Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Sulla
Episode Three
The first two episodes were mostly setup: arrival, snippets of background for each participant, partnerships assigned, basic challenges. The sanctuary watched with mild interest, polite but distant.
Episode Three is different.
Laura turns on the TV as Diana says, “The previews showed you all going into an ominous-looking metal door. I have a feeling we’ll need popcorn for this.
” Her tone is joking, but I doubt many of the gladiators in the room find it funny.
For most of us, nothing good ever happened behind doors that were locked from the outside.
The common room is fuller than the last two weeks. Word must have spread that something happens in this episode.
On screen: the underground challenge. People descending into cramped, dark spaces. Then Trevor’s panic attack. The camera catches him breaking down completely: hyperventilating, sobbing, barely able to speak. “I can’t… I can’t breathe—”
On screen, I approach. The entire common room leans forward.
My voice, coming through the television speakers, is soft. Patient. Nothing like what the men around me remember from Rome.
“Trevor. Look at me. Name five things you can see.”
I walk him through Flavius’s grounding technique: slow, gentle, my hands steady, my expression calm. A few chairs over, Cassius goes very still, watching intently.
On screen, Trevor’s breathing steadies. The panic recedes. He looks at me with desperate gratitude. “Thank you. I… thank you.”
“You’re okay,” I tell him on screen. “You’re safe.”
The room erupts, not all at once but in a wave, people turning to look at me, voices overlapping.
“Holy shit,” Thrax breathes. “You did that?”
“That was beautiful,” Skye says, wiping tears. “Sulla, that was so gentle.”
I shift in my chair, uncomfortable with the weight of their attention. “It was basic crisis intervention.”
“No,” Diana says firmly, cutting through the noise. “That was compassion. Real compassion. You can’t fake what was on your face.”
Varro is shaking his head slowly. “I’ve never seen you like that. In all those years in Rome I never once saw you like that.”
“Like what?”
“Soft. Patient.” He pauses, choosing the word carefully. “Kind.”
It sits heavy in the room. On screen, the episode continues, but the energy around me has shifted, people glancing at me differently, like they’re recalibrating something they thought they knew.
Flavius catches my eye from across the room. “All those months in my classes, I wondered if you were absorbing anything. But you used it.”
“He was drowning,” I say. “Someone had to help.”
“Old you wouldn’t have bothered,” Varro says. He’s not being cruel. Just accurate.
He’s right. Old me would have seen weakness and either ignored it or found a use for it. I couldn’t ignore a drowning man anymore. I don’t know exactly when that changed. But it had.
As people stand to leave after the episode, Skye touches my shoulder briefly—the first time she’s touched me voluntarily. “That was really good. What you did.”
After everyone else has gone, Cassius lingers. He helps stack chairs without being asked, moving alongside me in silence for a moment before he speaks.
“I watched your face when you were helping him,” he says quietly. “You weren’t performing. You actually cared.”
“Yes.”
“That’s new.” He sets down a chair. “I’m not saying it fixes anything. But I see it.”
Something in his expression has shifted—not forgiveness, not yet, but the first crack in a wall that’s been solid for two years.
Episode Five
From the previews, this will be the body heat episode, and everyone knows it. Even people who’ve been skipping earlier episodes show up; apparently the promotional clips have been suggestive enough to draw a crowd. The common room is at capacity before Laura even turns on the television.
On screen: Reid and me, soaked and shaking, the medical team issuing orders in clipped professional voices.
Strip down. Get in the sleeping bag together.
Share body heat. The camera catches our faces as we register what’s being asked of us—the split second of stillness before training kicks in and we both start moving.
Thrax grins. “Here we go.”
On screen we’re awkward. Careful. Reid in her sports bra and underwear, me in briefs, both of us treating this as the tactical problem it is and nothing else. We climb into the sleeping bag. Back to front. My arm around her waist.
My chest tightens watching this. I remember exactly how she felt against me that night—the way her body fit into mine, the smell of her hair, the sound of her breathing as she finally let herself sleep. She was trusting me completely, even then. Even before she had reason to.
The room watches in silence as the hours pass in fast-forward. Then morning, the camera catching my face as I watch Reid sleep against my chest. The expression looking back at me from the screen is one I’ve never seen on my own face before. Completely unguarded. Undone.
“Oh,” Laura breathes, from somewhere to my left. “Oh, you love her.”
On screen I’m looking at Reid like she hung the stars. Like I’d burn the world down to keep her safe. Soft and open and utterly without defense, caught in a moment I thought was private.
“You were already gone for her,” Skye says gently.
“We were surviving,” I manage, but even I can hear how hollow it sounds.
“You were falling in love,” Diana says. “Look at your face. You can’t fake that.”
She’s right. I can’t watch myself on screen and deny it. That expression belongs to a man in love, not a man managing a tactical situation, and everyone in this room can see the difference.
On screen, Reid wakes. She sees how close we are, and the camera catches her face too—the same softness, the same want, her gaze meeting mine with something that looks dangerously like recognition. Like she’s seeing something she already knew.
The episode ends with us pulling apart awkwardly. The damage is done. Everyone in the room knows.
“She loves you too,” Nicole says. “Did you see her face?”
Loved. My throat is too tight to say it. Before she knew. Past tense.
“You don’t look happy about it,” Skye observes.
“It’s complicated,” I say.
She grips Thrax’s hand and looks back at the dark screen. “I know what love looks like. That’s love. Complicated or not.”
After the episode, several of the women gather around—Diana, Skye, Nicole, Maya, Laura—and Diana asks when I fell for her. I think about it honestly. “I don’t know. Somewhere between the pairing and the rope bridge. Maybe immediately.” I pause. “Does it matter? It’s over now.”
