Page 166 of Where Darkness Bloomed
The words slammed into her again, cleaving through the chaos like a divine command. She had thought them a warning. A threat from a man shaped by violence, devoid of mercy.
Now, she realized—they had been an instruction. A promise.
Her lips parted, but no words emerged. There were none. Only the roar of her heartbeat, and the impossible presence of him here—real, alive, burning at the edges of her world.
As his gaze held hers, something flared in the space between them. A tether suddenly sparking to life. Bright, wordless, as undeniable as it was inseverable. It held for a breathless instant, time folding in on itself.
Amid the violence of the garden, another throng of soldiers surged forward, and Achilles’s gaze broke away from her. It hardened like iron drawn across flame, lethal.
He rose, turning from her. The sword in his hand flashed, bright and brutal. A blur of death.
Blood arced. Bodies fell like wheat to the scythe. He moved without hesitation, meeting each soldier on the stairs with the same swift, unerring strikes. A warrior sculpted for slaughter, cutting down men as if he’d been born for nothing else.
A sudden flicker of movement drew Helen’s attention, her eyes snapping upward.
On the balcony, outlined against the fire-lit sky—
Paris.
The blue robe of Trojan royalty billowed around him. Rage twisted hisfeatures, his dark eyes bright with hatred. His fingers curled around his bow, an arrow sliding onto the string.
He raised it, drawing back.
Then, behind him... the air shimmered.
A ripple of gold lit the sky just above Paris’s shoulder. An ethereal figure took shape, radiant and terrible. The god’s eyes gleamed with cold intent as he reached out, brushing a finger along the arrow’s fletching.
“Strike.”
The command reverberated through the air, otherworldly, absolute.
Time slowed to a crawl as the bowstring thrummed.
Helen’s scream clawed its way from her throat.
“No!”
Like an arc of golden sun, the arrow bent and flexed, glinting in the torchlight as it flew across the distance.
It struck.
The point buried deep into the heel of Achilles’s right foot as he felled another soldier with a powerful blow.
For half a heartbeat, relief surged through her. A small wound, nonlethal.
But then Achilles’s body locked rigidly, muscles seizing in sudden, brutal agony. The sword slipped from his grasp, clattering against the crimson stone.
His form folded, collapsing to his knees.
Horror sliced through her as his eyes found her again. They were distant now, dimmed. The gaze of one already fading, already reaching for the edge of the world.
And she knew.
Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, a thin line that dripped onto his bronze breastplate. Another crimson thread slid from his nostril, trailing down his chin.
Still, he looked at her with those fierce, unreadable eyes.
For a moment, it was only them.
