The voice came from behind me, low and warm, carrying the particular authority of someone who had spent decades being obeyed.
“Poseidon’s children have always been romantic, even when their patron is not.”
I turned.
She stood at the stern rail as though she’d always been there. She was tall, with silver threaded through her dark hair, held motionless by the frozen wind. She wore an elegant Grecian gown, the kind that might have been right at home on one of the engravings at the Heraion. She was beautiful, but in a sharp way, like a statue that had been worn thin by time.
Her eyes were the same color as mine.
“You’re Penelope.” I didn’t know where the instinctual knowledge came from, but I had no doubt it was true.
“And you are Helena’s daughter.” She crossed the deck toward me, her soft footsteps somehow both soundless and heavy. “I have been watching you for some time. You are very much like her, though I imagine that is not what you want to hear.”
“It isn’t.”
She stopped beside the frozen Orion and studied his face with a strange expression. There was tenderness in her eyes, but also a faint, aching disappointment. “He believes he is correcting a cosmic error. That if a Hera Omega chooses a Poseidon Alpha freely, the wound between our Houses will finally close.” She touched Orion’s frozen cheek with two fingers. “He has been telling himself this story for so long that he no longer sees the woman in front of him. Only the symbol. Perhaps he doesn’t even see himself.”
She turned back to me. “But you should understand what actually happened before you decide anything.”
She gestured toward Orion’s motionless body.
A man stepped out of him. One moment there was only Orion, frozen and beautiful. The next, a second figure peeled forward from the same space and stumbled onto the deck.
He was covered in blood. It darkened his arms to the elbows and streaked the torn fabric across his chest. His hands glowed green at the fingertips, faint and guttering. Where his bare feet met the deck, moisture beaded and pooled. I knew him immediately. Odysseus.
Around us, the yacht shimmered. Bodies appeared on the deck, translucent and drifting, sprawled across the polished wood like drowned men washed ashore. I counted a hundred of them before I stopped trying. Some had faces twisted in terror. Otherssimply lay still with thin trickles of brine leaking from their mouths.
“The bodies of my suitors.” Penelope kept her gaze on the frozen horizon, her hands folded at her waist. “He killed them all with seawater. Every cup, every basin, every drop of moisture in the palace. They drowned on dry land.”
The phantom Odysseus moved through the carnage without seeing it. His eyes searched the space above him. His body leaned upward, pulled toward something he had not yet found.
“I watched from the gallery.” Penelope’s chin lifted, and the phantom light played across the bones of her face. “And part of me was glad.”
The phantom found a second Penelope, fainter and younger, waiting on the upper deck. He crossed to her in strides that were too fast and too fluid. His hands found her face, and blood and seawater smeared across her skin.
“He claimed me there.” Penelope reached for her own throat, fingers splayed across the place where a bonding mark would sit. “In the corridor, above the dead. His teeth were on my bonding gland before I could stop him. The bond snapped into place, and I could feel everything. His relief, his love, and beneath it all, the ocean. Cold and patient and endless.”
The phantoms dissolved, and the bodies faded with them. The yacht was just a yacht again. Penelope stood beside me with her hands clasped together, her grief worn deep into her features.
“We tried.” Penelope unclasped her hands and let them hang at her sides, open and empty. “For months, we tried to be what we had been. He sat at our table and ate our bread and asked our son about the olive saplings. He wanted so desperately to fit inside the life he’d fought twenty years to reclaim.”
A new image flickered across the deck. Three people sat at a dinner table, eating together. Then the boy embraced his mother from behind, and every cup on the table exploded. Water and wine erupted into the air. A man’s hand locked around the boy’s arm. The Alpha command ripped through the room.
“The wife could endure it.” Penelope’s fingers brushed the phantom boy’s arm, passing through the five darkening bruises that matched the print of a father’s hand. “The mother could not.”
She let the image linger for a moment longer. Then it dissolved, leaving nothing but the deck and the frozen sea and the two of us.
“Orion tells this story as though the tragedy was something I was forced into.” She shook her head. “He doesn’t understand. Odysseus was dangerous. I severed the bond, but not because I was too weak to follow him. I severed it because I was a mother, and I had no other choice.”
She held out her hand. “Let me show you.”
I took it.
The yacht vanished. We stood on a sea wall at night, wind tearing at our clothes. Odysseus was already there, leaning against the stone. He was gaunt. The green in his eyes had nearly swallowed the color entirely.
“Do it.” The phantom Odysseus dug his fingers into the stone until his knuckles whitened. “Now, before I lose my nerve. Before the thing in me decides that keeping you matters more than keeping him whole.”
Penelope’s grip tightened on my hand. She was not watching the memory. She was reliving it, pulling me into the current of it so that the knowledge would settle into my blood the way it lived in hers.