The door between us had closed.
There would be no stepping back through it.
And gods help me … I missed it already.
Chapter25
The final Trial was tomorrow.
The thought worked its way beneath my skin, restless and growing, tightening its hold with each passing hour.
Ten of us remained, ten women draped in silks, balanced atop sandals that blistered our feet, trained for yet another week in how to sit, speak, bow, kneel. How to smile just enough but not too much. How to be the kind of woman a god might want on his arm.
Ten women … who couldn’t afford to lose.
I hadn’t spoken to Achilles since that night in the garden. But I’d seen him.
Briefly. Cruelly.
A glimpse of his back disappearing into a corridor. The tilt of his head in the training yard, too far to reach. Flanked by his soldiers, unreadable and untouchable.
He never came near me. Not once.
But his eyes … his eyes still found me. Swift and staggering, like a memory I hadn’t meant to keep.
I rolled onto my back, sleepless and restless, eyes fixed on the sliver of moonlight slicing across the stone floor. The quiet pressed in too tightly. Roz was late tonight. For the first time, the little creature hadn’t been waiting for me to come to my room. Even it had vanished.
A soft knock suddenly tapped the stone across the room.
“Psst!”
My lips twitched into a relieved smile before I could stop them. I pushed myself upright, heart lifting for the first time all night. “Took you long enough,” I whispered, already crawling toward the hole in the stone. “I was starting to think you’d taken a vow of silence.”
“Your life would be far too tragic without my commentary. I could never be that cruel to you.” Anysa’s voice carried through the hole, smug and bright as ever. “I would have graced you with my presence earlier, but I was trying to decipher a letter from my mother. Took me three reads to figure out she wasn’t saying my brother had married a goat.”
I leaned closer, amused already. “Whatwasshe saying?”
“That they had toeatmy pet goat.”
I froze. Then burst out laughing. “They ate your pet?”
“You sound so scandalized, Helena,” she said dryly. “We’ve got no food. The crops failed. The well dried up. She’d stopped producing milk. It was only a matter of time.”
That was true.
“She was old anyway,” Anysa added. “Practically suicidal. She used to try and jump off cliffs all the time.”
“Sounds like it was her time to go,” I said, my lips still curled in a grin she couldn’t see.
“It’s a hard loss though because I told her everything. My goat was especially good at interpreting my dreams.”
“That’s one of the stranger things you’ve said.”
“She would also chew on my sandal straps while I cried about village boys. Very helpful.”
I pressed my palm to the wall, still smiling. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thanks. She’d appreciate the respect. But really, I think my mother was just trying to soften the blow of saying we were out of goats and out of luck, but at leastsomeonein the family had a chance to be important now.”
