inside.
Through the window, Madoc saw her crumple against the side of the table and fall to the floor.
Steeling himself, he carried Cassia into the house. He took her to the bedroom and laid her on the bare mattress.
He was right—they had been leaving. The blankets were gone.
Why? Would they have told him?
He felt something tear open inside him. The hot spill of shame and guilt and loss. He was alone. Even when he’d wandered the streets, searching for help, he’d never felt this alone.
The next moments were a blur. Danon’s relentless questions. Ilena’s wail of grief. Ava was crying. Elias, for once, tried to keep them all calm.
Ilena came and lay beside her daughter on the bed. Madoc, now curled in a ball in the corner, wanted to lie beside them, but he couldn’t let go of his knees. The void had reached him, finally, and it was sucking in every emotion, screaming with hunger. There was too much here to feed it. Too much pain. Too much grief.
“You didn’t listen,” Ilena whispered. Her words weren’t for Cassia, they were for Madoc, and he crawled to her, pressing his forehead against the edge of the mattress. “I told you we’d handle this as a family. But you didn’t listen.”
Her pain was like a noose around her neck, closing off her words. Madoc couldn’t stand it. He could take it. He would, for her.
He rocked onto his heels. Her back was to him. Tentatively, he placed one quaking hand on her shoulder and opened himself up to her pain.
Instantly, he tasted her bitter despair. It was like Ash’s grief, but more potent, and even as he hated himself for the rush it gave him, he hoped it gave her peace.
“No.” She shook him off. Sat up. Faced him. “Don’t you do it, Madoc. I will feel every bit of this.”
He was disgusted with himself.
He rose and left the room. He shoved by Danon, still holding a packed bag on his thighs, and Elias, carrying Ava around the kitchen.
No one stopped him.
He wanted out of this house. Out of this district—this entire city. He wanted to run so far no one would ever find him. Anger rose up in him, as harsh as Ilena’s pain. He wished Cassia had never found him on the temple steps. That he had stayed an orphan, unwanted. Unattached.
Unable to hurt anyone.
He was done fighting. Done pretending he was a gladiator. He pushed out through the Metaxas’ front door, his last view of their home the floor above, where Seneca watched him from her balcony, a candle in one hand, a cat curled in the other. He walked, the minutes turning to hours as he passed the quarry and the aqueduct, winding through the alleys toward South Gate. And as the sun glittered over the golden water, he skirted around the crowds on the streets that headed toward the arena in their black and gray paint, ready to cheer him to victory.
He wouldn’t be there.
Twenty
Ash
THE SUN HAD barely risen, but already it scorched the arena. The logical part of Ash’s brain whirled. Heat is good. It will slow my opponent.
She braced one hand on the arched entryway that would spill her out into the fighting pit. The warm, gritty stone was all that kept her from dropping to her knees.
That, and the Deiman centurions standing guard at the end of the hall, there to make sure she didn’t run. She wouldn’t show weakness in front of them.
If she won this fight, Kula would keep the fishing rights in the Telsa Channel, the stock in their glass trade, the two valuable seaports. The vital resources Ignitus had staked on this war.
If she lost, Kula would slip even further into poverty.
Madoc’s life or fishing ports. Madoc or Kula.
Cassia. Saving Ash’s life. Once—by pulling her away from Petros. A second time—by shoving Ash aside and taking the weight of the boulder meant for her.
Because of Seneca. Ash still couldn’t process what she had seen. Hints of connections threatened to tie the remaining pieces of the mystery together, but she refused to think about them now. She couldn’t unravel yet.
The look of disgusted shock that had paled Madoc’s face in the villa’s main room would forever be branded in Ash’s mind. Where had he been? Petros obviously hadn’t captured him.
Ash wanted to talk to Madoc. She wanted to apologize. She wanted to bear the weight of the blame she knew that she deserved from him.
She and Tor had failed. Not just