And I knew it. I’d seen this during the Trial, when I’d tried to tell myself it was exhaustion or fear or imagination.
But it was here again … watching me with a cold focus.
Awareness slid across my skin, tightening every muscle in my body. No one else seemed to notice. But I saw it. And knowing I wasn’t imagining it this time made the fear burrow deeper.
“Kneel, my lady!” Alcmene’s frantic hiss sliced through the rising panic.
The words snagged inside me like a hook, dragging me downward before my mind caught up. My knees hit the marble, hard enough that pain sparked up my legs. But it was nothing compared to what I saw when my gaze dropped.
The floor.
Thatpart of the floor.
Scrubbed clean and polished to a shine now … but I could still see it. A memory of red staining the cracks, a pattern my mind refused to release. A body that had been dragged away. A life ended so carelessly that its echo still pulsed through the stone.
Fear tightened around my lungs. Anger coiled beneath it. How dare he make me bow here where he’d let her bleed out. Where the ghosts of last night clung.
My head lowered slowly, the movement scraped from me rather than given. Terror held my spine in place, but the defiance burned right beneath it.
I bowed because I had to. But every part of me shook.
The High Priestess glided forward, her movement cutting through the air with the same soft sweep I had heard in the seconds before Anysa was led to the altar. The sound scraped at old terror. For a moment the room wavered, the incense bending into the memory of burning oil, the brightness into the recollection of blood spreading across stone.
I forced myself back to the present, to the woman before me and the gold-threaded scroll in her hands.
But I felt him.
Menelaus’s gaze stayed fixed on me, unblinking and unnervingly still, a weight that settled along my skin with a strange, watching pressure. Something inside those eyes had shifted again; I did not need to turn my head to sense it. That same unnatural depth nudged at the edge of my awareness, patient and intent.
Fear crept upward through my chest, tightening my breath, and I lowered my gaze to the scroll, praying my hands would not shake.
“We gather before our god,” she began, her voice carrying through the hall. “To witness the sacred union of Menelaus, Son of Atreus, King of Sparta … and Helena of—”
The king lifted his hand in a careless sweep, though something in the motion felt mismatched, as if his body and voice belonged to different creatures. “Enough. We know who she is. Start the binding.”
The High Priestess’s head snapped toward him, the barest flicker of offense tightening the line of her mouth. Her grip on the scroll shifted, the gold thread biting into her fingers as if she were weighing whether to chastise a king in front of his court. In the end, she swallowed whatever words burned on her tongue, her gaze dropping like a curtain.
His words seemed fitting to me though. My identitywasbeing taken over.
A rustle stirred the air behind me, the faint scrape of wood against marble followed by the soft creak of wheels. I turned, my veil shifting with the movement, a shiver of gauze between me and the two servants pushing forward a low cart draped in white linen. On it sat a blade and a shallow bowl filled with clear water, a chunk of salt, and a sprig of asphodel—the ritual symbols of purity, fidelity, and death. The priestess dipped the salt into the bowl, murmuring a blessing I didn’t care to decipher … because I wouldn’t believe the words anyway.
The High Priestess reached for the ritual blade. Her fingers hesitated on the hilt, a small betrayal of composure, and when her gaze lifted to mine, the moment shifted around us. This wasn’t the soft fog of ritual in her eyes. She wasseeingme.
And woven through that look was the memory of her warning from the choosing, a verdict she had tried to hide but hadn’t forgotten:
She will be our ruin.
My heart thudded beneath the glittered paint and black sigils marking my skin, each beat a reminder that she still believed it, believedmecapable of ruin. With the king next to me, with his strange gaze and shifting depths and the power he claimed as divinity … how could she look atmeand see the threat?
How could she think the danger woremyface?
Her fingers finally closed over mine, and she turned my palm toward the ceiling as though laying me bare for the gods. The blade’s kiss was swift, a sting that bloomed heat, followed by the warm spill of blood tracing the curve of my lifeline.
She moved to the king next, her hand steady as she cut him as well. His spine stiffened at the sting, teeth clicking together in a small, controlled snap.
Then he reached for me.
I flinched before I could stop myself. A quick recoil of instinct, because for a breath I wasn’t afraid of the blade, but of him. Of whatever lurked behind his eyes. Of whether it might slide into me through this touch, this ritual, this mingling of blood.
