“But she was already dead inside, Elena. I knew it. I saw it in her eyes that night. Because when she saw me, she knew she’d failed at giving us the only thing she could give us, keeping that from us.”

Elena trailed her hand up his chest, his neck, to cup his jaw.

“By the mercy of the goddess, that’s the most tragic thing I’ve ever heard.”

“I’m born of rape, Ellie.”

She dropped her head, resting her forehead against his shoulder.

“So was Trajan. Gods,” he groaned, seeing his mother in his mind’s eye. “She was beautiful, Ellie. So lovely.”

She lifted her head and stared into his eyes.

Hers were bright with tears.

Cassius kept talking.

“She loved us both, so fucking much. I still hear her voice reading us stories or singing me to sleep. I still feel her arms around me and how she would hold me tight. I see her expression when we were brought down to the breakfast table. Her face lit up with such gladness at the sight of her two boys.”

“I’m glad she at least had you.”

He had always wondered about that.

It seemed he and Trajan were the only things that gave her joy.

But how could they with the way they’d been conceived?

He did not ask Ellie about that.

He told her, “It was not a love match from the beginning. Father coveted her beauty, and as king, he could have it. So he took it. She hated him. She feared him. She recoiled every time he was near. She always seemed to move to protect us from him. And I knew nothing but her cuts and scrapes, bruises and swelling, limping and holding herself carefully. I wouldn’t know, until much later, that it was he who made her so. That it was not normal for a woman to be like that. It was just, then, all that I knew.”

He lifted his hand and curled his fingers around hers at his jaw.

“My stories do not get worse than that, lamb,” he said. “But they are not much better. Now, do you understand why I did not wish you to carry this weight?”

“I do, and so now, do you see that I have not broken under it?” she asked.

He shook his head. “Elena, more grows from that. This kind of atrocity, this kind of evil, it breeds and spreads and infects everything around it. For me, I’m angry at her almost as much as I hate him. She fought him in the act. Years she’d endured that, and she still fought. Why did she not continue to fight? Why did she not try to get away? Perhaps she could have escaped. To The Enchantments. To Mar-el. Being a bounden, she’d have more rights and protections than she did in that bloody citadel.”

“She still would have had to leave you.”