“You don’t have to do this.”
Melanthius ignored me as he ripped two strips of fabric from his tunic and began winding them around his knuckles. His face was set with a grim determination; it lined his forehead, bracketed his downturned mouth, making him look so much older than our thirty-three summers.
He glanced over my head, and I turned to see Eurymachus clapping another slave on the back. I recognized the man as Philoetius, the palace cowherd, though I hadn’t ever shared more than a few words with him. He was shorter than Melanthius but far stockier, with thick-set limbs.
“Melanthius?”
I searched his face, looking for the brother I had sat with outside Laertes’s cottage, the one who had spoken such sweet, honest words.
“Why are you doing this?” I breathed.
“They won’t respect me if I don’t,” he muttered.
I reached for his arm. “Men like that willneverrespect you.”
His eyes blazed, then hardened, shoulders straightening.
The sound of smashing wood and snapping strings pulled my focus away. Across the room, a suitor was gleefully bashing the bard’s lyre against a pillar. He then thrust the mangled instrument back into Phemius’s tearful face, his cruel laughter ringing louder as he watchedthe bard flee from the room.
When I turned back to Melanthius, he was already walking away, heading into the makeshift ring the suitors had formed using tables and their bodies.
Whoops and cheers ricocheted off the walls as Melanthius and Philoetius began circling each other. At his table, Eurymachus was collecting the bets his companions piled before him.
Fury blinded all other senses as I stormed forward, slamming a hand over the silver scattered before Eurymachus.
“Stop this,” I snarled. “Penelope would not approve.”
Eurymachus’s eyes traveled leisurely from my hand, up my arm, lingering at my breasts, before finally settling on my face.
“Speak that way to me again, and I’ll have you whipped,” he said mildly. “Now sit.”
“I do not answer toyou.”
Eurymachus seemed unfazed as he picked up a silver piece, twirling it between his fingers.
“Obey me, slave, or I’ll make this a fight to the death.”
He held my gaze with such calm, empty cruelty, born from a lifetime of entitlement. I knew he would do it. He would have my brother killed simply to prove his power over me. That was how little our lives meant to him.
Rage scorched through my veins.
“You harm one of Penelope’s slaves, and you break the laws ofxenia,” I warned.
Eurymachus made an exaggerated point of looking at where my brother and Philoetius were still sizing each other up. Then he looked down at where he sat.
“AmIfighting?” he asked, placing a hand dramatically over his heart. “No. Of course not. I would not debase myself in such a way. These slaves are fighting each other.”
“Becauseyouare telling them to.”
“Semantics, my dear. Do you know what that word means? I knowit’s probably a tricky one for you.” He smiled, admiring my wrath as if it were a pretty trinket he wanted to collect. “Let’s try a simpler word, shall we? One I know you can understand—sit.”
I held his gaze, refusing to move.
Eurymachus regarded the meat knife before him. “Perhaps I will have them fight with knives. What do you think, Antinous?”
“Knives. Definitely.” Antinous licked his lips.
Eurymachus raised a brow at me. “What’s it to be?”
