Page 62 of A Queen and HER Bad Boy (Spies and Royals #4)

Achilles’s shoulders hunched, not in the mood to play nice with the traitorous priest. He’d filled his head with all sorts of nonsense.

A shrine to his father? Really! These people were brainwashed!

The real O Skia was a guerrilla leader, who’d kept their country locked in endless civil war, not a martyr, not heroic!

And now Bris was in danger! He studied her face, the black hair curling tighter in the humidity, the glow of perspiration on her olive skin and the rose flush in her cheeks. Despite the sweltering heat, he pulled her closer, needing her solid presence against his ribs.

The armed men guided them under the ancient olive canopy toward the main building, where the thick limestone walls promised some sanctuary from this oppressive air.

“Nice headquarters,” Achilles said flatly, staring at the crumbling mortar and warped wooden doors darkened by decades of oil and weather. “Is this where you torture secrets from your captives between olive pressings?”

“Oh, you like it? Maybe you can draw your Myrdon friends a nice map. We didn’t survive this long just to show the enemy the location of our base.

” Achilles flinched as if he’d been slapped—the enemy.

That was all he was to this man—he’d do everything in his power to never forget it.

O Skia jerked his head toward the entrance, motioning for them to follow.

Their footsteps echoed over worn cement floors scarred by decades of harvest work. Clay oil jars stood stacked in neat rows, the authentic smell of olive oil hung heavy in the air—earthy, rich, and comforting.

A simple setup of wooden chairs and a scarred table waited in the center of the workspace, the furniture hand-carved and polished smooth by generations of use.

Brass oil lamps cast dancing shadows on whitewashed walls where hooks held harvesting tools that looked more like medieval weapons in the flickering light.

Peleus gestured at their surroundings with a sardonic smirk. “Not exactly five-star accommodations, but it beats being shackled in a palace dungeon.”

“Why?” Achilles’s voice cut through the lame attempt at a joke. “Why did you turn against your people, against… us ? You said it yourself—you betrayed your family, your friends, everyone.”

O Skia’s broad shoulders squared against the stone archway, and his dark amusement melted from his face.

Suddenly Achilles could see the true man beneath—wary, exhausted, carved hollow by years of loss and bloodthirst. Not pretty, but real.

“You were Chises Mnon’s hostages. What could I do?

Go after you and get you all shot in the crossfire?

It killed me that I couldn’t take you away, so yes, I betrayed you.

I wasn’t strong enough to get you, and I spent every day regretting the life I led that divided us forever! ”

Achilles let out a bitter laugh despite the soldiers and their guns—what kind of excuse was that? Had the great military commander wanted to reach them, he would’ve found a way. O Skia had abandoned them for the wealth of this island, pure and simple.

His father’s temper flashed in his dark eyes. “Do you think I didn’t want you back? That I wasn’t constantly trying to find a way? Every birthday, every holiday, every milestone—I ached to be with my family.”

“You abandoned your wife to Atreus Mnon.”

“Had I known that sooner—” His voice cracked with anguish.

What? Then he would've wrung his hands over her the same way he did over his lost children? Achilles’s anger erupted at the pathetic excuses, remembering the shadow of the woman his mother had become after marrying the youngest royal brother, trapped with that bloodthirsty psychopath for the sake of her children while her spirit slowly died.

Now their country suffered in much the same way.

“You hid out here, playing soldier with these hero worshipers who fed your ego.” Achilles couldn’t keep the emotion from thickening his voice, the pain he felt at being abandoned to a man who hated him.

But that wasn’t the worst of it. “Now our people starve! They live in homes decaying from neglect while you sit on what should be the richest land in the Mediterranean! What good does your wealth do anyone? You failed the people with Operation C.I.R.C.E.”

“Operation C.I.R.C.E.,” Peleus repeated, warily this time.

He sank into one of the wooden chairs with a creak that echoed off the vaulted ceiling.

A strange kind of relief flickered across his expression as he shifted from personal wounds to the safer ground of military history.

The brass lamps cast harsh shadows across his features.

“After I married Clysta, we thought we had the whole world ahead of us. She took off time from her music career to spend her days with you. We moved to the capital, lived in a villa in Ilion with marble columns near the palace. Achilles, you spent good years there, running through the grounds, finding friends like Peder, Venice.”

O Skia glanced over at Bris, his eyes darkening into a storm when he studied her.

“Chises Mnon was my closest friend, and our family was happy… until I returned to the island of Clysta’s birth and realized what the soldiers were doing behind my back.

You want to know about Operation C.I.R.C.E.

?” He let out a heavy sigh. “It was a cover for foreign invaders, but instead of open warfare, they were drilling and hoarding what they could of our country’s precious resources, using our people as slave labor, and I was expected to enforce that nightmare? ”

Achilles’s thoughts turned bitter as he leaned back against the hard chair, feeling the legs creak beneath his weight—his father did more than enforce it, he’d profited from human misery.

His friends, those who trusted him, must’ve been devastated by his betrayal.

