The market dissolved. All that remained was a single, blinding need—her.
My vision tunneled. My hands curled into fists until my nails bit deep into my palms. I reached her door and didn’t knock. I drove my shoulder into it, wood splintering under the weight. The frame gave with a sound like something dying.
Inside, the silence was alive—not peaceful but waiting. The scent struck first—sweat, salt, and the fading warmth of another body. It hung in the air like smoke that refused to lift.
Weapons lay scattered in the corridor—two bronze swords propped together, a dented mace by the hearth, a sling coiled and forgotten. They were not staged; they were the leftovers of a hurried night. Not the kind of violence born of battlefields, but of something else—passion, pity, a comfort taken in grief.
I moved through the rooms like a ghost searching for a name.
And then I saw her.
Helena.
She was sprawled across the bed, silks twisted beneath her, her body slick with sweat and pleasure. One man moved above her, hips thrusting in a steady rhythm, his hands gripping her thighs as he drove himself into her. The other stood before her, his cock in her mouth, her head tilted back in surrender. Her eyes were closed, lips stretched, throat working as she took him deeper.
She wasn’t just enjoying it—she wasworshipingit.
Her hands clutched both men, guiding them, needing them. Her skin glowed with sweat, her breasts rising and falling, nipples hard, her legs spread shamelessly wide. Her moans weren’t soft. They were wild. Hungry. She looked like a woman in rapture—like a goddess fed on desire.
The door had been ajar, and she hadn’t even noticed me.
The air shrank around my lungs. For one sliver of a second, I could not pull breath through my teeth. Then everything inside me shattered, as if the world itself had split along a seam I’d never noticed.
“You lying fucking whore!” The words left me like stones torn from my throat.
The room fractured. The quiet was a thin thing that tore on that shout. Helena jerked, a wet, startled sound dragged from her throat as a man inside her cried out and fell away. Her hair clung to her face, sodden with sweat; her lips were red and slick, still parted from whatever had been on them. She looked at me as if I were a ghost that had crawled out of the walls.
“Salvatore—please. I didn’t know—wait! Let me explain?—”
I could not hear her. There was thunder inside my skull, the roiling of blood, a roaring that pushed every thought aside. All I saw was what she’d given away—the body I thought was mine made soft and open to strangers.
She had fed them what once saved my soul. She moaned for them. That sound—a knife across anything left of me.
One of the men struggled to his knees. Pale, scabbed, a boy-thing who wore his bruises like trophies. He lunged blindly for a small dagger on the bedside slab, as if a scrap of metal could stop what was coming.
I didn’t pause.
The bronze sword hung above the hearth—old, polished to a terrible sheen. I tore it free. The metal was cool against my palm, heavy and hungry. It sang when I lifted it, a single clean note that smelled like iron and promises.
He moved. I met him at the edge of his lunge and drove the blade through him so hard I felt the shock in my shoulder. There was a sound I will never unhear—a wet, stunned gasp—and then something hot and coppery burst out between us. It came in a ragged fountain, steaming in the light of the oil lamps, splattering the wall and soaking the linen that had been her sheets.
He went down like a slain lamb. When I shoved the blade free, his insides followed, a slick, red thing that spat and slithered. He hung halfway off the sword, convulsing, lips blue, eyes popping like drowned fish, before his knees slackened and he collapsed into a heap.
The next man, who fucked Helena’s mouth crawled like a rat, hands scrabbling at the floor as if he could dig himself out of living. Blood slicked his fingers and the boards below him; the room was a red mirror that swallowed light.
“Please—please don’t—” he whimpered, voice small and raw.
I did not answer.
My foot came down on the small of his back, and I crushed him into the planks. He screamed—a high, animal sound—and his body bucked beneath me. My leather sandal dug in. I slammed again, twice, until something inside him broke with a wet, unquestionable sound. He convulsed, choked, and sobbed like a man whose world had ended in one step.
“Salvatore, STOP!” Helena shrieked.
She stumbled from the bed, naked, linen clinging to her like a second skin from where it had been dragged. Her cheeks were bright with shame or fever; her breath came ragged. Her beauty was a ruin under the scent of blood and wet fear.
I laughed then—low, cold, without warmth.
I picked up the dagger that had fallen from the first man’s hand. It was small, bronze, its edge dull from use but still wicked. I yanked the second by the hair, forced his head back until the roots screamed, and drew the blade across his throat.
