But …
My mother’s words echoed in my skull, fierce and pleading.
Filippos, crumpled in the fields, blood painting his face. The boy who wanted to become a man. Gone.
Thalessa. Eyes wide, tongue cut off … left to rot in a cell.
The children, ribs showing through dirt-streaked skin as they trudged past the manor.
The villagers with dust in their lungs and hope draining from their eyes.
Amyklai.
All of them.
Every soul that had ever looked at me and prayed I might change something.
Counting on me.
My throat burned. My eyes slid shut as if darkness could block it out, his face, his voice, the ache in my chest, the want twisting tight and treacherous, the impossible choice lying between us like an altar waiting for a sacrifice. But the pain stayed. Gods, it stayed.
When I opened my eyes again, he was still there. His gaze locked on mine. Unmoving. Unblinking. Waiting like the world might tilt on whatever I chose next.
“I can’t,” I finally breathed.
The words felt like skin tearing.
Achilles went utterly still. Not the poised, battle-ready stillness he wore like armor. This was different. A quiet, stunned halt, as if the ground had shifted beneath his feet.
“What?” he said, the word heavy with disbelief, by something wounded beneath it.
I sat up, the sheet slipping from my shoulders. My chest rose and fell in shallow bursts as I forced the words out, each one cutting through me like a blade I had to wield myself. “My duty is to my people,” I said, the sorrow in my voice unmistakable, shaped from everything I’d lost and everything I still feared losing. “I cannot turn from that. If there is even the smallest chance I could win tomorrow … if there is any path that might save them. I have to take it.”
For a moment, he didn’t move.
He only stared at me disbelievingly, as if the right kind of stillness might rewind the world, might make the words I’d spoken fold themselves back into my chest.
But they didn’t.
And I wouldn’t.
I watched the realization hit him. His shoulders lowered, not in surrender, but in a slow collapse, like something monumental giving under its own weight. Something that had stood too long against too many storms.
And then it happened.
The shift. The unraveling.
Piece by piece, he drew himself inward. The fierce want in his eyes dimmed. The ache in his expression dissolved. The fragile, helpless hope that had trembled through his words moments before faded until what remained was emptiness and an ache that radiated between us like a widening gulf.
There was no rage, no fire, no fight. Just quiet grief that settled over him like dust on forgotten armor.
When he finally spoke, his voice was softer than I’d ever heard it, scraped down to something bare and aching. “I hope you get everything you want.”
He turned without waiting for an answer.
The door opened. Closed.
And the quiet that followed felt like a final breath.
