Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
Sophia
I wake before my alarm.
For a second I lie still in the dim cabin, heart ticking faster than my thoughts, not sure what pulled me out of sleep. Then it slots into place.
This is the morning I watch Flavius train.
Yesterday he was grinning at me while I learned to repair shields, kissing my palm like it was the most natural thing in the world, and teasing me about useful hands. My face heats as a picture of that flashes through my mind.
This morning I’m going to watch him fight.
Both versions are him. I want to know both.
The air feels thin, like the moment before a performance starts. My body is humming in a way that isn’t quite anxiety and isn’t quite excitement. Something braided from both.
I roll onto my side and stare at the faint glow from my laptop on the desk. The screen doesn’t have to tell me what I already know, that sitting in my inbox is the receipt from the University acknowledging they received my submission.
Although the words are the same as they were yesterday. They feel different now.
I kick off the sheet and sit up. My muscles protest slightly—I didn’t realize how much I’d walked yesterday—but it’s a grounded ache, not the wired, crawling exhaustion of panic.
My brain feels… ordered. Not quiet. It’s never quiet.
Just less like a swarm of bees and more like a well-behaved classroom.
I tell myself I’m awake because my circadian rhythm is messed up, because my brain is still metabolizing stress, because I should probably work on cross-referencing my documentation before the day gets away from me.
My thoughts bump up against the actual truth like a Roomba hitting a wall.
I’m awake because I don’t want to miss him.
Dawn training, he said. Before the gates open.
Not tourist Flavius. Not Jester Flavius. Not the carefully modulated version who sits across from me at conference tables and tells me his healing secrets so I can document them for his later use. Nor the huge, muscled gladiator who lets me help him struggle through his English primers.
This morning I will watch the Flavius who survived the arena.
My stomach does a strange swoop that feels like the drop on a roller coaster. I’ve watched footage of modern fighters before—MMA, boxing, even documentary reenactments of gladiators. This is not that.
Today, there are eight men in the training yard. Men who were actually shaped to die for spectacle, trying to make sense of that in a world where people buy tickets to watch a safe version.
I swing my legs over the side of the bed and stand.
The floor is warm under my bare feet. Outside, a bird calls once, twice, then falls silent.
The sanctuary is in that transitional state between night and morning—no tourists yet, no staff voices, just a soft background of animal sounds and the distant hum of the highway.
I dress more carefully than the situation warrants.
Jeans. Sports bra. T-shirt. Thin hoodie I can peel off when the sun gets brutal.
I twist my hair into a low knot, then undo it and redo it twice because the part isn’t straight and the lopsided pull of it will distract me.
Boots, not sneakers—the sand around the training yard gets hot later, and I don’t want it sneaking in through mesh.
There’s a little voice in the back of my mind that sounds suspiciously like my dissertation chair.
Are you sure this is a good use of your time, Sophia?
I hear another voice over it, the echo of yesterday in the garden.
Displeasure is not ruin. Punishment is not destiny.
I inhale through my nose, slow and even. Last year, I would have stayed in the cabin. Pulled up another article. Reworked another section of my research, trying to anticipate every criticism before it was voiced. Molded myself a little smaller, a little neater, a little safer.
Today, my hand settles on the doorknob instead.
The framework matters, yes. The details of these men’s memories matter. Seeing real gladiators in action matters. But that’s not the whole of it.
What I want is to understand him.
All of him. The parts he thinks are dangerous. The parts I’ve only seen in fragments and shadows.
The realization cuts cleanly through my rationalizations, leaving honesty in its wake.
I care about the research. I care about the complaint. I care about what this could mean for every student who comes after me.
But the thought of watching him move in his own world—unmasked, unperformed—does something to my chest I don’t have a clinical term for.
I open the door and step out into the blue-gray light. Dawn in late July. The air is warm and damp, clinging faintly to my skin. By mid-morning it’ll be sweltering, but right now the heat is still gathering itself, humid and patient.
