Page 67 of The Ruin of Eros

I thought we lived in a protected place. In a protected time.

Our town is one favored by the gods—that was what our king used to say.

I walk through the rooms, which feel cold and no longer mine. It’s not just the emptiness, not just the fine layer of settled dust. Before, the rooms would seem to turn their faces toward me when I entered. Now, they look blindly past me. They don’t know I’m here, or if they know, they no longer care.

This was the place I longed for when I thought myself a prisoner in a demon’s palace. The only home I knew. The place of all my memories.

I trail a hand along the wall, and make my way from my old room to Dimitra’s, and then to Father’s—it used to smell of him, but now it only smells of dust and stone. I open the great wood chest where he kept his clothes. Most of them look to be still here. If he packed some for a journey, they were very few. I run my hands over an old, grey cloak at the bottom of the chest, and pull it out.

I rub the light wool cloak between my thumb and forefinger. My head throbs. I dare not close my eyes, I dare not stop moving. Because if I pause for an instant I will think of him, and theenormity of it all will paralyze me. My cloaked stranger, my demon husband: the one who told me to forget him.

I know what happens to mortals who fall for gods. It never ends well.

And he is Aphrodite’s own son!No wonder he feared her wrath. No wonder he knew she’d hunt me forever: I’m the reason her own son went against her.

And what will she do, now that she knows what he has done? How he cheated and defied his own mother, to save me? I finger the medallion at my neck. I can’t un-see that look in his eyes, the pain of betrayal, the awful resignation.

Enough.I must push these thoughts from my mind.

My father’s room is not so empty as downstairs. The looters did not bother with much here, I suppose—

These things are valuable only to a loved one. The tray where he keeps his brush and soap and scent; his liniments, and the picks he uses for his teeth. And there at the back, a wooden box I know well.

Too sharp for little fingers.

The small, jeweled knife my mother brought with her from Atlantis. The only thing of value she owned. The sheath is old and slightly rusted when I lift it from the box. I slide the knife out to examine the blade.

Still sharp.

I don’t know how my mother came to possess such an object. I asked my father once and I think he was uncomfortable; it seemed to me that he believed my mother might have stolen it. She had lived a hard life, he said, before she came to Sikyon. But for a weapon it was a pretty thing, he admitted. Why should she not treasure it the way other wives might treasure a rich bracelet or a diadem made of gold?

The opals in the hilt catch the light, flaring like tiny flames. I don my father’s cloak, and slip the dagger in one of its deep pockets. It can be dangerous, for a woman traveling alone.

I start, then, at a noise from downstairs. Just the horse, growing restless outside? Or a stray animal perhaps, overturning something in the kitchen.Or something else altogether.I move quietly to the head of the stairs.

If someone is here to loot, they can have what they like. Most things of value are gone, and what is left I don’t care for. But I’m remembering the shadows in the windows that moved as I rode by. Watching me. In a pillaged town, looters may come for more than jewels…

My hand closes around the knife in my pocket. I take a few silent steps down the stairs.

“Lydia?” I stop short.

It’s no marauder—just our old neighbor, Lydia, who taught me to weave when I was only waist-high.

“I—I thought you were an intruder. Here for looting.” My breath catches in a foolish half-laugh. Her milky eyes look me over.

“Psyche.” Her voice is solemn and unsurprised. “So you are not dead after all.”

“I am not.” Though I almost feel it, today. Walking through the devastation of Sikyon, a part of me seems to have died with it.

Lydia’s gaze is steady. I notice that, though she looks much the same as before, her clothes are covered with a layer of dirt, and there is a small gash at her left temple that is still in the way of healing.

“Your sister said she saw the monster that came for you. That he was the size of a tall man, but all shadow. And that later he sprouted terrible wings, and carried you away.”

“It is so.”

“But he did not kill you.”

“The opposite,” I say, and my throat constricts.

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