Chapter 18
Chapter Eighteen
Sulla
Day nineteen. Rest day.
Mac gathers us at morning formation. Ten contestants remaining. Four gone in the last two days. Three quit: one injury on a strenuous climb, one hypothermia, and a bodybuilder who packed up and left on the transport that took Blake out yesterday. No explanation.
Heather is now paired with James Partlow.
He does not move like a soldier, but he moves like a man who rebuilt himself deliberately.
Broad through the shoulders, hands callused in ways that do not come from field work.
His strength is recent—earned, not inherited.
He carries himself without boasting, watches more than he speaks, and endures discomfort without complaint.
Whatever life he left before this, he chose iron and repetition afterward. That much is clear.
“Eleven days left,” Mac announces. “Tomorrow, the difficulty increases. Those of you still here have proven you can survive. Now we find out if you can excel.”
Mac studies us, as if deciding who will fail next.
“Before dismissal, let me mention the schedule. Tomorrow is rock-climbing training. All contestants, 0600, eastern cliff face. Mandatory safety training before the upcoming vertical challenge.” Climbing.
I did some of that in the ludus—scaling walls for training exercises.
Different equipment now, but I imagine the principle is the same.
He dismisses us. Most contestants head to the medical tent for checkups or to their tents for gear maintenance. As I’m walking toward my tent, production intercepts me.
“Confessional interview in ten minutes,” Michelle says. “Command tent.”
I nod.
Reid is already heading that direction, they must be cycling through everyone today. Our eyes meet briefly as we pass. She looks… different. Softer somehow. Or maybe I’m just noticing things I didn’t before.
I wait my turn outside the tent. Through the canvas I can hear Trevor talking, his voice animated. Excited. He’s still riding the high of completing the bunker challenge three days ago. Good for him.
My turn. I enter and sit in the designated chair across from Michelle. The camera’s red light is already on.
“Sulla. Day nineteen. More than two weeks complete. How are you feeling?”
“Functional.”
She smiles slightly. “That’s not very descriptive.”
“I’m still here. That’s what matters.”
“How’s the partnership with Reid?”
I choose my words carefully. “Effective. She’s competent. Tactical. Good under pressure.”
“That’s very professional.”
“It is professional.”
“Nothing personal?”
My jaw tightens involuntarily. “We’re here to compete. Not make friends.”
“But you helped Trevor. That seemed personal.”
“He needed help. I could provide it.”
“And what about Reid? Does she need help?”
“Reid doesn’t need anyone.”
Michelle leans forward slightly. “Do you?”
The question catches me off guard. Do I need help? Need people? I’ve spent decades believing I don’t. Believing I can’t afford to.
Long pause. Too long.
“No,” I say finally.
Michelle holds my gaze for a moment. Writes something on her clipboard. “Alright. That’s all for today.”
I walk out.
Outside, Reid is waiting for her turn. She sees my face. “That bad?”
“Questions I don’t want to answer.”
“Yeah. I know the feeling.”
I want to ask what questions she doesn’t want to answer. Want to know what she’s hiding. But we both have secrets we’re not ready to share.
I walk back to the tent alone.
The next day is intense with the climbing training.
The eastern cliff face is gray and wet, ropes already rigged from the anchor points above by the crew.
Mac runs us through harness checks and belay technique before anyone touches the rock—no room for error at these heights.
The cliff smells like cold stone and moss.
My hands find the holds instinctively, searching for the kind of grip that won’t betray you mid-climb.
Reid moves with the methodical confidence of someone who has done this before—not reckless, never reckless, but certain.
We don’t talk much. The cliff demands attention.
But I’m aware of her on the rope beside mine.
The sound of her breathing. The scrape of her boots on wet rock.
The way she pauses at a difficult section, reads it, then commits.
That evening, after the sun sets, I lie in my cot trying to sleep. But sleep won’t come.
The bunker memory won’t let go. Four days since that challenge and when I close my eyes I still feel it—the darkness, the cold, the walls pressing close. I used Flavius’s grounding technique and it worked. It got me through. But it didn’t erase the memories. Just pushed them down temporarily.
Now, with time on my hands, they’re surfacing. Demanding attention.
I close my eyes. Try to breathe. Try to think of something else.
But the darkness behind my eyelids triggers something. A door opening in my mind that I’ve kept locked for decades.
The memory crashes over me. Not the bunker in Scotland. Something older. Something worse.
Her name was Livia.
She was Domina’s new lady’s maid. Dark eyes and skin. Soft voice. The first person in my entire life who looked at me like I mattered.
“You’re good with the equipment,” she said one day, watching me oil the horse equipment. “You see things. The way fighters move, what they need. That’s a gift.”
No one had ever called anything about me a gift.
We stole moments. In the storerooms. Behind the stables. Anywhere the overseers wouldn’t see us. She’d bring bread from the kitchen and we’d share it, and for the first time since my mother died, I wasn’t alone.
“We could leave,” I whispered one night in the shadowed corner behind the grain storage. “I’ve been watching. The household funds, they’re kept in the office. If we took enough to buy our freedom—”
“They’d kill us.”
“Not if we were careful. Not if we planned it right.” I took her hand. “I don’t want to be a slave forever, Livia. I want… I want a life. With you.”
She looked at me for a long moment. Then she kissed me.
“Tell me the plan,” she said.
I told her everything.
One hour later two of Domina’s household guards grabbed me by the arms. When I struggled and demand an explanation, one cuffed me across the face, almost knocking me out.
Livia was crying when they dragged me to the audience chamber. I thought they’d hurt her. I tried to reach for her…
Domina’s hand cracked across my face.
“You thought you could steal from me?” Her voice was ice. “You thought you could corrupt my household?”
