Blood of a Gladiator - Ashley Gardner Page 0,29

Pirates were feared and hated, and the powerful in Rome would be merciless.

Without waiting for the man’s response, I turned and strode from him.

“Leonidas.”

The voice was Cassia’s. She’d hurried to the remaining casket and was trying in vain to push it along the dock. It screeched an inch, Cassia panting from her effort.

I watched her a moment, dumbfounded. Then I went to her, lifted the heavy box under my arm, took her by the shoulder, and marched her to the street.

“How did you know?” I asked Cassia.

We sat in the garden in the middle of Priscus’s apartment block, the sun setting in a pale blue sky.

Priscus was inside with his son, Decimus Laelius the Younger. His father had seen personally to having Decimus bathed, shaved, and dressed in fine clothes. The servants, equally astonished and weeping at Decimus’s rescue, hovered around, plying him with food and drink. In fact, many of the residents of the complex had spilled forth to lend their sympathy and offers of help. The young man was exhausted and bruised, with hollows under his eyes, but he tolerated the attention with good cheer.

Cassia and I, the outsiders, were given leave to sit in the garden with a small meal. The rest of the household quickly forgot about us.

“I didn’t know.” Cassia adjusted her feet as she sat on a low stool under the portico. “Not until I saw Decimus run to Priscus. I guessed, but I wasn’t certain.”

“The servants didn’t realize his son had been kidnapped?” This surprised me. Servants knew everything that went on in a household.

“Decimus is actually his step-grandson. Priscus adopted Decimus as his son and heir, but he’s a grandson of his wife, from her first marriage, the only one of his wife’s family left. Priscus and his wife raised Decimus from babyhood, after Decimus’s parents were killed by marauders.”

Decimus must have been certain he’d share his parents’ fate. I leaned my back to the marble-faced column, stretching my legs. My muscles were cramped by the fight—no medicus or massage for me today.

“They knew all that but not that Decimus had been held for ransom?”

“The household is as stunned as you are. Decimus had recently traveled from Halicarnassus to Antioch. Now that there is peace in Parthia, Decimus wants to try to expand the business in eastern cities, with Antioch as their base. As far as the servants knew, Decimus was still there, sending dutiful letters home.”

“How did you guess, then?” I’d been taken completely by surprise while Cassia had put together—rapidly—the true purpose of our journey.

She finished the last of her meal, grapes, which she plucked from the stem and chewed, carefully depositing the pits into a small container provided for the purpose.

“I thought about how Priscus was behaving. When a man is concerned about costly goods, fearing ruin if something happens to those goods, he’s naturally nervous and worried. But when he’s concerned about a person, especially one he loves deeply, it is different. His fear is more concentrated, and he will also try to hide it. Roman men, highborn ones in particular, do not like to appear sentimental.” Cassia arranged the empty stem neatly on her plate and wiped her fingers on a cloth. “I lived inside a villa my entire life, with a very wealthy and powerful family. I learned much about what people are like and how they truly feel, in spite of what they say to others.”

I had a vision of Cassia, very young, her serious eyes watching everything going on about her and noting it down on her tablet.

“Who taught you to write?” I asked on impulse.

Sorrow crossed her face. “My father. He was the secretary and keeper of the household accounts. He taught me everything he knew.”

The father was dead, I gathered from her expression. Even I had learned how to understand what a person was feeling.

I wanted to ask her more questions about him, and how she’d ended up in Rome, but I fell silent. There would be time for that later, and I did not want unseen ears in this house hearing our private conversation.

“I do not know who kidnapped the poor lad,” Cassia said. “The men who led us to the docks and who were holding him make unlikely pirates. I think they were hired by the kidnapper to convey Decimus from Antioch and collect the money. I wonder what will happen to them when they report to whoever hired them that they only retrieved half the ransom? They didn’t count