Page 14 of Elysium
THE SILENCE SEEMED TO STRETCH ENDLESSLY after she spoke. His heart thundered in his chest, the truth pressing against his ribcage like it was desperate to be cut out.
“The gods,” his voice broke, struggling to breathe under the weight. “They play their games, Penelope. They played them with me .” He closed his eyes, too ashamed to meet her piercing gaze. “But it was my hands, my choices, and my failures that stand between us now.”
He released a shutter, tempting him to stop, to catch his breath, but the weight of her demand hung around his neck.
She deserved to hear this. “Circe,” Odysseus spoke the name as if it burned his tongue.
“She turned my men into livestock. She is a goddess with a power beyond reckoning. She would have killed me… killed all of us had I not knelt to her power.”
“Kneeling was not all she asked of you.” Penelope stiffened, her voice was steel, but her body betrayed her, tension radiated from her stillness.
“No,” he said, hanging his head. He would not temper his answers with half-truths.
“She… claimed me. For a year I lived on her island, slept in her bed. She offered safety, power… a transaction. The safety of my crew for the time I spent on her island, in her bed. But it was not my heart she took.” He wanted to look at her, wanted to read the emotions she tried to hide on her face, but his remorse would not allow him.
“Never my heart. That was always here with you, with Telemachus.”
The edges of her breath were sharp enough to cut through his scabbed wounds. She gripped the frame of the bed, her knuckles white, facing this storm alone. Odysseus wanted to reach for her, to calm the tempest she was fighting, but he remained still, frozen in his guilt.
“And… there were others?” She asked, letting out a measured breath. The words were soft, but still a whispered blow.
“Calypso,” he murmured, feeling the shame of being caught in her web. “I was a prize to her. I washed upon the shores of her island after I had lost everyone, everything. She saved me from drowning, and in return… held me captive for seven years.”
His voice lilted, grief thickening in his throat as he fought to keep his mind here, in this room.
He had survived all of it, but only because of the woman he had hurt.
“I didn’t want her, didn’t want to be there, but I had no choice.
She offered me immortality if I would love her.
” His shoulders shuddered with unwept tears. “I refused.”
“Seven years?” Penelope repeated.
“Seven.” Odysseus rasped, eyes glistening. “And every night I lie awake and prayed that the gods would release me. I wept for you, for the boy who I could only imagine. For the life I had feared I lost forever.” A pause. “That I still fear I have.
“She kept me in chains of silk, but they were still chains.”
Penelope’s breath came in shallow gasps, her hand clutching at the fabric around her neck. “You survived,” she whispered. Odysseus wasn’t sure if it was even meant for him.
“Yes,” was his response. “But not without breaking. I broke, Penelope. I broke, and I bled and I suffered. And when I could fight my way free, I clawed back to the one thing that kept me breathing.” He turned to look at her for the first time in several moments.
“No cage could hold me. I will crawl home to you every time.”
“Odysseus…” Penelope’s voice wavered as her fingers tightened around the olive tree, its roots steeped in sorrow and stained with the weight of years, of longing, of betrayal, of love.
“Did you love them?” The question was a blade drawn against his heart.
It was not doubt that drove her, but the need for truth, for his voice to break the silence that had grown between them.
He exhaled, the breath heavy with burdens carried too long. “I could never love another.” His words, slow and deliberate, met her shattered gaze. “Not when you were here. Not when you are the very air I breathe, the blood in my veins.”