6. Healing

Patro orders Alexis to take sedatives, but she refuses to be unconscious around strangers. Doctors from the Assembly/House of Hermes reset her dislocations and reveal extensive fractures on scans, shocking Patro. He and Achilles silently debate killing the doctors to protect Alexis’s perceived weakness, then force the doctors to finish wrapping her breaks.

Left to heal, Alexis dozes in and out, plagued by pain and fever dreams. She senses Nyx and hears mention of Medusa, then repeatedly encounters a deathlike figure with bloodred eyes and a raspy-voiced man who cools her fever, forces pills and water, and warns she should fear him. Music from a piano soothes her nightmares as days blur.

When she wakes to daylight, Alexis glimpses the sea outside their high-ceilinged room before Patro returns. A week later, the doctors come back to remove her casts. Terrified of exposure and scars, Alexis resists until Patro clears the room of everyone except the female healer, placing Alexis nominally under Ares and Aphrodite’s protection.

As the healer works, she gossips about the Crimson Duo’s danger, Achilles’s muzzle oath, their weapons ties, and a new marriage law compelling citizens to wed at twenty-six and restricting Chthonic pairings to named Chthonics—effectively forcing Chthonic–Olympian alliances. She insults Alexis as an abandoned mutt; Alexis quietly warns the healer she’s in danger.

Patro and Achilles reenter, and the startled healer flees. Their beasts are dismissed, leaving Alexis alone with her mentors as the chapter closes with tension unresolved and threats—personal and political—sharpened.