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Chapter XXVIII

LOREN

A ll was white in the aftermath.

Loren came back to himself in pieces: a phantom touch along his shoulder blades. Gravel in his knees, tacky blood drying down his leg, suffocating dust thick on his skin. Silence, and the acrid stench of seared flesh.

He opened his eyes to a dead city.

Ash still flurried like tufts of poplar-seed, drifting slow and settling in mounds on the empty street. Loren knew this street. Via Stabiana, the city’s pulsing artery. Four days ago, Nonna slipped him a date roll here. Honey coated his tongue, a sour sense-memory.

‘We have to go,’ a scratchy voice said. ‘Please.’

Hands dragged him upright. Pain radiated from his foot, and – oh. Yes. His ankle had snapped. The thought occurred that perhaps he shouldn’t put weight on it, but then again, it was a little late for that. It was a little late for anything.

Loren moved forward in a drunk daze, though he could have sworn he was sober before.

Before.

‘Be still. I’ll lift you. That’s it.’

Then, unexpectedly, he was on a horse. And Felix – Felix – slid on behind him. Arms wrapped around Loren’s waist, and Felix smelled like burning skin, and the world slid backwards.

They galloped hard and fast from Pompeii.

Loren didn’t look back. He didn’t look forward, either.

Hours blurred, and their pace didn’t slow.

Time passed jagged. The ground trembled.

Vesuvius billowed. At the crest of a hill, Loren choked on bile as another black surge swept the valley.

All cruel, all cold. What he had witnessed in his dreams was child’s play next to this reality.

The smell of it, taste of it, that he inhaled remnants of a life he’d played a hand in ruining. An ungodly disconnect.

Grief hit not in rolling waves, but individual doses, stinging like poison-tipped arrows. But grief was no good when accompanied by equal measures of guilt. Loren had no right to mourn the dead. Not when he should be numbered among them.

They shouldn’t have survived. Loren shouldn’t have survived.

His heart thumped slow and methodical, his body convincing itself it still lived. Blood still flows here , it announced. We beat, we breathe, we bleed. He wished he could tune out the reminder.

On the far side of the hills south of Pompeii, where the wake of destruction was reduced to a sprinkling of ash, it all became too much. He shivered, slumped forward against the horse’s neck, and prayed to slip into fever and not resurface at all.

Clumsy stars greeted him when next he woke, and he wondered who had paid his passage to the underworld.

Had Felix pressed a coin into Loren’s mouth, over his eyes?

Anointed his body, then let him burn? Or had Felix held his hand, escorted him to Pluto personally?

Fitting, given how Felix flitted between this world and the other, stepped between planes with wings at his ankles, half of himself made ghost.

But Loren recognised these stars, even at night through thin candlelight.

He spent a winter painting that ceiling, smearing purple as the backdrop, then attacking with imprecise white points and a cupped moon.

If he squinted through the fog crowding his brain, he almost remembered the constellations, and that tipped him over the edge.

He vomited nothing onto his childhood bedsheets.

He needed air. He needed to see sky beyond ceiling, proof that anything still existed past this room. That Vesuvius hadn’t devoured the world, that he wasn’t trapped in a nightmare, condemned deep in Tartarus for the hurt he’d caused.

Loren fell out of bed in a graceless heap.

Plastered bandages knocked against tile where his ankle had been set.

Wrapped. It hurt like a bastard, and the stitched wound on his thigh burned as he hauled himself upright.

His mind tilted precariously until he realised, no, that was his body at a slant, seconds from toppling again.

Leaning between his old writing easel and a trunk was the sheathed sword of Aurelia’s father. Livia’s last gift.

He hoped she wouldn’t mind him using it as a walking stick.

His lungs tightened, light sparking at the corners of his vision, as he hobbled from his room. He dragged his useless leg down the empty, low-lit hall, and burst out through a side door that opened onto the Lassius estate.

If this was a nightmare, it was the cruellest yet.

But the scents were too vivid – remnants of grapes from the harvest decaying in the vineyard to the back, manure from the stables nearby, autumn pomegranates and pears from the orchard across.

In none of his dreams had Loren felt so vibrantly here , and he hated it.

He hated that his bones had led him right back into the cage he thought he’d flown .

Gasping, Loren made for the trees and the water trough he knew to be within. Distantly, he registered footsteps, a voice, a familiar presence nearing, but he couldn’t focus. He needed proof, to see . . . to see . . .

At the water’s edge, he collapsed. Unsheathed the sword. His faint reflection, distorted by water, snarled at him.

‘What are you doing?’

