Page 112 of Where Darkness Bloomed
How many had been sacrificed for this cause? How many hadhekilled for this purpose?
Too many to count.
The truth sat on his tongue, bitter as ash.
Rain slicked the parchment still clenched in his fist, ink smudging at the edges. The servant girl’s words echoed in his mind, a silent refrain.
If she was to be believed, Helen of Sparta was not merely beautiful... she was clever. Through the bars of her prison, she had watched. Learned. And reached two undeniable conclusions.
First—Achilles offered no allegiance to Agamemnon.
Second—the men didn’t fight for the bloated king sprawled in the shade, gold cup in hand. They fought forhim.
In both, she was right.
When he’d withdrawn before over Agamemnon’s insult, the army had staggered beneath the blow. Without him, without the Myrmidons, the Greeks losses had been heavy. The camp grew restless, then mutinous. Agamemnon had tasted it then, the sharp tang of fear. Fear of rebellion, of a blade in the dark at the hands of men who’d grown tired of dying on foreign soil.
In desperation, he’d offered bribes: gold, women, titles, and hollow words of humility. Each meant to tempt Achilles back to the battlefield.
But Achilles had refused them all. His hatred for Agamemnon was a chain of iron. His pride, the key.
Only Patroclus’s death—sudden and shattering—had drawn him back to the battlefield. Not duty. Not glory.
Grief.
But the servant girl had confirmed something else, too. Something that twisted hotly inside him like a blade drawn from theforge—
Helen of Sparta had not willingly become Helen of Troy.
She had been taken. Stolen. Torn from her homeland like a blossom ripped from the roots—beauty bruised, will crushed beneath a coward’s heel.
And Paris had done it for reasons Achilles knew too well.
War turned men into beasts. But Paris had been a beast even in peace. He hadn’t taken her for love nor devotion, as the poets now claimed. His hunger had been baser, uglier. The lust of a man grasping at something far more precious than his own skin.
He had caged her high inside the doomed city, smiling with serpentine pride while his brother bled and the world burned.
Achilles’s breath came harshly, feeding the firestorm beneath his ribs.
He had long silenced the boy he’d once been, the child who believed in heroes and noble causes. That boy was buried beneath a mountain of dead men, piled high and rotting on the plain. That boy had fallen beside Patroclus.
But now, this.
A woman carrying the weight of ten thousand graves.
Yet despite everything, the horrors she’d witnessed, the chains of captivity, the violence inflicted—Helen endured. With silent defiance, she now reached through the bars of her cage, hand outstretched toward the innocent. Even as none came to save her.
The memory of her eyes surfaced fiercely, striking like a spear. Sapphire eyes that burned against the fabric of his nights, turning his dreams restless and black. Eyes that had seen too much, that held tragedy beyond bearing. Not just the brutality waged in her name, but what had been done to her. Conquest played out nightly behind locked doors.
Something primal ripped free in Achilles’s chest. His fingers twitched, aching for the familiar weight of his spear. In the bay, the sea churned furiously, its wrath rising with his own.
Paris would answer for it, all of it. There would be no noble reckoning as there had been with Hector. No pretense of glory. Glory was a lie—a heap of mangled flesh and shit, trampled underfoot on the blood-drenched fields.
This would be vengeance. Pure, uncomplicated.
Paris’s fate was already written. His every breath was borrowed, stolen from the edge of Achilles’s blade, whetted with every vile act he’d dared commit. Against her.
The wind howled past Achilles’s ears, alive with salt and storm. And in it, a voice:
