I Don’t Need the Crown Anymore

Althea fought her way back to Argos for Lysandros and helped him reclaim the throne, only to find herself trapped in the enemy kingdom of Thrace, wearing a slave's collar for three full years.

Through three years of mortal danger, being dragged behind chariots, and bone-chilling winters, Althea survived on a single conviction: her betrothed, Lysandros, would come to rescue her.

But when she finally set foot in the royal city again, what awaited her was not an embrace. It was a heavy golden laurel crown pressed against her brow, the Sacred Flame seal clutched in another woman's hand, and a royal heir growing in that woman's womb.

She clung to one last hope: perhaps they had cast her aside only because they believed her dead. Then a chance encounter drove home every word of the truth. The opening that had lured her headlong into the rebel encirclement had been left there deliberately by Lysandros and her foster father.

From the very beginning, they had never intended for her to come back alive.

Everyone assumed that she, left with nothing, would forgive the king and surrender everything her mother had left behind to the royal court.

Althea burned the old covenant and pressed a blood-soaked thunderbolt pattern into a wax tablet.

On the night of the Festival of Dionysus, the long-sealed old watergate would open.

This time, she would not wait for the king, nor for the gods.

She would carve out her own path forward.