He tilted his head. “No, my queen. I’m the cure you don’t want to swallow.”
A ceiling beam crashed behind us. Sparks showered the corridor. I flinched, but I couldn’t stop walking. Couldn’t stop obeying.
The statue of Menelaus loomed at the end of the room, cracked from crown to base. The flames licked up its legs, blackening the marble, charring the solemn face that had once watched Anysa die.
My breath hitched. “Aren’t you afraid?” I asked. “Of Menelaus?”
Theron’s smile deepened, dark and crooked, as though I’d offered him a bedtime story. “Menelaus?” he echoed, tasting the name like it was a joke he’d already solved. “Once, maybe, he could slay the gods and Sparta trembled at the sound.”
He spun the bone lazily between his fingers, an absent, almost mocking gesture, its pale length catching what little light the room still had.
“But power like his …” His gaze drifted to the crumbling Menelaus statue, its marble eyes stained as if they’d wept something older than soot. “It thins. It leaks. It forgets how to hold itself.”
The bone clicked softly as he twirled it again.
He stepped closer, close enough that the heat of the fire blurred with his breath. His eyes caught mine, bright with promise. “Menelaus should have been more afraid of what comesafterthe gods.”
The words still shivered through me when a knot of guards surged from the smoke, their faces smeared black with soot, swords lifted as they rushed to drag me from him. “Free the queen!” they cried.
“Now they want to help,” Theron said exasperatedly, waving his sigiled hand again. The air shimmered, and the men locked mid-stride, bodies caught as if the world had clenched around them. “Where were they the rest of the time?”
My blood iced. Achilles … Alcmene … where were they? Did Theron’s protection from the fire extend to them?
“Please.” I gasped, though the word dissolved as soon as it left me.
A beam collapsed with a crash right behind us, and Theron didn’t so much as flinch. His hand closed over mine, and heat flared where our skin met, his sigils spilling their light into me until my palm blazed with borrowed fire. My breath caught, my body bound to his rhythm.
He leaned close, his voice tickling my ear. “Time to get out of here, Your Majesty. But please don’t mistake this for the end. It’s only the opening move.”
The glow seared brighter, painting the corridor in red and white. I wanted to wrench away, to fight, to burn him with my hate … but my fingers tightened around his as if the choice had never been mine.
The palace shook, flames devouring everything they touched.
And still, Theron only smiled.
The wind howled across the cliffs I’d once looked out on, heavy with salt and something colder. Something ending.
Theron dragged me up the last cruel stretch. My sandals slipped against the red stone, the climb jarring and relentless, but it wasn’t the strain in my legs that consumed me. “You don’t have to do this,” I rasped for the millionth time. “Youcan’tdo this.”
He didn’t answer. Not until we reached the edge, where the red sea kissed the sky. There, he stopped. The moon cast a glow across his midnight hair as he turned, his eyes gazing first at the burning world below us … then to me.
“Imust, Helena,” he murmured, his voice edged with certainty.
I blinked, and when my eyes opened again, he was breaking apart.
The gold at his collar flared too bright to bear, searing my vision, then split downward in streams of light. His skin cracked open like fired clay, but what spilled through was not blood. Smoke bled out in streams. Fire licked along the fractures, peeling him away strip by strip until the man I knew was nothing but unraveling ash on the wind.
My heart hammered as I stared at him in disbelief.
His eyes were no longer violet but blazing, molten starlight burning from within. His skin glowed as if an eternal sun had kissed it raw, runes alive and pulsing across his chest.
Wings burst from his back, vast and black, their edges smoldering with flame. They unfurled with a sound like tearing sky, spanning wide enough to drown the moonlight before folding close again, shadow curling at their tips.
The air bent around him. The cliff shook beneath us. Lightning spidered across the clouds.
And in that blink, in that breath … the man I’d known was gone.
What stood before me was no mortal. He was terrible. And divine.