The air is soft and damp, clinging faintly to my skin. The sky is the color of a low-resolution photo—details still blurred, edges not yet defined. A thin line of brightness is just beginning to show along the horizon beyond the tree line.
The path to the training ground is familiar; I’ve walked it dozens of times in full daylight, with tourists and staff filling the space. This is the first time I’ve done it like this. Alone. Early. Intentionally.
Gravel crunches under my boots in a regular pattern.
Thirty steps between my cabin and the turn by the main building; forty between the corner and the first glimpse of the arena’s safety rails.
My brain automatically counts and stores the sequence, filing it with the thousands of other tiny maps I carry.
I pass the main hall—dark, except for a low light over the back door. No breakfast smells yet. No clatter of dishes. Somewhere a horse stomps and snorts, the ring of hoof against stall floor sharp in the quiet.
My inbox tugs at the edge of my awareness like a gnat. No new emails. No updates. Blackwell and the university exist in a separate, digital world—lines of text, Zoom windows, signatures at the bottom of PDFs.
What I’m walking toward is older. Messier. Tangible.
At the edge of the training ground, I slow. The sand is still shadowed; the wooden rail around the perimeter throws long stripes on the ground. Beyond it, shapes move in the half-light.
Ten of them.
For a heartbeat, my nerves spike. These are not abstract case studies. These are the men whose stories I’ve been learning. Not as data points. As people. Men pulled out of ice and dropped into a century that makes almost no sense by their original metrics.
Men who learned, for most of their lives, that the only way to survive was to be more dangerous than the person in front of them.
I rest my hands lightly on the top rail and force myself to look.
They’re warming up. No tourists.
The gladiators move in pairs and trios, bodies flowing through drills with a precision that makes my throat go tight.
Wooden gladius against wooden shield. The crack of impact is duller than metal, but my nervous system reacts anyway.
My brain supplies the missing sound as if overlaying an old soundtrack—steel on steel, roar of crowd.
Varro moves like a fortress. Cassius like a storm rolling in. Victor like fire looking for oxygen.
And then I see Flavius.
My whole body goes still. Not frozen. Just… focused.
He’s at the far end of the yard, working through a series of forms on his own. No showmanship. No grin. His face is stripped down to intent and breath.
He steps forward, gladius angled low, then pivots and drives an imaginary opponent back with a series of quick, economical strikes. Each movement flows into the next, a choreography of violence honed so thoroughly it’s become another language.
I’ve seen him at demos countless times. Charming tourists, playing up the drama, tossing off jokes every other sentence to keep the kids from getting scared. That Flavius is magnetic, safe in the way of people who make a point of never letting the mood grow heavy.
This Flavius is… not safe.
Not because he’s out of control. The opposite, actually. Because everything is controlled. Every line of his body, every breath, every shift of weight is intentional.
This is the man the arena built.
Heat prickles under my skin. Not the kind that comes with embarrassment or sensory overload. Something lower, deeper. Recognition that I am watching a predator in his natural environment—and that this predator has devoted the last months to making sure I feel safe around him.
“Ready?” a voice calls.
It’s Cassius. He tosses a practice shield to Flavius, who catches it with one hand without looking and slides his arm through the straps as though his body has done it a thousand times without his brain needing to get involved.
They square off in the center of the yard. The others ease to the edges, giving them space the way you give space to storms and fault lines.
My fingers tighten on the fence rail.
There is no referee. No bell. No ritual announcement. Cassius just lifts his gladius in a small salute, and Flavius answers with a tiny tilt of his shield.
Flavius’s stance changes—subtly, almost imperceptibly.
It’s not showmanship. It’s calculation. Awareness.
He notes the angle of Cassius’s knee, the set of his shoulders, the way his weight settles unevenly for half a second.
I don’t know how I know he sees it, only that his body adjusts in answer, like a dancer responding to a partner’s breath.
Then they move.
For a heartbeat, my brain can’t keep up. It’s all blur and impact and the dull thud of wood meeting wood, sand scuffing under boots as they shift and pivot and lunge.
Then my pattern-recognition kicks in.