“Is it?” Laura asks gently.
I don’t answer. Because I don’t know. Because I want to believe it’s not over, but I watched her walk away from me in that hotel saying she might need to stay away from me ‘maybe forever,’ and those words have echoed in my head every night since.
Episode Six
The rope bridge episode.
The common room is packed for this one; everyone came, even people who’ve been skipping.
The promotional clips have been intense.
“Most dramatic rescue in Elite Crucible history,” the announcer promised.
My hands are already sweating before the episode starts.
I know what’s coming. Lived through it once. Somehow, watching it is worse.
On screen, teams cross the bridge one by one. Trevor and Zay. Sienna and Luna. Aiden and Jacks, slower because of Aiden’s prosthetic but steady. Then it’s our turn.
“That’s a death trap,” Victor mutters, and he’s not wrong. Even on screen the structure looks wrong. Too much sway. The wind catching it badly.
My chest constricts watching Reid approach it. I want to reach through the screen and stop her, tell her to wait, find another way. But I already know how this ends.
On screen, Reid goes first. Methodical. Careful.
She gets over halfway across before I hear it—the sharp crack that I still hear sometimes when I'm falling asleep.
The rope anchor on the far side gives—not a clean snap but a progressive failure, rope fraying and slipping through the fitting in a single second.
The bridge lurches violently, the whole structure tilting, and Reid loses her footing on the canted slats. Her hand shoots out and catches the rail still anchored, and she's dangling one-handed eighty feet over white water, body swinging in open air.
The entire common room gasps. I can barely hear them over the sound of my own pulse.
On screen, I run.
Watching myself sprint across that tilting bridge is one of the stranger experiences of my long life.
I don’t remember the decision to move. I don’t remember anything from those seconds except her name in my throat and the absolute certainty that I would reach her or die trying.
But watching it now, hearing my own voice ragged and torn as I scream her name over and over—
“Holy fuck,” Thrax breathes. “You’re going to die.”
That’s why my throat was so wrecked after. Why I could barely speak that night. I was screaming her name and didn’t even know it.
On screen, I drop to my knees on the tilted planks and grab the left rail above where Reid is gripping it, leaning out over the edge so she can see my face.
My right hand clasps her wrist. The camera catches her expression in that moment—white with terror, somewhere far away, not in Scotland at all.
I know now where she was. Iraq. Ramirez. The cliff and the hand that slipped.
The drone footage catches what I couldn’t see from where I was: how close the rail is to giving, the way Reid’s fingers are going white, the precise geometry of how little margin we had.
I watch as my voice finally breaks through her terror and she reaches up to grasp my wrist.
I haul her up by the wrist onto the bridge. We collapse together on the tilted planks, both breathing in ragged bursts.
Then the camera catches my hands cradling her face. I don’t remember doing that either.
“You’re okay,” I’m saying on screen. “You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
Her hands fist in my shirt. “You almost… you could have—”
“I wasn’t going to let you fall.”
Watching this now, from a couch in Missouri, I can see what I couldn’t in the moment—how close we both came to not being here. If the rail had given ten seconds earlier. If I’d been two steps slower. If her grip had failed while she was still in Iraq and couldn’t hear me calling her back.
We would both be dead.
And in that moment, I wouldn’t have cared. All I cared about was her.
The drone camera holds on our faces. Relief and terror and something neither of us is naming yet, all of it completely visible, completely undeniable.
The drone pulls back as we stagger to our feet and make it to the cliff edge with Mac, Trevor, and Zay giving us anchor as the bridge collapses. The video is slowed down to give maximum impact of the dramatic sound of splintering boards against solid rock.
The episode ends.
The room is silent.
Cassius speaks first, his voice quiet and certain. “That was love. What you did. That was love.”
No one disagrees.
My throat is tight. I can’t speak.
“You could have died,” Quintus says. “That bridge was failing. You ran across it anyway.”
“She was falling.” My voice comes out rough, raw as the day it happened. “I wasn’t going to let her die.”
“Even if it meant dying yourself?” Varro asks.
“Yes.”
The word hangs in the air. Simple. True. Undeniable.
Thrax is staring at me as if he’s never seen me before. “Old you wouldn’t have done that.”
“No. Old me would have calculated the risk and stayed safe.”
“What changed?” Flavius asks.
I think about Trevor in the bunker. About the choice I made that day that surprised even me. “I don’t know exactly when,” I say. “But somewhere in the last two years I stopped calculating whether people were worth the cost. She was falling. That was enough.”
A pause.
“The man I was in Rome would have watched her fall and called it her own fault for going first.”
The room is quiet for a long moment.
Skye says softly, “But you didn’t.”
“No.”
“That’s everything,” she says.
After the episode, people don’t leave immediately. Victor approaches—a man who was at the ludus, who knows exactly what I was, who has more reason than most to keep his distance. He extends his hand.
I stare at it. Then shake it. His grip is brief and firm and real.
“You’re different,” he says. Then walks away.
Later, Cassius falls into step beside me on the walk back to my cabin. We move in silence for a while, the night clear and the sanctuary grounds quiet around us.
“When Trevor was panicking in the bunker,” he says finally, “you helped him. That was the first time I thought maybe you were different.” He stops walking and looks at me directly. “Tonight, I watched you run across a failing bridge without hesitating. That wasn’t performance. That was instinct.”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t come from nowhere,” he says. “Someone had to build that.”
“I don’t know if I changed,” I say, “or if I finally became what I was supposed to be.”
He considers that for a moment. “Maybe those are the same thing.”
He walks toward his cabin.
I stand in the dark alone with that.
Six more episodes. Then the reunion.
Then Reid.