The perfume of foreign garlands clings to your throat.

You lift a hand—slow, deliberate—and adjust the fall of your veil. Not too much. Just enough to let the torchlight kiss the curve of your cheek, enough to pass for one of them. A child of Troy, woven into their revels, draped in linen finer than you’ve ever owned, your hands jeweled with borrowed gold. You are a ghost in another mortal's skin.

Beside you, Odysseus shifts.

He does not touch you—not yet—but you feel the careful tension that lives in the space between you. A string drawn tight. You glimpse it in the way he keeps his gaze roving, never quite resting on your face. In the way he sips his wine but does not swallow. In the way his jaw clenches when a Trojan girl tosses her laughter like a net toward him, and he smiles back, charming, distant.

You wonder if Penelope would have recognized that smile. If it would have stung.

“I suppose,” he murmurs now, under the hum of lyres and the clatter of amphorae, “this counts as treachery twice over. Once for the disguise, once for the company I keep.”

You, tilting your head, ask if he would rather have someone else.

He laughs—a quick, quiet thing, low in his chest. “No. Gods forbid. I couldn’t keep my lies straight if you weren’t here to scowl them back into place.”

Then, as if remembering himself, he lowers his voice further. “But this—” his hand gestures, vaguely, between your shoulders, your closeness, “—this part… The lovers’ charade.”

You glance at him sidelong.

His eyes are not on you. They are on a passing servant, on the gilded curve of a lyre, on the braziers where the flames burn too bright for such a warm night. Anywhere but you.

“I’ve one woman waiting for me,” he says. “And I have not forgotten her face. Not even here. Not even now.”

His hand brushes yours.

Barely a graze—like a wave that kisses shore and pulls away before it can be named. But it is enough to draw the eyes of a nearby pair of revelers, their grins conspiratorial. Odysseus sees them, sees the need for the part he must play, and with a sigh soft enough to drown in wine, he slides his arm around your waist.

It is not intimacy.

It is strategy. Performance. War by another name.

Still, his voice is smooth when he leans in, “Let it not be said Odysseus of Ithaca cannot commit to a role. But I warn you, my dear, I’ve never been one for tenderness on cue.”

Then he looks at you—truly looks—and his gaze is steady, sea-dark and sharp. The mask slips for just a moment, and you glimpse what it costs him to play this part. What it means to let another person's perfume cling to his tunic. What it means to hold someone who is not her.

But still, he does it.

Odysseus leans closer, lips brushing the space just beside your ear. “There are three guards near the gate. One of them’s drunk enough to sing. That’s the weakness we’ll use, come moonset.”

You nod.

"Can you keep up the act for a little while?"