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‘You will like Lucretia, if only because she won’t challenge you when you demand your way.’

‘Did her father stamp that out of her, too?’ Loren snapped. ‘Void the contract. I will be your heir and remain here, but I will do so unmarried. That is my condition.’

‘You’re in no position to negotiate.’

‘See what happens if you decline.’ He settled in the glare he learned from Lassius himself. ‘You’ll find I can negotiate my own fate just fine.’

A beat of thick, sticky silence passed. Lucius Lassius said, ‘It’s high time you start going by your true name. I’ll hear nothing more of this Loren nonsense.’

After his father had swept from the room, Loren lay on the floor, staring again at his painted ceiling.

He wouldn’t cry; that demanded energy he couldn’t summon.

The fight drained from him as quick as it came.

It didn’t matter if he married or not. He would still be stuck here.

He had no other options, and fleeing the first time had caused all the grief that followed.

All his ambitions, politics and priesthood, and a love he felt true about, were a dead bird before him.

Somehow, he understood the plight of Elias in a way he hadn’t before.

Elias had wanted freedom, and to leave nothing behind when he got it, so he could build a life with intention.

On his terms. Loren thought of the ache living in his eyes, and their last conversation, and how without a proper burial and an escort to the world of the dead, Elias would never leave Pompeii now.

Slanted light shifted across tile as time dragged on. Pinned under ceiling stars felt safe, like something he could control. His parents could plot away his future. The sky could break and shatter around him. Beneath the weight of familiar paint, Loren almost imagined he was small again.

What he wouldn’t give to dream of something besides a vacant temple. To not see white ash behind his lids while awake. To breathe and know he deserved it .

Footsteps drew near the door, quiet padding.

‘Comfortable?’ Felix asked.

His shadow split the shuttered light, falling over Loren like a blanket. ‘Plato the philosopher had an allegory about people in a cave, watching shadow figures move across the wall, and letting that be their life instead of . . .’

Loren cut off with a sigh, pressing the heels of his hands into his eyes. Staring at his ceiling of childhood stars was not Plato’s allegory in the same way he wasn’t Icarus flying too close to the sun. He was Loren, and he was responsible for himself.

Weight dropped beside him, Felix stretching out on the tile. Their arms brushed and Loren swallowed, the simple touch so nothing, so everything.

‘I’ve heard that story before, but it never made sense to me. A cave isn’t a cage. The people could have left.’ Felix tilted his head, staring. ‘Loren, you could leave.’

‘I don’t think I can,’ Loren whispered. ‘Leaving was what got me into this mess.’

‘So what’s the alternative? Staying here? You look horrible.’

‘Nice to make a boy feel wanted in his own bedroom.’

‘That’s not . . . I brought you here because you needed time to rest your body.

But what about this?’ Felix tapped Loren’s forehead, then frowned at his scarred fingers.

‘I miss when that felt like anything. I asked the physician who wanders around, and he said the damage to my hands is likely permanent. Seemed happy to break the news.’

Loren could imagine. ‘He was dismayed I wouldn’t need an amputation.’

‘Numbness isn’t all bad, I suppose. Bet it’ll feel like someone else’s hand when I—’

‘Still vile as ever.’

Snorting, Felix rolled onto his stomach, and the effect that had on Loren was impossible. Too big to understand, too fast to escape. Tears burned his eyes, and he blinked rapidly. ‘I miss you. ’

Felix smiled sadly. ‘I see you daily.’

‘Do you? Do we see each other at all?’ He hadn’t meant to say it, but the words spilled out. ‘I’m not myself anymore, and I wonder how much of the old me you knew to begin with.’

‘But I see you now,’ Felix said. ‘When you read to me. When we sit together, and you give me space. Sometimes I’m angry still. But I found that being apart aches from a deeper place.’

‘People aren’t meant to die and return. You brought back a ghost.’

‘Then that makes us even,’ Felix said. ‘Neither of us is whole. So what? I’m not lacking for it, and I don’t regret what I did. Damn the rules.’

Loren took him all in, his tired eyes and rumpled clothes. His ruined hands and scarred body. Felix was still there, despite the pain Loren inflicted on him, over and over, starting the moment they met. Before that, even, when Loren left the ghost hanging cold in his visions.

‘I don’t deserve you,’ Loren said in a ragged gasp. ‘I failed. All I ever wanted was to help, but I’ve dreamed of you for years, and I knew – I saw when we were on the mountain that it was Vesuvius all along. The ghost told me how to stop it, and I was too selfish to listen.’

‘No. No.’ Felix pushed to his elbows. ‘It wasn’t your fault. Stopping it was never in my power. Nor yours.’

Loren was splintering, drawing air into lungs marred by a thousand hairline fractures, a vase about to shatter. ‘My dreams stopped, Felix. You should have left me to die in the city. What use am I if the only thing that set me apart meant nothing in the end?’

Shock flitted across Felix’s face, followed by fury. ‘Don’t say that. Never say that. I’ll tell you the alternative. You survive and heal and stop blaming yourself for what you didn’t understand.’

‘It isn’t that easy.’

‘You think I don’t know? I watched my father die and did nothing because sometimes there’s nothing you can do except run. It’s shit. But it doesn’t make you a coward. It means you’re too strong to let yourself be torn apart. You keep moving.’

A dam burst in Loren’s chest, and the sea of grief drowning him spilled out at once. He cried, body-shaking sobs. Wordlessly, Felix flopped onto his back again and leaned his head on Loren’s shoulder, that point of contact a lifeline.

Felix was solid and present and there, fixed as the moon, but far, far more reachable.

‘How can you still want me,’ Loren choked, dragging an arm across his wet cheeks, ‘after everything I’ve done?’

A scarred hand worked between the gap of their bodies, caught Loren’s fingers.

Felix looked over, grey eyes sparkling. ‘I like a challenge.’