“What? Are you trying to tell me you were just following orders? That you didn’t know any better? ”

“None of us understood the scope of what was happening, and I didn’t either,” Peleus’s voice echoed in the stone chamber.

“The island was isolated with almost no communication with our leaders. They dropped me here with fifty men in the middle of a civilian uprising, and that’s when I received my orders—massacre all dissidents and their families. ”

Bris’s sharp intake of breath cut through the musty air. Achilles saw her knuckles white against the table’s dark wood. “You think my father would order such a thing?” she asked.

“No,” O Skia answered simply. His eyes never left her pale face.

“Not back then he wouldn’t… these orders came from Atreus Mnon.

He was working behind his brothers’ backs.

I thought your father would understand once he knew the truth, once I told him about his brother’s betrayal.

And so… I made the mistake of being one of the first to disobey his orders.

It led me down a path where I could never return. ”

Ah yes, he was going with Priest Eleni’s starry eyed bedtime story that made a god out of the island’s war hero. Achilles glanced over at the man who’d betrayed them earlier as he listened on with fanatical devotion.

“The battle was a bloodbath.” His father’s eyes blazed as he stared into the dancing lamplight.

“My men turned against each other, brother fighting brother. Not one of us left that day without blood on our hands. I became the very monster I’d sworn to fight.

” The bitterness in his voice made the stone walls seem to press closer, suffocating them all with the weight of the past.

Achilles wrestled with this new version of history, watching Bris’s passionate eyes shimmer like gold pools in the lamplight.

“Atreus Mnon lost no time framing me for everything he’d done.

Phoenix was his messenger, a trusted advisor to Chises Mnon and his older brother, Darius Mnon—a master of courtly poison, spinning lies to ensure his place in this new world order!

” His father turned to Bris, his eyes narrowing.

“He poured those lies into your father’s ear like poison, and the man who should’ve trusted his oldest friend, swallowed every word—hook, line, and sinker.

Your father paid dearly for his stupidity—lost his older brother as well as his brother’s every heir.

After that, your mother was next to fall, Bris.

” She flinched as he spat the words, her chest heaving under her ragged breaths.

“In the end, it didn’t matter what he believed, because the damage was done.

Atreus Mnon pretended to champion the very people he’d crushed; he created the Myrdons and used them to eliminate all threats to his power. ”

Some of this was true, but was it all, or was his father trying to make him swallow the lies with their sad history?

Achilles tried to sift through these claims, watching his wife’s stiff shoulders.

Anger and grief mottled O Skia’s expression, settling into the deep creases and lines of his face like a second skin.

“Chises Mnon sent assassins after me, but none of those traitors made it through this island alive—these people are fierce, they’re the survivors of power-hungry tyrants bleeding them dry.

So here I stayed, a shadow of myself, O Skia, they called me.

I did what I could—defended our people from cannibalistic Myrdons trying to drag us down with them.

” His father turned to Achilles, his eyes piercing him through.

“And so you answer me this, young wolf—will you continue allowing Atreus Mnon to destroy what’s left of our people, or will we join forces and save them? ”

Achilles felt something shift inside his chest—not full acceptance, not yet, but a shared resentment and burning desire to help those who couldn’t help themselves.

He’d felt so useless during that flood, watching their people lose everything while oligarchs counted profits.

Now here was a chance to seize that control back, to actually make a difference.

But was this just another false hope? Like the Myrdons?

Would he be pulled into another rebellion built on lies, manipulation, and empty promises?

He couldn’t rush headlong into danger like before; he had Bris to think about, a country depending on them.

How could he know the truth? “Aggie Mnon said you were to blame for all this,” he said.

O Skia snorted, drawing himself up with a proud smirk that made him look every inch the guerrilla leader Achilles suspected he was.

“That red-headed baby demon? Yes, all this chaos is my fault—we backed Atreus Mnon into a corner with no escape routes and no allies… until another rich parasite came scuttling in, willing to fund the Myrdons for a price… us. Turns out they want Aeaea conquered once and for all, our riches theirs and our people wiped out, and they think they can use you to do that!”

“Who is it?” Achilles blurted. If this was actually true, then this backer would be the ones behind Bris’s assassins. “Who are the Myrdons working with?”

“I was hoping you could tell me that,” his father said. The lamplight carved deep shadows under his eyes as he leaned across the scarred table.

The Earl of Alexopoulos. It had to be. The man had everything to gain by stripping the island bare.

Achilles met his father’s expectant eyes; they were dark with hatred, and something else—a lust for revenge.

Could he trust O Skia? The man was a firecracker ready to go off and destroy what was left of this country!

What choice did he have? He studied Bris’s pale face, her hair tumbling loose from its pins, the emerald silk torn and stained with olive oil and dust. She looked like she’d been dragged through a battle, but despite all that, her skin glowed with the beauty that none of these monsters could take away, her chin still raised in dangerous defiance.

But they could do more and worse. The years had hardened his father into something unrecognizable. Achilles read it in his eyes—O Skia wouldn’t hesitate to use Bris to make Achilles do whatever he wanted.

And that was no excuse. It was time to stop letting his heart rule him and play this smart or everything they loved would burn.