She dipped the pitcher in the water again but didn’t reach for me.
“They told her no,” she said, her voice harder now. “They told her grief was natural and she would heal.”
“What did she do?” I whispered.
“She tore the petals from her own hair,” Alcmene said with a steady gaze. “She twisted them into a crown of thorns. And she hunted every man who touched what didn’t belong to them. Every raider. Every merchant who turned a blind eye. Every king who praised her beauty but ignored her pain.”
The bathwater sloshed gently around me, the surface shimmering red from the remnants of yesterday’s paint.
“She became a goddess that day,” she finished. “Not because Olympus above welcomed her. But because the women below did. Because someone needed to wear a crown made of fury.”
I let the sponge fall and it hit the water with a muted splash. My throat felt like it was closing. Not from sadness, from something else. “I wish she were real,” I murmured finally in a barely audible voice.
Alcmene stood and grabbed a towel, keeping her eyes on me. “She is,” she said softly. “She just hasn’t remembered her name yet.”
Something inside me fractured.
I trembled, softly at first, a subtle shiver in my shoulders that gave way to a violent quaking in my chest. And then more tears came. Hot, silent, unstoppable. They spilled down my cheeks without permission, cutting through the steam, through the red-flecked film of the bathwater, through everything I had tried so hard to hold together.
Alcmene didn’t speak again. She simply moved behind me and began to wash my hair with careful hands. Her fingers worked through the tangles as if they were thorns, each stroke patient and kind. The water streamed down my back in rivulets, rinsing away what little red paint was left.
When she was done, she held out a hand.
I took it.
The air bit at my skin as I rose. Alcmene wrapped a linen around me, whispering nothing, just humming low in her throat in a way that reminded me of what Calismae used to do when I was small and fevered. Alcmene dried my skin in silence, and I let her, numb and weeping and beyond exhausted.
Then came the paint.
The bowl waited, already prepared, the same shimmering red. But this time it wasn’t ritual. It was armor.
As Alcmene dipped the brush and brought it to my skin, I felt the shift. Like an edge hovering just above flesh. Like iron being pressed, not hot, but holy. Eachstroke carried its own intent. A curse. A branding. A memory written in metal and grief.
The red seared across my chest. Down the curve of my arm. Across the bruises on my ribs from Menelaus’s frantic fingers.
I stood there, tears still streaking down my cheeks, as she turned me into something that glittered. Something I hoped was unbreakable.
Even if that word tasted like an impossibility.
Chapter36
Sparta had not entered its golden age.
And I wasnotits golden queen.
A month of marriage to Menelaus had taught me that all my hopes and plans would not come in the shape I’d imagined.
The hall reeked of wine and grease from the banquet I’d put together. Meat juices slicked the marble floor. Musicians sawed at their strings, dancers spun until sweat turned their silks transparent, and the nobles below clapped as though this was triumph, this spectacle of indulgence.
I sat beside Menelaus on a throne that felt more like a shackle than a seat, a laurel crown biting into my temples. To the revelers, I gleamed, a goddess painted in mortal flesh. But my nails scored my palms, and my jaw ached from keeping it shut.
This was not glory. This was a gilded sickness.
Menelaus leaned forward, his forearms corded with muscle, every scar etched into his sun-dark skin on display. He raised his goblet high, wine sloshing dark as blood, and drank deep. Rings glittered on his hands as he slammed them down with a crack that rattled the table, and his laughter followed, loud and unchallenged. The hall laughed with him a heartbeat later, too afraid not to.
The once-golden son of Sparta, still as powerful as any warrior in the room. But his strength no longer served discipline. It served appetite.
And I, his queen, was nothing more than a jewel on his throne and a body in his bed, still trying to figure out how to be more.
