Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Sulla
Episode Eleven
One week since the documentary. The atmosphere at the sanctuary has shifted—not forgiveness exactly, but acknowledgment. People nod when I pass. Cassius sits with me at breakfast sometimes. Small things that carry more weight than they should.
But tonight is Episode Eleven. The episode where Reid finds out.
The common room is packed again. Draco and Charity stayed the extra week, delaying their return to New York. “Wouldn’t miss this train wreck for the world,” Draco said yesterday. But his voice was gentle.
The episode begins.
Day 28. Finale day. On screen, Reid and I look ready. Nervous but focused. We have no idea what’s coming.
Then: production calling Reid away.
My stomach knots watching this. I already lived through it once—the confusion, the dread, the moment everything shattered. But watching it happen again, seeing it from the outside, is somehow worse.
The camera shows Reid in the production trailer. The producer Bethany with the tablet. Reid’s face as she watches—color draining, hand going to mouth, eyes widening with horror.
Beside me, Skye makes a small sound. “Oh, that poor woman.”
I can’t speak. Can’t look away.
I’ve imagined this moment a hundred times: in that hotel room, on the plane home from Scotland, and lying awake in my cabin here at Second Chance.
I’ve constructed it from the outside, tried to picture what her face did when she saw the footage.
But imagination is a mercy. It lets you soften things, skip frames, cut away before the worst of it.
The camera doesn’t cut away.
I watch her watch me. Watch her see what I was.
The color leaving her face in real time—not a metaphor, an actual thing: the blood retreating from her skin while Bethany keeps talking, the tablet keeps playing, and Reid keeps watching with her hand pressed to her mouth like she can hold something in that’s already escaped.
Her eyes don’t fill. She doesn’t cry. That would be easier.
Instead, she goes very, very still. The kind of stillness that means the impact hasn’t landed yet. Her body is buying time.
I know that stillness. I’ve seen it in the arena. It’s what people do when the wound is too serious to feel yet.
The room around me is silent. When I glance sideways, no one is watching the screen anymore. They’re watching me.
I can’t pay attention to them. I can’t look at anything but her face.
She loved me when she walked into that trailer. She is not the same person walking out.
I did that. Sitting on a couch in Missouri eleven weeks later, watching it happen in high definition—I did that to her.
Not the show. Not the producers who called her in.
Not the footage. Me. My choices, made twenty centuries before she was born, landing on her face in a production trailer in the Scottish Highlands on day twenty-eight.
The camera follows her back across the camp. Her stride is different. Controlled in a way it wasn’t before, the military bearing she’d relaxed over four weeks, back up like a wall.
On screen, she finds me. Our eyes meet and I watch myself smile—that rare, unguarded smile I only gave her. I’m completely oblivious. My chest constricts watching this. That smile. That moment of hope before everything died.
On screen, I start moving toward her. She walks past me without speaking.
“Reid?” My on-screen voice is confused. Worried.
She keeps walking.
“We need to move. Challenge briefing starts in two minutes.”
“Reid, what happened? Talk to me.”
“Not now.” Ice cold.
The briefing scene. Reid sitting as far from me as possible. Not looking at me.
After the briefing, I catch up to her outside.
My on-screen desperation is hard to watch.
She stops. Turns. And the look on her face—
“They told me.” Her voice is eerily calm. “About the ludus. About Cassius. About what you were.”
The color drains from my on-screen face.
In the common room, everyone’s watching me instead of the screen. Seeing my reaction to seeing my reaction.
“Reid—”
“You have one hour to prepare for the challenge. I suggest you use it.”
She walks away. On screen, I say her name one more time. Broken. Desperate.
She doesn’t turn around.
The camera holds on my face. Devastation. Complete devastation.
I can’t watch myself anymore. That face—my face—empty and shattered. I look down at my hands gripping the chair arms, knuckles white.
This is worse than living it. I know what my face looked like in that moment from the inside. Watching it from the outside—seeing exactly what I looked like when my world ended, captured and broadcast to millions—is something else entirely. It was worse than I remembered.
I remember watching her walk toward me that morning and thinking something was wrong. Thinking, she knows. And then, she’ll walk away. And then, she should.
That’s when I finally look away from the screen. Down at the rope scar on my left palm from the bridge.
She loved me. I just watched the moment it stopped.
Laura’s hand finds my arm in the dark. She doesn’t say anything. Just holds on.
The episode continues. The challenge beginning.
Thirty miles of Highland terrain with a hunter force behind us, and Reid ten feet ahead of me the entire time—shoulders rigid, not looking back, handing me rations without a word when we stop.
The camera catches everything. The silence between us that’s worse than any argument.
The moment I try and she says “not now” and I say “okay” and we keep walking.
There’s no dramatic confrontation. That’s the hardest thing to watch. There’s just two people moving through wilderness, one of them destroyed and the other not allowed to show it.
Cassius speaks quietly. “You tried to tell her. Back in Episode Nine. You said, ‘I wasn’t a good man. I hurt people.’ We all heard it.”
“Tried,” I say. “Didn’t tell her enough. Didn’t give her the truth when it mattered.”
“You were afraid,” Diana says.
“Yes. And she paid for my fear.”
Victor nods. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? There is no good answer. You can’t reconcile it. You just have to accept that both are true.”
The episode shows us in the cave that night. Holed up. Miserable. Reid as far from me as the space allows.
On screen, she speaks to the darkness, “I loved you.”
“I know.”
“Past tense.”
“I know.”
The episode ends there.
The common room is silent.
“She still loves you,” Victor says finally. “You can see it. The way she’s hurting—that’s not past tense.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do. That’s present tense love in past tense words.” He pauses. “Question is: will she forgive you?”
I don’t answer. Because I don’t know.
Episode Twelve
The finale episode.
The 48-hour challenge falling apart. Reid and I barely communicating. Every interaction hostile or silent.
The sanctuary watches the river crossing. Reid going in alone. Getting swept downstream.
On screen, I’m running along the bank, throwing the rope, pulling her out.
“You saved her again,” Diana observes.
“She nearly died because I didn’t tell her the truth earlier,” I say. “If trust hadn’t been broken, she wouldn’t have made that call.”
The forced intimacy after. Hypothermia. Body heat. Both miserable.
“This is awful,” Skye says quietly. “Watching you two fall apart.”
The challenge continues. Getting caught a quarter mile from extraction.
Results announcement: First place: Jacks and Aiden ($250K each); Second place: Trevor and Zay ($100K each); Third place: Us ($50K each).
“You would have won,” Varro says. “If trust hadn’t been broken.”
“I know.”
Then: hotel night. Reid knocks at my door, I open it. We look at each other. The knife scene.
The door slams shut behind her.
Screen fades to black: SOME SCENES EDITED FOR TIME
Cuts to morning. Separate departures.
Draco says dryly, “Well, that was fucking depressing.”
“She still loves him,” Charity insists. “You can see it in every frame.”
“Doesn’t matter if she can’t forgive him,” Draco counters.
The episode ends.
Laura clears her throat. “I have an announcement. The reunion special is next week.”
Everyone looks at her.
“They’re filming it here. At the sanctuary.” She looks at me. “All contestants are arriving over the next few days. Including Reid.”
My world shifts under my feet.
“She arrives in four days,” Laura continues.
Four days until I see her. Ninety-six hours.
“We’ll be here,” Cassius says quietly. “When she arrives. You won’t face it alone.”
I nod. Can’t speak.