paused and ripped off the bandage. “Do you believe you are Hugo’s brother?”
“What?” He paused. “I…I am going to find a way to murder Viktor.”
“Do you?”
There was a long pause. “No.”
He wasn’t delusional, then. She honestly didn’t know if she was relieved. “You lied to me.”
He snarled loudly. “What does it matter? They’re stupid lies! They’re nothing. What do you care about it, anyway? What if I were to say I came from the moon? Does it fucking matter?”
“It matters enough for you to lie about it.”
Suddenly, she was up against the wall. He had slammed her there. Hard enough that she gasped in surprise, but not quite hard enough to hurt. He pinned her by the shoulders, and she could feel his breath washing over her. His voice was a low hiss. “I am what they made me, Hope. I am the monster they created. Morten murdered my family for having the audacity to stand up to him. That’s why I wanted to marry Rose. To save her from the kind of life I had to suffer. One of servitude to a conquering force.”
“I—”
“Shut up! You want the truth, huh? Then hear it!” He shook her, and she froze, not knowing what else to do. He stormed away from her, and she heard objects shattering. Stone, glass, wood, it didn’t seem to matter. He was hurling things against the wall. Away from her, thankfully, but still violently enough that she felt bits of things skitter over her feet.
There was no running away. There was now escaping him. She couldn’t see, and therefore she couldn’t protect herself if he threw something at her. She locked up, trembling in her terror.
“Morten killed my entire family! I had a sister. A beautiful sister. I remember her lying in the snow, dead. Looking at me with glassy, empty eyes. And what did he do? He gave me away. Gave me to Pompei.”
Nero’s screaming stopped. But his anger had not diminished. He took a loud breath in and out before he resumed speaking. The weight of the words fell like a gavel. “I spent my life being raped by him, Hope. Is that what you want to hear? Is that the truth that’s so important to you that you needed to know? That he bent me over everything in his villa and had me service him every night? Is that the truth that’s so important to you? Well?”
He was back to screaming. In between every few sentences something shattered near her. Suddenly, he was back, and she cried out as he slapped his palms against the stone wall on either side of her head. She wailed as he leaned in close to her. “He fucked me like a cheap whore, but I was even less than that. He said I was his favorite doll. I sat there at his side in his meetings, listening to all his dirty secrets. I knew every line of politics he had ever written. He wasn’t afraid to say anything to anyone in front of me. I was just his little fuck toy. His little slave.”
His hand wrapped around the chain that hung in the center of her chest and yanked her head closer to his, pulling her neck and shoulders off the wall. His lips hovered over hers. His voice was a whisper. “I beat his brains out. I smashed his head against the lip of the steps of a pool and watched his blood mingle in the water. I let him beg me for mercy. He told me he loved me. He said I was his whole world. That he would have married me if he could have. That he would have freed me if a war slave could be freed. I let him weep. Then I beat his head in some more until he was dead. And I laughed…Oh, how I laughed…and I set the building on fire with my mind. I walked into that building a wretched slave, and I walked out of its ashes as a god.”
She was shivering. Shaking like a leaf. She didn’t know what to say.
But she knew one thing. It hit her with a sudden realization as hard as if he had struck her.
She was angry.
She shoved him hard with both hands. The unexpected action pushed him back half a step. And reeling up as best she could, she slapped him harder than she ever had before.
Smack.
That time, he didn’t count out “eleven.”
If I’m going to die, I might as