Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Sulla
Reid’s breathing evens out before midnight. I lie in the dark for another hour, listening to it, not sleeping. She’s still against my side. I haven’t moved. Didn’t want to wake her. Told myself that’s the only reason.
I love her.
The thought arrives without warning and then immediately settles, like it’s been true for a while and only just found words.
When I get up carefully, she stirs but doesn’t wake. I pull on my boots and step out into the cold.
The camp is dark. A few lights are on in the command tent, production never fully sleeps, but the contestant area is quiet. No cameras trained on the perimeter path at this hour. Just the hills and the wind and the kind of Scottish dark that has some weight to it.
I walk.
No destination. Just movement. The path that rings the camp, churned mud and rough grass, my breath misting in the cold air.
I love her.
I turn it over, examining it. Testing the edges of it the way I’d test a handhold on the cliff face. Is it solid? Does it hold weight?
Yes. Completely. Irrevocably.
I’ve been careful, these past weeks, not to call it that. Told myself it was partnership. Proximity. The particular intimacy of shared hardship. Told myself a lot of things.
All of it was a lie.
I stop walking. Look up at the sky—cloud cover, no stars, just dark—and wait for the familiar thing to happen. The thing that always happens when I get close to this territory.
Livia’s face.
The storeroom. Bread shared in shadow. Her voice calling something about me a gift.
The ergastulum.
But tonight something is different.
I look at the memory and I don’t see a wound. I see a boy.
Seventeen, maybe. Small for his age—I never got the height the lanista wanted, never got the breadth of shoulder. Wiry. Fast. Good with equipment, good with the gladiators, not good enough at anything to matter.
No mother. Father, a gladiator, long absorbed into ludus life, present in body but unreachable in every other way.
No one had ever told that boy he mattered.
Then Livia looked at him.
You see things. The way fighters move, what they need. That’s a gift.
I stand in the cold Scottish dark and look at that boy clearly, perhaps for the first time.
He wasn’t foolish.
He was starving. He’d been starving his entire life—for someone to see him, for someone to say you, specifically, are worth something. Livia offered him a crust of bread and he called it a feast. Because he’d never had a feast. He had no reference point. How could he have known the difference?
Of course he thought it was love.
What else would he have called it? He was seventeen and hungry and she was kind to him and that combination had never happened before. Of course he built a future out of it. Of course he told her the plan, the funds, the careful hopeful escape route he’d mapped in his head.
He was a child. Doing what children do when someone is kind to them; he trusted her.
Something in my chest that has been clenched for most of my life loosens slightly.
He didn’t deserve the ergastulum for that.
The thought arrives plainly, without drama, and I stand very still with it.
He didn’t deserve it.
Not the chains. Not the dark. Not the rats. Not the weeks of not knowing if he existed. Not what came after, the beam, the rods, the second descent. He didn’t deserve any of it for the crime of being a hungry boy who thought someone loved him.
I’ve carried the ergastulum as evidence of his stupidity my whole adult life. Look what happens when you trust. Look what love costs. Look at what you were, weak and foolish and naive, and look what they made of you because of it.
But that wasn’t the lesson. That was never the lesson.
The lesson was what they did to him. Not what he did.
He was seventeen. He wanted to be free. He wanted someone to go with him.
I forgive him.
The words form in my mind with a simplicity that undoes me.
I forgive him. The boy in the storeroom.
Took me a lifetime.
I stand in the Scottish dark for a long time, in the cold, my breath puffing out white. The camp is quiet around me. The hills are dark shapes against a darker sky.
What Livia and I had, whatever it was, betrayal or cowardice or Domina’s cruelty extracting it from her, it wasn’t this. I know that now with the clarity of contrast. It was hunger mistaken for love, which is not the same as love, which is not the boy’s fault, because he’d never been fed.
Reid is across the camp in our tent. Asleep. She said she was betrayed by a superior officer.
I think about that.
Two people who learned the same wrong lesson from two different catastrophes. Vulnerability is death. Trust is the setup for the fall. Keep your walls up and your distance and your professional face and maybe nothing else can reach you.
I walk toward the tent.
I don’t know what to do with this. Don’t know what comes after the competition, after the cameras, after the remaining days of pretending. Don’t know if she feels what I feel or if the kiss the other night was its own kind of hunger—warmth and proximity and weeks of accumulated wanting.
But I know the difference now between starving and being fed.
I know because I’ve had both.
I step back into the tent quietly. Reid hasn’t moved. Her breathing is steady and deep.
I sit on the edge of my cot, looking at her in the dark.
I forgive him, I think again. The boy in the storeroom.
Then I lie down and close my eyes.
I had to survive two thousand years in ice for me to experience the feast of real love.
For the first time, the boy from Rome doesn’t feel like the villain.
He feels like possibility.