Page 18 of Where Darkness Bloomed
The softness of the moment shattered.
Her eyes flew wide, startled. She stepped back, graceful and swift as moonlight slipping through leaves. Then she was gone, silence closing behind her like a sigh.
Hades remained beneath the laurel boughs, standing among the carpet of moonlit blooms—the earth’s offering to her. The warmth of her skin lingered on his palm.
He stared into the dark where she had vanished. Then, to the silence she’d left behind, he gave a quiet vow.
“For now.”
Chapter 8
Helen’s cheek was pressed against the rough blanket. Her eyes cracked open, lids heavy, and her muscles were knotted with lingering exhaustion. Dull pain pulsed through her.
Like floodgates bursting, memories surged—dark, visceral. Familiar horror expanded in her rib cage, swelling until it choked her.
She dragged a breath slowly through her nose, forcing her eyes shut again. Willing the rising tide of panic to retreat. It clawed at the edges of her mind, threatening to pull her under.
The bed was empty. Paris had not returned.
Relief seeped in, however temporary.
Days had bled into weeks. Like water overflowing a bowl, the weeks had spilled into months. Time blurred in an endless cycle of tortured nights and shattered dawns. Each morning, light spilled over the black memories of the night before, formed by her captor’s hands.
She’d prayed for deliverance. Begged the gods not to wake her to another day. Without mercy, the sun always rose.
“What will happen?” A soft, anxious voice drifted across Paris’s bedchamber.
Helen’s red, swollen eyes shifted to the hearth, where two maidservants hovered. The younger knelt, stacking firewood.
“I don’t know,” the older woman whispered, wringing her hands. “Theprince met with the king at first light, but there’s been no order to return her.”
“But they arehere,” the younger murmured, voice trembling. “Her husband’s army is on our shores. We risk our men, our children...for what? So the prince can keep his prize?”
Dread churned Helen’s stomach, and she swallowed the urge to be sick.
She had relived her last night in Sparta a thousand times. Every detail of it was etched into her memory. The scream trapped in her throat. Her hands clawing at the rough grip over her mouth.
Guilt had become her constant companion, circling her like a vulture around carrion. She should’ve screamed until her voice shattered. Should’ve fought until her fingers bled. Most of all, she should have known Menelaus’s wrath would follow, dragging thousands of her countrymen to Troy’s gates.
On that first horrible night, and every night since, Paris had approached her with ill-fated passion burning in his eyes. A fool, thinking he’d won a great prize of love. Day after day, week after week, he had called himself her protector, insisting Aphrodite herself had chosen him as her truest love.
Even as he forced himself inside her. Even as she lay beneath him, silent and stiff, he whispered of fate and devotion against her skin. But what he offered was something entirely different—
It was possession. A lie wrapped in worthless words, rotting from the inside.
Survive,her instincts whispered.
So she did.
She swallowed every scream. Clenched her fists until her nails bit deep into her palms. Turned a deaf ear to the poisoned words falling from the prince’s foolish lips. And willed walls of iron around her heart.
Day after endless day. Week after week, until time unraveled entirely. A lifetime seemed to pass inside Paris’s bedchamber.
But then the Greeks had arrived.
That morning, everything had changed. It began as a murmur among servants, half-heard voices slipping beneath the door, low and urgent. Then came the clatter of armor, the stamp of feet in the streets as the men were called to arms.
Helen had pressed her ear to the bolted door, desperate to hear, to understand.
