His answer came in motion. He spun me so abruptly I staggered forward into him, my palms smacking against him. His hands seized my shoulders, fingers biting into my flesh, and he shook me, hard enough to rattle the darkness from my skull.
“What in Hades’s name were you doing?” His eyes blazed down into mine, fierce, accusing, and terrified all at once.
My breath hitched. “What does it look like?” I spat, my voice trembling. “I’m ending it.”
“Ending it?” His jaw locked; his nostrils flared. “No!” His grip tightened on my shoulders, dragging me closer. “You’re letting him win.”
I shoved at his chest, pounding my fists against him, but he didn’t move. He didn’t even sway.
“I can’t do this!” My voice cracked. “I’m not strong enough. I’m not like you. I’m not a soldier. All I wanted was to save my people. I thought I could sway him, and look at what I’ve become instead. I’m athing. A body they dress in red and gold and parade like a prize. But not a prize they want to keep or cherish … a prize they want to use and then destroy.”
The words tore out of me, shaking, but his eyes only burned brighter. His expression split, fury and anguish tangling in his face.
In a heartbeat his trembling hands were framing my face as if he meant to fix me there. His thumbs pressed hard against my cheeks, holding me so I couldn’t look away. “You think I don’t see it?” His voice rasped, hoarse with rage. “You think I don’t feel it?”
“Feel what?” I spat, choking on the words.
His breath hitched. “This. You. I watch you walk into a room, and the world forgets anyone else exists. I watch you kneel for a man who deserves nothing of you, and it burns me alive. I walk these halls like a ghost, waiting—praying—that the Fates might twist their weave and place you in my path. That one day, you’ll look at me and see what I already am … yours.”
I stared at him, stunned, the words striking deeper than any blade could.
His forehead pressed to mine, the heat of him searing. “I’m already lost,” he whispered. “But if you vanish—if you fall into the dark where I can’t follow—then everything I am, everything I’ve sworn to, burns with you. So go ahead, Helena. Step into the shadow. But know this.”
His grip tightened, fierce and desperate, his voice shaking with fear, and something I couldn’t name. “I will follow. Into silence. Into death itself. Because I am already yours. And I would rather be destroyed beside you than draw breath in a world where you’re gone.”
Something inside me split open, something I had fought so long to keep bound, and it came undone all at once. Like a scream wrenching free after being strangled in my chest since the day I was first paraded before the court in white.
And suddenly … I wanted to breathe.
Not for Amyklai.
Not for the king. Not for Sparta. Not for the cage of silks and crowns that had smothered me.
But for this.
For the fury in his eyes, the fire in his voice, the way his hands trembled against my skin as though losing me would unmake him. For the first time in weeks, something pierced the haze of misery. For the first time in weeks, something feltreal.
I clung to it. To him. To the fragile, impossible thought that maybe—just maybe—I wasn’t ready to vanish after all.
His eyes burned into mine, and then he fused his mouth to my lips like it was the only way to keep breathing.
There was nothing soft about it. Nothing hesitant.
He crashed against me like a dam giving way, like months of restraint had finally burst into a flood that neither of us could stop.
He kissed me like he was claiming what had always been his.
Like I was air and he’d been suffocating.
Like he was parched, and I was water spilling over his tongue.
Like his soul recognized mine and had waited lifetimes to come home.
The air trembled between us, alive with something that felt like it could shatter stone. My body seized, breath ripped from my lungs, the taste of him tilting the world off its axis. All I could do was clutch at him, clinging as the fire between us roared high enough to consume everything else.
My knees buckled.
He caught me and his mouth hovered a breath from mine. “Don’t ever do that again,” he rasped. “Don’t ever make me feel that kind of fear.”
