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“You look cold,” came her voice, so soft it cut right through him. “Are you all right?”
And Zeus had no idea how to answer that.
Nina was beside him in the next moment, kneeling down with him on the thick, priceless rug before the fire. She drew the coverlet with her, wrapping it around the both of them while she slid her legs beneath the quilt.
He thought she would ask questions, but she didn’t. She only sat with him, her thigh against his, until he shifted her so he could hold her before him. She sat between his legs and leaned back, resting her head against his shoulder.
Even then, she only gazed into the fire. As if she knew that simply sitting with him soothed him, somehow. It was as if the heat of her body was hope itself, curling its way into him whether he wanted it there or not.
Whether he wanted to believe in it or not.
He rested his chin on the top of her head. He wrapped his arms around her.
It was only then, in a room dark save for the fire, that he found himself able to talk.
“They say my mother died of heart failure,” he told her, amazed at how easily the words came after so long spent holding them in. And letting them poison him. “And in the end, she did. But it was more complicated than that.”
“I’m so sorry,” Nina murmured.
Somehow that made him want to go on rather than stop, when he would have said he was allergic to pity.
“I told you what a joy she was, but there were many others who did not think so. My father chief among them.” He heard Nina murmur something and held her tighter. “I cannot say when I began to understand that the way my father spoke to her made something in her die a little. He was so much older, you see. She had been given to him after his first Queen died, taking his hopes of extending his bloodline with her. That was what he cared about. Bloodlines. The throne. The kingdom. What he did not care about was his young, silly second wife, who he took on purely to breed an heir.”
“Maybe he didn’t know how to care about anything but those things,” Nina said softly. “Do you know what his relationship was like with his first wife?”
That walloped Zeus. Hard. Because in all this time, across all these years and all the bitter hours he had spent cataloging his father’s many sins, it had never occurred to him to think of such a thing. He knew about the Queen who had come before his mother. He knew her name and some part of her story. But he’d been so focused on the wrong that had been done to his mother that he had never asked too many questions about the woman who had preceded her.
“I always assumed she suffered the same fate,” he said.
“But you don’t know?” Nina sighed a little. “Maybe he loved her. And hated that he couldn’t have her but felt he needed to have a child.”
“Nina.” Oddly enough, he wanted to laugh. “Do not defend him.”
“I’m not defending him,” she replied. “It’s not his heart I’m worried about.”
His own heart kicked at him unpleasantly. But he kept going. “My mother was soft. It was part of what made her sweet, but she was no match for life at court. The courtiers and sycophants took their cues from my father, and she wasn’t like you. She didn’t know how to hide herself away. She didn’t know how to protect who she was inside. And each harsh word, each bit of malice, each laugh at her expense took more and more from her.”
Zeus couldn’t remember now why he’d started to tell her this story. But as she nestled in closer against him, something in him eased. Or made room, maybe, so that he could keep going.
“First she would harm herself,” he said. “Bruises. Cuts. Not where anyone could see when she was in public. But I saw.” He shook his head. “Over time, it became clear that she wasn’t eating. That every time someone criticized her, she punished herself for her flaws by taking away food. And then, I suppose, it was not so much a punishment any longer, but how she made her point. How she got the last word.”
“Zeus...” Nina whispered.
“They tried to intervene. But in the end, I suppose it was the one place she could assert her will, so she did. And eventually, her heart gave out.”
He heard her whisper his name again. He felt the touch of her lips at the side of his neck.
And he had never told anyone this story before. It was the only story that mattered, and he peddled his stories to anyone who would run with them, but he never gave them this one. Maybe it was that Nina knew tragedy, too. Or maybe it was that she was Nina. And the simple fact of her, sitting here and bearing witness to this tale, made it better.
Not what had happened. But how it sat in him, even now.
“I was eleven years old.” Zeus pulled in a breath. “And I was the one who sat with her at the last. And in my rage and grief, that day and into her funeral, I made a vow. I promised her as she was laid to rest that I would keep it.”
Nina slid her hand over his chest. It took him a moment to realize she’d put her hand over his heart. He covered it with his.
“It was my father who could have helped her. Who, if not the King? Her husband? He could have stopped what was happening. He could have thrown out anyone who dared speak ill of her. He could have stopped criticizing her himself. There were any number of things he could have done, but he didn’t.” Zeus heard that roughness in his voice. He knew it told too many truths about him—more than he liked to share. Perhaps even with himself. “I vowed that I would ruin the one thing that mattered to him.”
He heard her quick, indrawn breath, though Nina said nothing. But she didn’t have to.
