Chapter XV #2
A slight moan was all he received in answer.
The room was otherwise empty and dark. Exhaustion rolled over him, swift and heavy with the sudden longing to crawl into his own bed.
Shut his eyes for a moment. Put the day behind him.
He ran a hand over his face. There was a good chance he would be spending the night sprawled on the hard operating table with a sheet rather than going home.
It would not be the first time, and he didn’t relish the prospect.
He could already feel the soreness of his muscles tomorrow.
Felix crossed the room to set his lamp on the table near the window.
It was already occupied by a cracked cup.
Adelgard hadn’t moved. He glanced over his shoulder to be sure before picking up the cup and holding it to the light.
The tiniest seedling sprouted in a shallow bed of arena grit she’d likely swept up from the floor.
Despite its obvious lack, the little thing stood ramrod straight in defiance.
He set the lamp and the cup on the table and turned back to Adelgard, wondering briefly if a plant could take on the characteristics of its caretaker.
Or if a person could. If only compassion was as contagious as the plague.
Adelgard’s injured arm was angled toward him.
He could check it quickly and head to bed—or to the operating table.
He touched the bandage lightly. “Adelgard?” he whispered.
She didn’t move. Probably faking. Waiting for the opportunity to hold him at knifepoint—all in jest, of course.
He dragged his bag closer and knelt at the bedside. “I’m only checking your arm. Try not to kill me.”
The bandage was loose and drooping, fabric stretched from the day’s events and subsequent trip through the baths. He gently eased the damp ends free and tugged at the strip, loosening it further.
Adelgard shifted and lifted her arm.
Felix flinched backward, anticipating a fist, but her hand only settled on his head, fingers ruffling through his hair in tender strokes. A rush of heat went through him and his mouth went dry. What in the empire was she do—
“Good dog.” Her words were breathy on the back of a sigh.
Felix squinted. Good . . . dog? Was the woman so adept at insults that she could hurl them in her sleep?
His breath froze as her hand drooped, fingers sliding down the side of his face, catching on the stubble of his evening beard.
He felt awareness tense her fingertips and snapped his hand around her wrist before she could punch him.
Adelgard jerked upright with a gasp and kick that caught him in the side.
He released her, and she shot to her feet, standing on the bed, back pressed to the wall.
“What are you doing in here?” she hissed, chest heaving with quick breaths.
Felix rubbed his side and slowly pushed to his feet, trying to ignore the dull throbbing in his ribs. “Ignacio ordered me to check on your arm since you refused to come to the clinic. I tried to warn you.”
Adelgard lifted her chin, the movement forcing the hair out of her eyes. “I refused to go to you because I am fine.” Her teeth flashed white in the lantern light. “Why do you refuse to leave me alone?”
“It’s my job.” He raised an eyebrow, refusing to let her rile him. Or, rile him further, at least. “You’re angry with me now? After stroking my hair with such . . . tenderness?”
Her jaw dropped and then snapped shut.
Triumph surged. For once, he’d rendered her speechless.
They stared at each other, neither giving in or offering answers.
Adelgard crossed her arms, still standing on the bed as if he were a mouse and she was debating the quickest way to dispatch him.
At least the cell was still unlocked if he needed a quick escape.
Felix shifted. “Are you going to come down here, or shall I go to you?”
“I would like to see you try it.”
“Would you?”
“You would never make it.” She hesitated only a breath longer, her eyes locked on his, joints bending and flexing as she moved to the floor with the ease and power of a large cat.
“I heard you won your matches.”
“Why do you not watch?”
He stepped closer, reaching for the slipping bandage. She smelled of cheap soap and olive oil. “Why did you call me a good dog?”
She muttered something that sounded like obvious and looked away. “I asked you first.”
“Fine, since you’re being so pleasant tonight, I’ll answer.” He tossed the bandage aside. “I can’t abide the violence.”
A smirk. “Are you a coward?”
He shook his head, pulse quickening. “I am a Christian.” There.
He said it. All it took now was for her to shout for Jovan, tell him as much, and Felix could find himself on the street without a job.
For as adamant as the church was about keeping its people out of the ludi, the lanistas were equally vigilant about keeping out the Christians.
According to Jovan, a Christian gladiator was no gladiator at all.
