I stiffened, glancing between them. What did he mean by that? Either Mene laus knew something … or he was trying to get under Achilles’s skin.
Menelaus turned back to his throne, the shift of his bulk a wordless decree that the matter was finished.
I was already stepping away, eager to escape the suffocating weight of the hall, when Theron’s voice drifted after me. “Your hunt, great king,” he said lightly. “How did it go?”
Something deeper coiled under the words—too soft to be an open challenge, but too pointed to be anything else.
Menelaus froze mid-step.
For a moment he stared at Theron as though measuring a threat in plain sight. Then he spat, “Unsuccessful.”
His tone was clipped, stripped of its usual swagger, and a hard pause settled in the room.
Across from him, Achilles grimaced, just enough for me to catch it. A momentary crack in his mask. Why?
Why did a single word about the hunt strike him like that?
And why did it feel like I was the only one of the four of us who now didn’t know?
Chapter52
The hallway lay in silence as I staggered through it, my steps uneven, my limbs rubbed raw. Each torch hissed and flared too bright, shadows jerking against the walls like they knew what I had done. What had been done to me. The reek of sex clung to my skin, thick as tar, shame crawling over me with every breath.
I bit the inside of my cheek until blood filled my mouth, salty and metallic, holding back the tears burning at the corners of my eyes.
Menelaus had been the worst he’d ever been as if the failure of his hunt needed a body to punish, and mine was closest. My wrists throbbed where his fingers had clamped down, iron-hard, bruises pulsing beneath the skin. A cut burned across my thigh where his ring had caught and torn, and … the evidence of it all slid down my leg in warm, vile trails, sticky and humiliating.
My foot caught on an uneven stone on the floor and I stumbled, about to fall, until a hand clamped on my arm and steadied me.
“Easy there, Your Majesty,” Theron murmured.
A shiver broke across my skin. Gods. Of all the people I could have collided with, it had to be him.
I forced myself to look at him, reluctant, bracing for the grin I’d come to hate.
His gaze raked over me, over the bruises at my wrists and the tremble in my mouth I couldn’t bite away. The mischief in his eyes vanished. His face didn’t soften with pity … it hardened, set into something sharper and almost foreboding.
I jerked back, not from fear but instinct, a visceral need to keep him from seeing more than he already had.
He didn’t move, but his head tilted and his violet eyes narrowed, pinning me as if he were peeling back every layer I’d tried to bury. As though I were a riddle he’d solved long before I could open my mouth.
“I can help you, you know,” he murmured.
A sound clawed its way out of me, half laugh, half choke. “Do you take me for a fool? That I’d ever accept help from you?”
“No.”
His lips curved, but it wasn’t a smile. It was too thin. Too dark.
“I think you’re drowning,” he said. “And I think they’ve taught you to keep silent while the water fills your lungs.”
I tried to shove past him.
He shifted easily, cutting off my path. “I can make him fall asleep,” he said, his voice almost … bored. “Every time he wants you.”
I froze. The words rang in my skull, not because I believed him …
But because I wanted to.