Loren raised the sword to his neck.

On the downward stoke, Felix caught his wrist and halted the blade’s trajectory.

Loren grappled to regain control, but Felix was stronger.

The sword clattered into the trough. When Loren lunged for it, water soaking the nightclothes he’d been changed into, Felix kicked the hilt, and it disappeared into a perfectly manicured bush.

‘Fuck, Felix, I was only cutting my hair.’ Cursing was cathartic. Really fucking soothing. If only Lucius Lassius could hear him. ‘Please.’

‘Use this.’ Felix handed him a pocketknife. The wood-and-iron one that he kept losing and that kept coming back. A sore Loren couldn’t be rid of.

Bunching what remained of his braid, Loren sawed. Locks of burnt hair fell away and floated, lifeless. With that, his final shield crumbled. The act stripped him bare, left him with nothing more to hide behind. When he spoke to others now, he would have no choice but to be honest.

‘It looks good.’ Felix sounded hoarse. Too much smoke.

Loren didn’t trust himself to respond. A face he didn’t recognise stared from the water, a boy with hair shorn in an ugly, chin-length bob, and who existed worlds away from where he knelt.

‘Elias,’ he whispered, the name a quiet prayer. ‘Camilia. Nonna.’

‘What?’

‘The Priest. Sera. Shani. Castor and Pollux.’

‘Counting the dead won’t help.’

‘Celsi. Julia.’ Loren’s voice cracked. ‘ Julia. ’

‘Fuck Julia.’

‘Don’t say that.’

Felix let out a single, incredulous laugh. ‘Are you defending her? Still? She used you. Once you were her heir, the target moved from her back to yours.’

Loren shut his eyes tight against his reflection.

Acid rose in his throat. Damned if he didn’t know that.

Damned that he’d been so foolish, had, in one stylus stroke, lived up to every accusation of ignorance and impulsiveness his father had ever levelled at him.

Julia gave Loren hope of change, then snatched it away, and he was too empty to care.

‘There at the end, she became desperate. Servius was closing in. After Umbrius . . .’ Felix ran his fingers through tangled curls.

‘What did she say to win you back over? And leaving the contract where she knew he would look the instant she fled town – all of it was a setup. What she didn’t predict is that you would leave, too. ’

‘That you sent me away.’

Felix swallowed. ‘To save your life.’

Dragging his gaze up, Loren stared at Felix in the dark. He looked ragged, paper-thin and an instant from collapse. Yet, somehow, still unfairly golden.

Loren wanted to sob because he knew, he knew Felix was holding himself together at his own expense. Felix had fought to keep control for hours – days – so he could play his part perfectly, get Loren to safety. He’d wrestled back his own grief to give Loren space for his.

All Loren felt was a sharp hook of anger. Not at Felix. At his own ugly, rotting heart.

‘You brought me here,’ Loren croaked. He stuck the dagger point-down in the dirt. ‘You brought me here, you saved me, and I want to hate you for it.’

‘You can. I would understand. I couldn’t think where else to go.’

‘Stop it. Stop being so damned good. I can’t stand to hear it. ’

‘I know it hurts.’

‘How? How would you know anything about what I feel right now? Pompeii was my home. You’ve never had . . .’ Loren broke off, but the damage was done. Felix’s face hardened.

‘A home? No. But you still have this one, and that’s more than me.’ He tore from Loren’s side. Footsteps crunched away, then came the sound of metal clanking as he resumed whatever task Loren had interrupted.

Ankle screaming, Loren followed the noise deeper into the orchard. Felix knelt at the base of a pomegranate shrub, back to Loren, hands sunk in the earth. Digging for something, but Loren couldn’t fathom what.

‘Felix, I didn’t mean that.’

For a long while, Felix was quiet. When he spoke, his words were tight and angry and carefully controlled.

‘The closest I had was Mercury’s temple in Rome, where my father left me for long weeks while running errands for Servius.

Until he learned what the priest was doing to me.

How the priest dosed me with wine and poppy sap and .

. . sorry, should I spare you the details?

’ Felix bit when Loren made a pained noise.

‘He assaulted me, Loren. Let me say it. No one else ever has.’

Sickness hit Loren in such a sudden wave that he flinched. ‘I’m . . . listening.’

‘My father thought I couldn’t handle my own shit past. He fucking’ – Felix wrenched a rock from the ground, hurled it over his shoulder, where it hit the trough with a hollow clang – ‘locked it away. But I never forgot the effects, reactions I couldn’t explain, hurts I couldn’t name.

My father just stole my words to understand them. ’