When he laid me back on the bed, there was no rush in him. He moved over me as though the moment itself was holy, his body a vow pressed close to mine, his hands mapping every line of me with the certainty of a man who had always known the way.
And I let him.
Because part of me needed to feel wanted. Needed to feel like someone saw the pieces of me and didn’t turn away.
He made love to me with the same aching devotion, but something in me stayed untouched.
Not my body. Not my heart.
But a space deep within that I was struggling to let him reach.
His touch was usually enough to quiet the war in me. Tonight, it was reminding me that I was still in it.
And no amount of tenderness could change the fact that in the daylight, I bled all alone.
Even when he kissed me like salvation, it felt like a prayer given too late.
His breath caught as our bodies joined, and for a few aching moments, it felt like the world had narrowed to this bed, this firelit silence, this man who felt like a refuge. He whispered my name, and I held his face between my hands, searching for something I was struggling to name.
His touch was everything it had always been … gentle and adoring. But where it once unraveled me, tonight it no longer reached as deep. I responded to him because I knew how. Because I remembered the rhythm. But it almost felt like echoes, like dancing in the ruins of a temple that was collapsing.
He moved inside me like I was something fragile, something breakable, and it only made the ache worse. Not because of the pain, but because I kept reaching for that place we shared, unsure why it felt further away than it should have.
My fingers dug into his shoulders, desperate to tether myself to him. To remind myself that his love was my armor.
“Tell me again,” I whispered. “Tell me we’ll have more than this.”
His mouth moved over my skin. “You’ll be free. You’ll be safe. You’ll be mine.”
But the promises slid off my heart like water on glass.
And when we finished, tangled in sheets and sweat and silence, he reached for me, but I turned my face to the side.
Not cold.
Just tired.
And desperate for something I was beginning to realize I no longer expected.
Chapter51
Roses.
My nose wrinkled at the cloying sweetness rising from the bath, steam curling into the shafts of morning light that spilled across the tiles. The servants had already released the water from the valve in the wall, the rush fading to a trickle. Now they moved with hushed precision, drizzling oils across the surface and crushing herbs between their fingers so the scents bled into the air.
I stood at the edge in my robe, arms crossed tight against the cool breeze drifting from the balcony.
I had never seen roses before coming here. But now their smell followed me everywhere, perfuming the halls, pressed into my clothes, steeped in my bath.
If you had shown me a rose in Amyklai, I would have been in awe of it.
Now, I hated them.
I was about to drop my robe and step into the bath when Alcmene’s hand shot out, clamping around my arm. Her nails bit into my skin. “Don’t touch the water!” she cried. “Look at it!”
I jolted back, my eyes widening as I saw that the roses floating on the surface had begun to blacken at the edges, their petals shriveling, sizzling as if the bath were eating them alive.
One of the younger girls, Lysa, barely past her fifteenth summer, had been kneeling beside the bath with a jar in hand, and she jerked back in surprise at Alcmene’s cry. Her foot slipped. Her hand flailed.
