Page 133 of Vesuvius

He touched the contract in his pocket. He could take on Julia Fortunata’s family name, have a house, a life, a future in Rome. Forget Loren. But that was the catch to letting someone past your walls. Once they were part of your home, their absence echoed.

Felix was sick to death of letting ghosts decide his fate.

The next time he ran, it would be towards something. Not away.

‘Damn it all,’ he muttered.

He turned the horse around.

Chapter XXX

LOREN

When Loren slept, his dreams were empty.

He preferred the nightmares.

He began stretching his waking hours, first to midnight, and when that offered little respite, beyond. He paced. Up the halls of the estate, long after servants turned in. Through the orchard, past the helmet’s grave. Down the straight, narrow rows of the vineyard. Fatigue tugged him, his ankle begged for rest, but exhaustion and pain were temporary troubles. He endured both.

Only when Felix caught him did Loren allow himself to be coaxed to bed. Felix rarely said a word, even as the routine wore him down, strain apparent in tired eyes and tight shoulders. Another source of guilt. Felix had come back. Chosen Loren as he’d wanted him to. Loren should feel lucky when Felix sat at the foot of his bed, waiting for him to drift off. So lucky. But it was hard to feel anything when he barely felt alive.

He slept. And woke again in his dreams. Gone were blood and daggers, billowing smoke and ragged whispers, as if those, too, were left cinders in the rubble. Instead Loren faced endless nights in an empty temple, its worshippers long since fled. No statue to mark its devotion. Frescoes stripped from the walls. Loren wandered and wandered butnever found an exit. Sometimes he heard footsteps, but they flitted away when he sought the source.

He knew the source. He recognised the pattern of stealth and sandal as the same steps that followed him during his waking hours, watching him close.

But Ghost-Felix had nothing more to say, and Loren, despite his efforts, dreamed alone.

If his dreams were empty, they balanced out the way he burst when awake. Rot flooded him to the brim, a constant sickness of festering numbness that little could stir him from. Days slipped and spilled into each other. The moon came and went. Loren didn’t care. He’d stopped keeping track.

‘You did so much damage to this leg,’ announced the family physician one morning, ‘you should thank Apollo we do not need to amputate.’

He sounded disappointed that amputation was not, in fact, on the table. Loren felt his eyes glaze over as the man launched into a lecture about the necessity of letting bones come together at their leisure, and not disturbing the process.

‘Lorenus gets plenty of rest,’ his mother, Hemetra, cut in. Loren had nearly forgotten she was in his bedroom, too, so silent by the door. ‘Convincing him to attend to his responsibilities is Sisyphean. The last thing he needs is more incentive to laze about.’

He knew her well enough to pick out an attempt at teasing, but it only stretched the edges of old wounds, same as the physician poking the stitches on Loren’s thigh.

The physician’s face pinched. ‘These fresh scratches on his legs suggest otherwise. What did you do, boy, lose a fight with a thorn bush?’

Loren bit his tongue. If his mother didn’t yet know of his night-time excursions, it wouldn’t do to incite a scolding now. The physician wrapped his tools, still shaking his head, and hobbled out, leaving Loren alone with his mother. He studied her, trying to spot the woman who raised him beneath her brittle exterior. She’d aged, certainly, but hadn’t they all? Her hair, once the same dark brown as his, now sported grey streaks. New lines creased her lips, held pursed as she perched on the edge of his bed.

When Loren was a child, he thought her aloof as an olive tree, strong-boughed and stern against storms howling from the sea. Something sturdy to cling to, but not made for comfort. Now he wondered what, precisely, she’d been protecting. If it had ever been him at all.

‘Has it really been four years? The number of times your father wanted to bring you home, why, I stopped him, of course. I knew you would come around once you worked it from your system.’ She smoothed his choppy hair back from his face. ‘This is getting long. Won’t you let me cut it?’

Loren reached for his braid and clutched air. ‘I’d rather not.’

‘We’ll discuss it as a family later,’ she said, as if it were thefamilyhair.

Irritation prickled Loren’s nerves, their constant state these days. He was tired of being on edge. He was tired of feeling seconds from boiling over. He fiddled with a hole in his sleeping tunic until she batted his fingers away with a sigh.

‘I can’t help but feel distance between us,’ she said. ‘What changed? You were contrary as a child, but now you’re obstinate.’

Laughter rose, but the kind closer to crying. He wanted to howl at her that if she wanted an answer, she should reflect on each time she’d sided with his father over him, each dismissal of his fears as madness. There she might uncover what dug the chasm.

He couldn’t muster the energy. ‘Father found his success through being headstrong, so you taught me to act the same. Now you punish me for it.’

‘When have I ever punished you?’ From anyone else, it would have been a snap, but proper ladies didn’t snap. ‘The one lesson that clearly didn’t stick was humility. Perhaps I indulged you too much. Paints, instruments, tutors, scrolls.’

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