Though, Felix had to admit, for the first time, losing this job didn’t seem like such a great loss.
Instead of shouting for the guard, she bit back a laugh, brittle with bitterness. “So am I.” She shrugged. “So is the emperor. So are many of the people in the stands screaming for our blood.”
The breath seemed to leak from his lungs as the truth of what she spoke sank in.
Gaius and Telemachus had bemoaned the same thing.
In their century of religious freedom, many Christians had grown lax.
Drawn to watch or simply ignore the bloody entertainment they’d once been the center of.
And what was he doing about it? Could he claim to love and care for others if he did nothing while they were cut down in the arena?
“Christians are not God, and thank goodness for that. We cannot judge God based on the actions of humanity.”
“No,” she agreed in a soft voice. “But it is an easy thing to mistake, is it not?”
Conviction struck. God had seemed distant to him of late, but was He truly? Or was it Felix who had withdrawn, shifting the anger against his pater’s failures and inability to provide on God as well? Who was he to lecture her?
“Yes,” he admitted. “I am guilty of it too.”
Their gazes met. Held. Each wrestling with their own thoughts.
Adelgard’s lips pressed together and she looked away. “If you cannot abide the violence, why are you here?”
That, at least, was a question he could answer honestly, even if he didn’t want to answer it at all. “Because I needed a job.” A paltry excuse.
“You Romans are all alike.” She huffed and seemed to withdraw. “You may not watch the fights, but you are no better than those in the stands who cheer on our deaths. You all use us for your own purposes, just the same.”
He wanted to argue that it wasn’t the same. The spectators wanted to be entertained. He simply wanted to save his family. He bent to dig a jar of salve from his bag, silent excuses falling flat. Weren’t all lives worth saving? Or only a special few? And who was he to choose?
His throat worked to swallow but his mouth felt dry as a roll of bandages. “You’re right.” His fingers closed around the jar, his voice rough in his ears. “You bear the image of God. And anyone who bears His image is precious and worth fighting for.”
As Felix straightened, Adelgard wiped a stricken expression from her face.
He opened the lid of the salve and reached for her arm, trying and failing to quell the storm of uncertainty raging in his mind.
He struggled to shift his voice to the monotonous calm tone he used while he worked, mentally flailing for a benign subject of conversation.
“About the dog . . .”
“I—” She cleared her throat, lifted her chin with a cool indifference that no longer fooled him. “I thought that should be obvious to you.”
“I understand the slur, but the petting is what confused me.”
She stared straight ahead, a practiced dull expression fixed upon the scuffed wall, though the redness creeping up her throat and flaming in her cheeks betrayed her. “I had a wolfhound once. She was . . . like you.” Her eyes flicked toward him. “Nosy. Never left me alone for a moment.”
“She sounds nice.”
A hint of a smile. “She was barely tolerable.”
“I’ve never had a dog.”
“Perhaps you ought to find one. Keep yourself busy and leave us all alone.”
“Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“She could never take the hint either.”
He dipped two fingers in the jar of numbing salve and massaged it gently around the cut, feeling the tightening of her muscles. “It’s healing well. You may be rid of me soon enough.”
She didn’t answer. No celebratory smile or cheer. No quip.
“Does it hurt?”
“A little.”
The two small words slid off her tongue and hung suspended in the air between them like a bridge, fragile and vulnerable to destruction by a single breath.
He slowly met her gaze, this first bit of honesty she dared to allow him more heady than the sensation of her caressing his face.
Regret and an anxious uncertainty wavered in the way she rolled her lower lip between her teeth.
He drew in a breath, choosing his next question with care. “How long have you been in pain?”
She jerked her arm free of his grasp, retreating in every way she could, armor hardening the lines of her body and face. “Actually, it does not hurt. You may go.”
He hesitated. “You know you can come to me, if . . . if ever you’re in pain.” His own words emerged weighted with things he didn’t dare say, but by her still expression, she heard them all anyway.
She lifted an indifferent shoulder. “And what would you do about it?”
Telemachus scraped bits of drying gruel from the clay bowl before drowning it in the basin of hot water and reaching for another dish from the morning meal.
A small price for the brothers’ hospitality, and one he was happy to pay.
Scrape, scrape, dunk. Repeat. It was mindless, monotonous work, and it left his thoughts unfettered.