"I was worried about you. I saw you today in the market and wanted to see how you were doing."
Acheron added more herbs to the pot, then blew on them to stir the embers around them. "I'm well. Now you can go home and sleep in wealth and good conscience." The mocking sarcasm of his tone stung me soul-deep.
I shook my head as tears gathered in my eyes. "How can you do this to yourself?"
He arched a mocking brow. "I'm a trained dog, Ryssa. I'm only doing what I was well taught to do."
"This is so demeaning. How could you have gone back to this?"
His eyes stormy, I saw the rage he bore me. "Gone back to this? Why, big sister, you speak as if this is a bad thing. For me it's paradise. I only have to fuck ten to twelve people a night, generally only one at a time. I'm finally allowed to eat at a table, not off the floor or someone's lap. No one makes me beg for food or punishes me the few days a year when I'm sick and can't screw. If anyone hurts or beats me, Catera bans them from her stew. She even pays me for my work and I get a day off once a week. Best of all, when I go to sleep, I go to bed alone. I've never had it so good."
I wanted to scream at the horror he described. The fact that I knew it was the truth only hurt me more. "And so you're content to live like this?"
He set the clay pot down on the table and pierced me with his mercurial gaze. "What do you honestly think, Princess?"
"I think you're worth more than this."
"Well, aren't you special to be able to see me as something more than a whore? Let me educate you on what the rest of the world sees. I left Atlantis and was sick for weeks from the drugs Estes had forced down my throat."
I remembered well how ill he'd been when I had rescued him.
"I had nothing but the himation you gave me. No money, no clothes. Nothing."
"So you went back to whoring?"
"What choice did I have? I traveled far and wide, while trying to find work doing anything else, but no one would hire me to work. When people see me, they only want one thing from me and I happen to be very good at it. Tell me, Princess, if Father threw you out tomorrow, naked on the streets, what would you do? What do you know how to do?"
I lifted my chin. "I could find something."
"I defy you to try it, Princess." He gestured toward the door behind me. "Go ahead. I don't even know how to sweep a floor. All I know how to do is use my body to please others. I was sick and alone with no references, friends, family or money. I was so weak from hunger that even a beggar stole your himation from me while I lay on the ground, wanting to die and unable to stop him from taking it. So don't come here now with your disdainful eyes and look at me like I'm beneath you. I don't need your charity and I don't need your pity. I know exactly what you see when you look at me."
"Do you really?"
He stood up and spread his arms wide, showing me his perfect naked body. "I see it clearly on your face. What you see is the pathetic little boy who kissed his father's feet and begged him not to send him back to whoring. You see the whore who pleasured a prince and was then thrown from his home."
I shook my head in denial. "No, Acheron. What I see is the little boy who used to run up to me and ask why his parents didn't love him. The same little golden-haired cherub who chased sunbeams in my room and laughed when they filled his palm. You are my brother and I will never see anything bad about you."
The anger on his face intensified to the point I actually thought he might strike me. "Get out."
Covering my head, I turned and left.
I waited for him to stop me. He didn't.
And with every step I took, I cried harder for what I'd found this morning. My precious Acheron was gone and in his place was a man who wanted nothing to do with me.
The worst part was, I couldn't even blame him for it. This was all so unfair. He should be in his royal apartments with servants at his beck and call.
Instead he was locked into a nightmare that neither of us could release him from. Surely this wouldn't be his life. Surely Acheron was meant for more than this.
Yet how could I deny what I saw? He was right. People only wanted one thing from him. And unless Father was willing to protect him, Catera was better than nothing.
My little brother was a whore. It was time that I realized the truth.
August 23, 9529 BC
The day had dawned with the most wretched of meetings. I'd been told that my father and his senators had decided to try and placate the god Apollo with a human sacrifice.
Me.
Ever since war had broken out between Greece and Atlantis, the Greek kings had been trying to think of some way to stave it off. But the Apollites who ruled Atlantis hated us and were determined to make the whole of Greece nothing more than an Atlantean province.