, eyes closed, his body stretched out as if he has finally allowed himself to stop holding himself upright for the sake of the world.
Water beads along his shoulders and chest, tracing scars I know now better than I ever thought I would.
He looks still, but not soft. Even at rest, there is something dangerous about him.
Something contained. Something powerful enough that quiet does not make it smaller.
For a moment, I simply stand there and look at him.
At the breadth of him.
At the strength in his stillness.
At the parts of him the world would call cruel, and the parts of him only I have learned to recognize as care.
And then, without opening his eyes, he reaches toward me.
His hand lifts slowly from the water, palm open, waiting.
"Come here."
His voice is low rough, and commanding.
Something soft catches in my chest.
I step forward.
The water greets me with heat when I slip into it, warmth climbing over my skin, sinking into my muscles, unraveling tension I had not realized I was still carrying. I move slowly, the ripples spreading around me, until I reach him.
The moment I am close enough, his arm wraps around me.
There is no hesitation in it. No pause to ask.
No doubt that this is where he wants me.
He draws me into him with an ease that says I belong there, that says he has already decided there is nowhere else I should be.
His hand settles against my waist beneath the water, firm and grounding, and my own hands rise instinctively to his chest.
He is warm.
Solid.
Real in a way everything else in my life still struggles to be.
For a moment, neither of us speaks.
I listen to the water shift around us. To the soft crackle of candle flames. To the steady rhythm of his breathing beneath my palms.
"How did you know?" I ask finally, my voice quiet enough that it almost disappears into the steam.
His thumb moves against my side in a slow, absent caress.
"I know the way you feel before I even touch you," he murmurs.
I blink, surprised by the answer.
His mouth brushes lightly against my temple before he continues, voice lower now, more intimate than I have ever heard it.
"I know the sound your breathing makes when you're trying to be quiet. I know the way the room changes when you walk into it. I know when you're near me, even before I look."
"I know you."
Something in my chest twists at that.
Not painfully.
Just... deeply.
I tilt my head back enough to look at him, and even with his eyes still closed, he seems to feel it. His lashes lift slowly, and his gaze finds mine with an intensity that makes the room feel smaller.
"The woman I love doesn't enter any space unnoticed," he says.
The words settle between us.
Simple.
Unadorned.
And still they steal the breath from my lungs.
I go very still.
The woman I love.
Not a queen.
Not his wife.
Not something bound to him by duty or fate or war.
Love
"You love me?" I whisper, because even hearing it, I still cannot quite believe I understood him correctly.
His brows draw together faintly, as if the question itself confuses him.
"Yes."
The answer comes without hesitation.
Without flourish.
Just truth.
his gaze sharpens immediately, reading my face the way he always does.
"Is that a problem?" he asks.
The question is calm, but there is something vulnerable buried deep beneath it, something so hidden I almost miss it.
I shake my head quickly. "No. No, it's not that." My fingers tighten against his chest. "I just... I didn't think you did."
"Why?"
The question is immediate. Honest.
"Because you never said it," I admit.
He goes quiet.
Not cold.
Not distant.
Just still in a way that tells me he is thinking.
Then something changes in his expression something like realization, followed by the faintest trace of regret.
His hand leaves my waist only long enough to lift my chin. He doesn't force me, only guides me until I am looking fully at him.
"'m sorry ," he says.
The words are quiet.
"ill bd sure to fix that ," His gaze searches mine for a long moment, as if he is choosing each word before he gives it to me.
"I love you," he says again, but this time the words come differently.
They are slower. More deliberate. Less like a declaration shouted from a throne and more like something taken out of his own chest and placed carefully between us.
"I think I loved you before I understood what it was.
Before I had a name for it. Before I knew a man like me was still capable of feeling something that did not ask for permission before it made a home inside him. "
My throat tightens.
He brushes a strand of damp hair back from my face, his fingers impossibly gentle.
"I loved you when you still looked at me like I was something to endure," he says, "because even then, you were kinder than I deserved.
I loved you when you defied me in the smallest ways, when you held onto softness in a place that would have broken most people into something hard and cruel.
