Chapter XXII #2
“You are not nothing, Adel.” His whisper sent a burning pain through her chest.
“Am I not?” She gripped her elbows tighter, her words grating harshly against her ears. But perhaps he was right about this too. She was fire. She was fury. Untouchable. She was everything she made herself to be.
“You seek your worth in all the wrong places,” he said softly. “And in searching, you reinvent yourself in a dozen different ways, each attempt falling short to fill the missing piece in you because that void can only be filled by discovering who you really are in the eyes of God.”
She looked up and found his gaze close and steady, holding hers with an honesty she wanted so badly to believe in, and yet, trust had only left her crushed at every turn.
And what could Felix possibly hope to gain from speaking to her like this?
From breaking her one moment, and trying to mend her the next?
She tried to read his motive in the mottled gray of his eyes and found nothing but sincerity.
“I know who I am.”
He shook his head as if he could see past her words and the hurts buried in shallow graves beneath them.
“You are a woman made in the very image of God. Chosen. Beloved. A woman worth fighting for. A woman He died for. If that does not make you the greatest of treasures, I don’t know what else could. ”
Adel swallowed back the burning ember lodged in her throat.
Telemachus had told her similar things. But how could she believe it when all evidence pointed to the contrary?
How could she be both unloved and a woman worth dying for?
Even God had seemed to turn His back on the Visigoth suffering.
Was it any wonder they’d tried to take matters into their own hands?
That she had done the same? Tried to prevent a future of starvation and want by angling for security on her own terms?
Her head ached, pulse pounding in every inch of her battered face in a way that seemed to mock her efforts.
She pressed a cool hand to her cheek and shut her eyes.
Felix shifted beside her, pushing to his feet and then dropping back down again. Something liquid sloshed in a jar and then clunked against the tile next to him as he set it down.
“Here.”
Her chin lifted, and he caught it in one hand and raised a damp rag that smelled of something earthy and sweetly floral. Aipei. The room went blurry and her chest crawled with the burn of fire ants.
Felix dabbed at her bruised cheek, wincing when she did. “Sorry. Does that sting?”
More than he knew. “Why are you here? You refuse to watch me fight and yet you treat me like . . . like . . .” She saw his breath hitch in the parting of his lips, as if he’d been about to respond and then stopped himself.
The lamplight set his skin in a warm amber glow, deepening under the shadow of his evening beard. The knob in his throat bobbed as his granite eyes flicked to hers and away.
“Tell me about your family.”
The sudden change in conversation sent a new pain to her head, as if he’d physically yanked her in a different direction. She took the cloth from him and held it to her cheek, letting her eyes fall shut. “They are better off without me.”
“Why?” As if sensing her growing discomfort, Felix pushed to his feet and moved across the room toward his shelves of supplies.
“I shamed them,” Adel admitted in a voice that seemed too loud. “Ruined everything. And I became a war-daughter to escape it all, to . . . to make something new of myself.”
Back to her and framed by his wall of neatly labeled jars, Felix had gone still, his only movement the expanding and contracting of his ribs with each breath.
“But what is the point of wealth and fame if I can never go home, if my atta will not look me in the eye?” She lifted an aching shoulder.
“So tell me all you like that they do not love me here, but I will refuse to believe you. Because Rome cares for me far more than my family does now.” She swallowed back the dryness in her throat, hating herself for revealing so much.
He would only use it as a weapon against her.
Wasn’t that the first rule in a place such as this?
Keep your heart close or find it in a jar.
Felix turned around, jaw shifting back and forth as if he chewed on her words, or perhaps he had some of his own that he was holding back. Dark eyes flicked about the room, wary and searching, before settling on her. “That isn’t true.”
The certainty in his voice drew the breath from hers.
“How would you know?” The question came less hopeful and more haughty.
What could he, an Alexandrian medicus, know about her or her family?
Nothing. He could tell her she had friends here, but she knew they would just as soon cheer her fall as her rise.
Anything he could say would be just as false as the declarations of devotion Eadric had murmured in her ears.
It was an invitation for pain to hope for anything more, and just now, she could not bear any more of that.
She grasped the scarred leg of the table and pulled herself to her feet.
Felix started forward. “Where are you going?”
Adel scowled and whirled on him, one hand shooting out to catch herself on the edge of the operating table as the room spun.
She missed the table and plunged her fingers into his bag instead.
Her hand fell on a familiar object and she drew it out, blade flashing as she pointed it toward him.
“Come closer and I will carve your heart from your chest with your own scalpel.”
He stayed where he was, hands outstretched in the way one might try to corner and calm a wild stallion, but it was the anger in his eyes that made her still. And his next words that made the breath catch in her throat.
“God is gracious that I don’t know who it was who hurt you. Because if I did, I would stop at nothing to hunt them down and make them pay.”