The sword pressed harder against him, the point digging into his skin with every word I forced out. “It even looked like you were in it with Menelaus … or the High Priestess. Like you wanted me to lose.”
I held his gaze, searching for anything—denial, anger, regret. Some shred of truth that might make this make sense.
But there was nothing. Just silence.
Heavy. Unmoving.Infuriating.
A bitter breath slipped out of me. I stepped back, the heat in my chest collapsing into something colder. The sword slid from my hand and hit the stones with a clatter.
“Forget it,” I said tightly, even as everything inside me still burned.
“I did want you to fail.”
The words slammed into me with more force than any weapon he’d swung. I staggered a fraction, breath catching hard, as if he’d driven something straight into my ribs.
Gods.
My hands curled into fists, nails biting my palms. Heat flared up my neck, and my veil swayed with the sudden shift of air, brushing my cheek like it was trying to hide me from this … or hidehimfrom what I was about to do.
“How dare you,” I growled. “This isn’t only aboutme. It’s about Amyklai. About every child who goes to bed hungry, about every villager who loses their loved ones and still wakes up to fight another day. They’re counting on me, and you almost made me fail them today! Why?” The last word came out devastated, trembling with everything I couldn’t contain. “Why would you try to make me lose?”
I wanted the truth. I wanted to understand him … so I could hate him properly.
His jaw flexed, a muscle jumping hard, and then the words tore out of him before he could stop them. “Because you broke me!” Achilles snapped. “In front of Menelaus, in front of everyone. And I wanted to break you back. I wanted you tofeelit, this thing inside me you’ve infected me with.”
The confession hung between us.
He looked away, as if wrestling something down. When he spoke again, the words came slower, drawn from a place he clearly didn’t want touched.
“And because passing means staying,” he whispered. “And staying … means you’ll marry him.”
The words landed hard. Not like the cut he’d given me, but deep, like roots sinking into the soil. Something treacherous stirred in my stomach, rising like a warning. Not a feeling I could name, just heat and the unbearable, devastating truth of it …
He wasn’t just a threat to my crown.
He was a threat tome.
“You don’t want me to win,” I said, still trying to comprehend his words.
He watched me with that maddening stillness of his. “I don’t want you to belong tohim.”
The words didn’t echo. They didn’t need to. They simply lived there, suspended between us, stark and unvarnished.
I looked at him, and I saw it.
The longing.
It wasn’t loud or obvious. It lived in the small betrayals of his body, the way his jaw clenched after the words left him, like he hated that he’d said them and needed me to hear them anyway. It was in the way his gaze roamed across me … reverent and greedy in the way a starving man might look at a feast he had no right to touch.
His chest rose like he was holding something in, something aching. His fingers curled into fists at his sides. Gods. He looked at me like he would tear the world apart stone by stone if it meant keeping it from touching me.
And it undid me.
I felt it everywhere, behind my eyes, down my spine, pooling hot and frantic in my belly. A dozen feelings warred beneath my skin: fury, confusion, something too much like want.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
I wasn’t supposed to feel … anything.