I loved you every time you chose to remain yourself in a world that kept trying to carve pieces off you. "
"I loved you long before you gave me any reason to believe I might be loved in return," he continues. "And I think that frightened me more than any war ever has."
There it is.
The truth beneath the power.
The man beneath the king.
His thumb brushes my cheekbone, wiping away moisture I hadn't realized had gathered there.
"You are not a weakness I endure," he says. "You are the reason I still remember there is something in me worth saving."
The words hit harder than anything else.
I stare at him, and the ache in my chest turns liquid and warm and unbearable.
"I don't love you because you are gentle," he says, though his voice softens further at the word, like he cannot help but honor it.
"I love you because you remained gentle even when life gave you every reason not to be.
I love you because you have suffered and still know how to be kind.
I love you because when the world tried to teach you cruelty, you learned strength instead. "
His forehead comes to rest against mine.
And then he says the thing that undoes me completely.
"If I had met you before the crown, before the war, before everything that made me what I am... I think I still would have spent my life trying to deserve you."
A broken sound leaves me before I can stop it.
My hands tighten on him, and his hold on me deepens in response.
"I don't know how to love you lightly," he murmurs.
"I don't know how to make this small or pretty or easy.
I only know that when I thought I might lose you, there was nothing left of me that still cared what happened to the world after.
I only know that every room is wrong when you are not in it.
I only know that you have become the first thing I look for and the only thing I cannot bear to live without. "
His lips brush mine once, softly, almost reverently, before he pulls back just enough to say, "You are not beneath me. You are not behind me. You are not someone I keep at a distance and admire from safety."
His hand spreads against my back, pulling me closer until my heart is beating against him.
"You are where my life begins to matter."
The tears come then.
Quietly.
Helplessly.
Not from pain.
Not from grief.
But from the terrible, beautiful weight of being loved so fully by a man who never says anything he does not mean.
I laugh through it a small, trembling sound and his mouth softens at the edges in a way that might have been a smile on any other man.
"I didn't know," I confess.
I lift my hand to his face then, touching him the way he touches me when I am something fragile and precious he is afraid to mishandle. My fingers trace the line of his jaw, the scar at his temple, the shape of the man who was once only terrifying to me and somehow became home.
"I love you too," I whisper.
This time, it is his turn to still.
Not from doubt.
From the force of it.
His eyes search mine as though he is making sure I understand what I have said, what I am giving him, what it means.
And because I do, because I need him to know that I do, I say it again.
"I love you."
His breath leaves him slowly, like something he has been holding far too long.
Then he kisses me.
Not hungrily at first.
Not desperately.
Tenderly.
With a depth of feeling so overwhelming it makes my whole body ache with it. His hand cradles the back of my head, his other arm holding me close as if there is still some part of him convinced I might disappear if he loosens his grip.
I kiss him back with everything I have left.
With every fear I survived.
With every soft thing that somehow lived.
With the broken pieces and the healing ones and the woman I am still becoming.
When he finally breaks the kiss, he keeps his forehead against mine and closes his eyes.
"I should have said it sooner," he murmurs.
"Yes," I whisper, and he lets out the faintest breath of a laugh.
"I loved you before you trusted me."
"I loved you before you wanted me." That makes me smile through tears. "And I'm a very difficult to want."
Something fierce and aching moves through his expression at that, and then he gathers me closer again, until there is no space left between us at all.
Outside, the palace remains quiet. The night stretches on. The world beyond these walls is still dangerous, still fractured, still full of things waiting to test us.
But here, in the warmth of the water and the circle of his arms, none of it touches me.
Because the cold man I thought would never say the words has finally given them to me.
Not like a poet.
Not like a saint.
Like himself.
And somehow that makes them mean more.
Because they are not polished. They are not borrowed. They are not beautiful because they were meant to impress.
They are beautiful because they are true.
And when he holds me there and breathes my name against my skin like it is both prayer and promise, I realize something I should have understood long ago.
This was never a slow surrender.
It was always a love story.
It just happened to be written by a king who did not know how to confess .