Chapter 18: The Aftermath of Degradation
The bathhouse steam was a throat-cloying perfume of rose and crushed petals, thick enough to blur the edges of the marble pillars. It did nothing to scour me clean.
Marisa guided me into the central pool, its water heated by some hidden furnace beneath the palace. I sank into the liquid heat, the blue sheath clinging, then floating away as she untied it. She let it drift like a shed skin toward the overflow channel. Her hands were businesslike on my shoulders, pushing me to sit on the submerged bench, the warm lapis tiles smooth against my back.
“Scrub,” she said, offering a cake of olive-oil soap.
I took it. My hands moved over my arms, my throat, my face. I scrubbed until my skin shone pink. But the taste was still there, buried in the lining of my throat. The memory of heat, of helplessness, of a shocking, shameful awakening.
“It doesn’t come off,” I said, my voice hollow in the misty chamber.
“The taste? It will. Drink some wine later. It’s the feeling you’re trying to scour. That won’t wash away.” She leaned against the opposite ledge, watching me, her sleek hair dark with dampness at the ends.
I stopped scrubbing. The soap slipped from my fingers and vanished into the milky water. “I can’t… I can’t be that. Not again.”
“What are you now, Bene?” she asked, too gently. It was the old nickname, a blade wrapped in silk.
“I am an ancell. Her confidante. Her…” The word ‘lover’ stuck. It felt fraudulent now, after kneeling before a slave. My right to that title felt revoked.
Marisa swam closer with a single, fluid push. Water rippled between us. “That was the function of an ancell. Service. In all its forms. You just forgot the scope of the definition. She reminded you.” She traced a idle pattern on the surface. “The status is permanent. You don’t challenge a definition she has written in stone.”
A desperate, cold clarity cut through the steam. “There must be a way. To make her see me differently again. To regain… standing.” I wasn’t begging. Not yet. But the plea was there, trembling beneath the words.
Marisa’s sharp eyes fixed on mine. Her playful mask was gone, replaced by an unsettling neutrality. “Think twice before you try to challenge her mind. What you’re asking for isn’t a return to favor. It’s a rewriting of history. She doesn’t rewrite. She builds monuments on top of things.”
The finality in her voice was a door slamming. I felt the walls of the bathhouse, the whole palace, pressing in. This was my life now. A series of moments like the one in the Cherimony Room, each stripping away another layer until nothing of Benedetta remained. Only a vessel for rewards and punishments.
A reckless, terrified energy seized me. I closed the small distance between us in the water. My hands, raw from scrubbing, found her slender shoulders. The mist coiled around our faces.
“Marisa,” I whispered. “Please.”
I leaned in and kissed her.
It was not the passionate, competitive clash we sometimes engaged in for Angela’s amusement. This was slow. A question. A surrender. I poured every ounce of my confusion and fear and that damnable, lingering heat into it, my lips moving softly against hers, asking for an answer she hadn’t given me in words.
For a heartbeat, she was still. Then she responded, but not with passion. With assessment. Her mouth moved with mine, a mirror, not a partner. She let it linger, let me hope, before pulling back just enough to speak against my lips.
“There is only one way,” she breathed, the words lost to anyone but me, swallowed by the sigh of the steam and the distant drip of water.
“Tell me.”
“A change in leadership.”
I froze. My hands slipped from her shoulders.
She didn’t move away. Her eyes held mine, and for the first time, I saw the true depth of the mischief there. It wasn’t just for play. It was a deep, corrosive intelligence, patient and hungry. “The foundation shakes. The monuments become rubble. New ones get built. With new definitions.”
The world tilted. The warm water felt suddenly freezing. She was talking about treason. Not a whispered grievance, but a seismic, bloody shift. And she was offering it to me like a lifeline.
“You’re speaking of…”
“I’m speaking of reality,” she interrupted, her voice dropping to a thread. “A bored empress with a taste for humiliation is a dangerous animal. A new one, with different tastes… that’s an opportunity.” A ghost of her familiar smile returned, but it was colder now. Sharper. “It’s what I have in mind. It’s what’s been in motion. The question is, do you want to keep kneeling on cold stone, or do you want to help choose the stone?”
She leaned back, the moment of terrifying intimacy broken. She slicked her hair back, the casual gesture absurd after the words that hung between us like poisoned incense.
“Think on it,” she said, as if suggesting a new perfume. “We have time. But not infinite time.”
She hoisted herself out of the pool in a smooth motion, water streaming down her athletic form. She reached for a linen sheet, wrapping herself without looking back, and padded silently toward the antechamber.
I remained in the water, alone in the rose-scented mist. The taste of soap. The taste of Darius. The taste of Marisa’s kiss. The terrifying, electric taste of possibility.
My mind, which had been screaming in revolt only hours before, was now perfectly, chillingly quiet. It was calculating. Weighing the weight of a collar against the weight of a crown not yet forged.
The heat in my belly was no longer just shameful arousal.
It was a different kind of fire entirely.