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The hull scraped against the shore. The gangplank dropped with a groan.

Her attendants disembarked first. Spartan nobles, servants, quiet guardians of her girlhood. They would return across the sea, bearing word of her safe arrival to her father. But she would not return.

When her feet touched Ithacan soil, she looked up—and found him there. Even wind-lashed and salt-sprayed, she was beautiful. Not with the polished sheen of girls from distant courts with practiced charm and rehearsed grace. Her beauty had been wilder somehow, untouched by vanity and unburnished by time. It held a fierce, quiet purity. Not asking to be seen, yet impossible to ignore.

He stepped forward, closing the distance between them. “My lady.” His voice was steady against the sound of the surf. “Welcome to Ithaca.”

Then he had offered his hand.

A breath had passed between them, just long enough for him to see it flicker in her eyes. Awareness. Sharp recognition of the threshold she now crossed. Everything ahead was unknown to her.

She had been Penelope, daughter of Icarius. Now she would be Penelope, wife of Odysseus. Under his name. Beneath his roof. Within his keeping.

Her fingers touched his—chilled from the voyage, soft against his calloused grasp as he closed his hand around hers.

That first night, she had trembled beneath his touch.

Amid the hush of ancient stone and flickering firelight, he’d approached her slowly. She stood beside the olive-wood bed—the bed he had carved himself from the living tree that grew up through the palace, its roots sunk deep into Ithacan soil, gnarled and ancient. Her hair was still damp from the bath, the scent of myrrh and lavender clinging softly to her skin.

It had struck him then, the swift realization that he could not wield tenderness as he did a blade.

He had moved slowly, spoken softly. Held her as if she were something sacred, touching gently as he guided her against him, then took them to the bed.

It was tentative, at first—two strangers, bound by vow but not yet by knowing. The air between them shimmered with nerves and newness. But slowly, like a tide turning, it became inevitable as breath found rhythm and her body answered his.

When he brought her to pleasure—when she arched beneath him, a soft, gasping cry torn from her lips—it echoed through him, fierce and soul-deep. With her pleasure, his own followed, swift and unstoppable. A storm breaking within him, a wave crashing hard against the shore of her body.

As dawn’s first light crept through the window, pale and gold, he found her curled against him. Her body was tucked into his as though it had always belonged there, her breath warm against his collarbone, her hair spilling in dark ribbons across his bed. One hand rested over his heart, a quiet claim of her own.

Now, the memory of that night still burned in his chest. He had carried it to Troy like a secret held beneath his armor. The taste of her fear. The sound of her sighs. The fragile bloom of trust that had risen between them in those still, intimate hours—

Now tested mercilessly by time, war, by the gods themselves.

Still, he held onto it with the ferocity of a man who knew the worth of what he’d been given.

Within nine months, she had borne him a son. A strong, clear-eyed boy whose first cries had rung through Ithaca’s halls with promise.

Telemachus.

Odysseus had held him close. Had traced the curve of his cheek with his thumb and pressed a kiss to his downy brow. Then he had turned away, taking up the spear.

His son had been only a month old when he sailed for Troy.

Amid the slaughter of war, Odysseus had buried the memories deep, sealed away beneath duty and survival. Grief was a weakness he could not afford, and longing was a blade that cut too deep.

But now, bound for Ithaca’s shores, the memories surged—vivid, relentless. He ached to see the boy’s face. To find him standing tall beside Penelope, to measure the boy time had carved from the babe he’d once cradled.

His grip tightened on the ship’s rail, knuckles whitening. Around him, his men moved with surety of seasoned sailors, hauling in heavy oars, laying them flat across the deck. The rhythmic creak of the timbers was muffled by the sea’s roar.

But Odysseus heard none of it.

His eyes were locked on the horizon, where a black wall of storm clouds brewed. An iron knot twisted in his stomach, coiling tighter with each breath.

“But hear me, king of Ithaca—the gods do not condone butchery. If you stand among those who indulge it, you will share in their doom.”

Athena’s stern warning echoed sharply in his ears. And with it, more memories.

The terrified screams of Trojan children, piercing and short-lived. And then, the brutal silence that followed. The groans of women dragged to the ground, their cries swallowed by the earth. The brittle wails of the old, too weak to flee, falling beneath blades slick with blood.