Oh, his expression! I had wanted to say that to him for months, to taunt him, to insult him. And to watch his face redden as my barbs hit home; to watch the hurt in his eyes…it partly repaid me for all the humiliation he’d put me through in the past months.
Another day, and he would be dead.
Brutus took some time to lie back down to sleep, and I wondered if I’d been as clever as I’d initially thought. I couldn’t afford to have him awake all the night through. Should I turn and say something sweet to placate him? The thought made my stomach turn, but if I had to…No, praise Hera. Eventually I heard the deep regular breathing of sleep.
To be sure, I lay awake for many hours, enjoying the sense of happiness and anticipation that flooded through me. Tomorrow night Brutus would be gone, and all the other Trojans either dead with him or re-enslaved into such bondage it would be the ruination of all their hopes.
Tomorrow night I and my father would again be supreme within Mesopotama, laughing together as we surveyed the destruction we had wrought.
Tomorrow night I could prevail upon Tavia to feed me those herbs which would cause me to birth this hateful baby before its time. Then neither of us would need fear Brutus’ wrath at the murder of his son.
Tomorrow night I would sit and watch the horrid thing between my legs, bathed in its birth blood, gasping for—yet never gaining—air, and I would laugh with delight as it died, as Brutus’ hopes would die during this coming day.
Within the week my belly would be flat again, and I could forget all the horror of these past few months. My father would again rule from his megaron, and I would again stand beside him, clad in the most wondrous of linens and the rarest of silks…and no one would ever dare to think of that time that Brutus and the Trojans had humiliated us.
These past months would vanish as if they had never been…and perhaps the gods would be generous enough to allow Melanthus to rise from the dead and take his rightful place beside me and in my bed.
Tomorrow night…tomorrow night…tomorrow night all these things would come to pass.
But first, as Brutus slept, I needed to spend the darkest hour on one last task to ensure that tomorrow night was indeed all that I could hope.
Silently sending my nightly prayer of thanks to that strange goddess with the black curly hair with its peculiar russet streak (Hera might be weak beyond telling, but her distant sister had proved more than beneficial), I sat up carefully, and looked at Brutus’ face.
He was deeply asleep, his face slack, his chest moving in slow, lumbrous breaths.
I slid from the bed and reached for a loose gown to pull about my bulky nakedness.