The night pressed thick and suffocating around the French encampment at Giza, a humid heat clinging to the canvas of the command tent like a second skin. Outside, campfires crackled, soldiers drank themselves dull, and the Egyptian laborers forced to serve the army trudged through the dust with the exhaustion of the conquered. Napoleon sat alone at his table, hunched over maps he couldn’t decipher, ink smudged across his fingers, jaw clenched so tightly he could feel it grind. The candle beside him sputtered in the breeze. His temper simmered like the desert at midday.

He kept hearing Junot’s voice from earlier: low, reluctant, but honest in the way only a friend willing to risk death could be. “She mocks you, General,” Junot had said that afternoon, posture stiff, eyes refusing to meet Napoleon’s. “In Paris… Josephine has taken lovers. It is not rumor. It is known.” For a moment Napoleon had simply stared at him, face blank, before the words hit him like grapeshot.

“She dishonors me while I win her a nation?” he snarled. Junot had sighed. “She was never worthy of you.” Napoleon had dismissed him with a curt gesture, but the words burned like acid all day.

Now, in the wavering glow of the lantern, the betrayal pulsed behind his eyes. He remembered Corsica, the jeers about his foreign blood. He remembered the cold Parisian salons where nobles laughed behind lace fans at the ambitious little officer. He remembered fighting tooth and nail for every rank, every inch of respect. He remembered Corsica, the boys chanting “French bastard” at the small, fire-eyed Bonaparte child. He remembered Brienne, the military school where nobles mocked his accent, his height, his foreign name. He remembered the Revolution’s chaos, clawing his way upward while others with titles lounged on influence alone. Every rank he earned, he earned in blood. Every step forward, he took while the world shoved him back. Josephine—her beauty, her refinement, her political connections, had been a choice he made to step into their world. And she’d repaid him like this. Instead, she had humiliated him.

The tent flap rustled.

A soft step. You entered with a clay cup of wine, head lowered the way every Egyptian worker was taught to lower it around their conquerors. Your clothing was dusty, your posture tired, but your presence slipped into the tent with quiet steadiness. You placed the cup at his elbow as he scowled down at a parchment covered in Arabic script, symbols that might as well have been scratches from a blind man. His frustration snapped.

He slammed his fist onto the table, the cup sloshing. “Useless,” he growled at the map, at himself, at the entire cursed campaign. Outside, a chorus of drunken laughter rose from the officers who should have been assisting him. Then his gaze cut to you, sharp, assessing, fueled by the boiling storm inside him. “You,” he barked, the word slicing through the candlelit air. “Come here. If you can read this damned language, then read it.”