“Please, it was my idea, she didn’t—”
“She told me everything.” Domina smiled. “Such a loyal girl. She came to me the moment you revealed your pathetic scheme.”
I looked at Livia. She wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“No,” I said. “No, she wouldn’t—”
“Take him to the ergastulum,” Domina ordered. “Let’s see if darkness teaches him his place.”
They dragged me down.
And down.
And down.
Stone steps. Deeper than I knew the villa went. The air got colder, damper. I could hear water dripping somewhere in the black.
The door was iron. It screamed when they opened it.
They threw me in. Shackled my ankles to the wall. Left me one piece of moldy bread and a cup of water.
The door slammed shut.
The darkness was absolute.
I don’t know how long I was down there. Days became nothing. There was no light, no sound except the drip-drip-drip of water and the scratch of rats.
The rats came at night. Or what I thought was night. It was always night in the ergastulum.
They crawled over me while I slept. Bit my feet, my hands. I’d wake up screaming and the sound would echo off stone walls I couldn’t see.
My leg cramps in the present—Scotland, the cot—and I shift position without fully waking from the memory. The phantom sensation of rats on my skin persists even as my hand grips the clean Scottish blanket.
The bread came once a day. Maybe. I couldn’t tell. The water was rank, but I drank it because the thirst was worse than the taste.
I talked to myself to remember I was human. Told stories my mother used to tell. Sang songs even though my voice cracked and broke.
Then I stopped talking.
Then I stopped being sure I existed.
The darkness was inside me now. I couldn’t remember what light looked like. Couldn’t remember Livia’s face. Couldn’t remember my own name.
There was only the dark. The cold. The dripping. The rats.
And the certainty that I would die here.
They came for me eventually.
Dragged me up the stairs. I couldn’t walk—my feet were destroyed from the rats, from the damp, from being chained in one position for weeks.
The light when we emerged was agony. I couldn’t open my eyes. Couldn’t speak. Couldn’t stand.
They held me upright while Domina watched.
“Have you learned your lesson?”
I couldn’t answer. My voice was gone, but I nodded like a puppet.
“Good,” she said. “Crucifixion position.”
They stretched my arms and tied them to a beam. My feet barely touched the ground. The weight of my body pulled at my shoulders until something popped. The pain was white-hot and endless.
Hours. Maybe days. I don’t remember.
When they finally cut me down, I couldn’t move my arms. They hung useless at my sides.
Then they beat the soles of my feet with rods until I couldn’t feel them anymore.
Then they dragged me back to the ergastulum.
“One more week,” the overseer said. “To be sure you remember.”
The iron door screamed shut.
The darkness swallowed me again.
When they finally brought me up for good, I was different.
Lighter. Hollow. Something essential had been carved out of me in the dark.
They assigned me back to the training grounds. Someone pulled my arms back into the sockets. The pain was just as bad as when they were dislocated, but then it was immediately better. It took months to regain my weight and strength. I limped for years. My shoulders never quite healed right.
But the worst damage wasn’t in my body.
It was in the lesson I’d learned: Love is a lie.
Livia told Domina. Or maybe Domina tortured it out of her. I’ll never know. But it doesn’t matter. The result was the same.
Kindness is a trap. Vulnerability is death.
I would never—never—let anyone close enough to hurt me again.
I would never be that boy who believed in love and freedom and stupid, impossible dreams.
That boy died in the ergastulum.
What came back up was something colder. Something harder. Something that understood the only way to survive was to make sure you were the one holding the whip.
I wake gasping. Sitting up in my cot. Scotland. Tent four. Not Rome. Not the ergastulum.
My heart is racing. Breathing too fast. Sweat soaks my shirt despite the cold.
I press my back against the tent pole. Focus on the cold canvas. Count the sounds outside—wind, rain, a distant generator. Try to pull myself back the way Flavius taught me. It’s not working.
“Sulla?” Reid’s voice in the darkness. Concerned.
I can’t respond. Can’t speak. The memory is too close. Too real.
I hear her move. See her shadow crossing the tent. She sits on the edge of my cot.
“Hey. You’re okay. You’re here. Scotland. You’re safe.”
Her voice is calm. Certain. The same tone I used with Trevor.
I force myself to breathe. To ground myself. Five things I can see—her shadow, the tent wall, my hands, the cot, her face barely visible in darkness. Four things I can touch…
Slowly, the present returns. The past recedes.
“Nightmare?” Reid asks quietly.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.”
She nods. Doesn’t push. Just sits there. Present. Steady.
“I’m here if you change your mind.”
“I know. Thank you.”
She stands. Goes back to her cot.
We lie in the darkness. Both awake now.
“Reid?” My voice rough.
“Yeah?”
“Earlier. The interview. Michelle asked if I need help.”
“What did you say?”
“I said no.” I pause, my mouth working as I decide if I have the courage to say the rest. Then I force out the next two words. “I lied.”
Silence. Then, “We all lie in those interviews. It’s safer than the truth.”
“Do you lie?”
“Constantly.”
“About what?”
“About how I’m really doing. About what I’m really running from. About…” She pauses. “About a lot of things.”
“Me too.”
We don’t elaborate. Don’t confess. But the admission hangs between us—we’re both lying. Both hiding. Both trying to survive by keeping secrets.
“Goodnight, Sulla,” she says finally.
“Goodnight.”
A moment passes. The darkness settles.
Then her hand reaches across the space between us. Palm up. Offered.
I look at it for a moment.
Then I reach back.
We don’t speak. Just lie there in the darkness, hands clasped across four feet of Scottish air.
Her thumb traces one slow circle on the back of my hand. Then stills.
I don’t let go for a long time.