Not a queen.
Not a bride.
Just a woman who had been drained and left vacant.
I buried my face in my knees and wept. For Sparta. For Anysa. For the version of myself that was still trying to have hope in all of this.
I wept for the gods who had left us and the king they had left us with.
And I wept because there was nothing else Icoulddo.
My skin felt foreign. My name felt foreign. I didn’t know who I was anymore, only that something in me had been taken and might never return.
The torches hissed.
The king snored.
And I stayed in the corner of his bedchamber until the night was nearly gone, trying not to drown in the ruin of what I had become.
Chapter35
The morning came like a punishment.
Pale light filtered through the windows, thin and cold, and I lay unmoving as a corpse on the edge of the bed, my limbs aching, the linen wrapped around me heavy with sweat and silence.
I felt him stir before I heard him. A shift of weight, a drag of breath … and then his hand clamped around my thigh.
I didn’t have time to recoil before he was on me again. There were no words or ceremony. Just flesh and power and the sickening rhythm of a man who believed this was his right. After making sure it was still justhim, staring down at me lustfully, I kept my eyes on the ceiling and counted the cracks in the stone above us.
One.
Two.
Three.
I imagined I was somewhere else.Someoneelse.
He grunted and pressed into me, his breath hot against my neck, and I did my best to follow his movements, to pretend once again.
When it was over, he rolled away with a few faint praises, already sliding back into sleep, sated and snoring like a glutton who’d fed too well.
I didn’t even move when the hinges of the door whined. The sound barely reached me, muffled as though I were buried deep underwater. I couldn’t summon the strength to turn my head, not even to see who had come.
It wasn’t until a voice broke the silence, soft, familiar, and cutting through the haze, that something inside me stirred.
“Your Majesty,” Alcmene whispered, and the sound of her struck against the empty place in my chest.
I forced myself to turn my head, my neck locked, every muscle screaming to stay still. Her face came into view, and in the flicker of lamplight, I saw her flinch. A flinch she tried to hide, but not quickly enough. Gods, what must I have looked like? My hair undone, my body exposed, his sweat still damp on my skin. A ruin of a queen.
Alcmene tiptoed closer, careful, as if moving through a field of glass. She lifted a robe in her trembling hands. I pushed back the sheet and stood, every muscle protesting. My body didn’t feel like mine. It felt like a thing—used, sore, unwanted even by the spirit trapped inside it.
Without a word, she eased the robe around my shoulders, guiding my arms into the sleeves. The cloth settled over me, and I almost sobbed at the feel of it covering me, hiding me, granting me back some of my humanity.
Menelaus still lay sprawled in the tangle of blankets, his mouth open. His chest rose and fell with the vacant rhythm of oblivion, as though he had not just gutted me and left me a shell.
A surge of bile burned the back of my throat. Rage and shame that cut deeper than the pain between my thighs.
I turned away before it could crush me, before I could shatter in front of her. I followed Alcmene into the hall, my bare feet slapping softly against the stone, each step echoing like a confession in the narrow dark.
