Terror gripped Loren. He never expected to be followed this far from Pompeii, but in hindsight, the countryside had no witnesses. Only the quiet road, where bloodstained dirt would soon wash clean. Servius must have found out about the contract already. Guilt coursed through Loren. What had he done to Julia, left alone in their empty estate?
Maxim stalked nearer, wicked sword glinting. For every clumsy step Loren stumbled back, Maxim took two strides forward.
‘I won’t return to Pompeii,’ Loren tried. ‘You have my word. The contract—’
The blade slashed, curving where a heartbeat ago Loren’s stomach had been.
‘Let my friends walk free, and I’ll do any—’
Metal sang through air.
A blade appeared at Maxim’s neck. ‘Don’t you touch him.’
Livia stepped around as Maxim stilled. Her approach had been so silent, Loren hadn’t registered it until she stood right there, shoulders tense in wrath. She gripped her husband’s gladius, hand lethally steady.
‘You plan to stop me, woman?’ Maxim said with a thread of mirth.
Wrong choice of words.
Livia sliced Maxim’s forearm, and he hissed. His sword thudded to the ground. Deep purple blood sprayed from the cut. She edged the hilt of his fallen weapon with her foot, then kicked it in Loren’s direction. It took a moment to recognise her command. Trembling, Loren picked it up.
Another moment, and he realised the ground was shaking, too.
The horses, tied under the pine tree, stirred. Aurelia, somewhere in the underbrush, shouted a warning. Beneath Loren’s feet, the earth rattled, violent.
An aftershock, stemming from this morning.
Ghost-Felix’s ragged voice:This is far bigger than just you.
Loren turned to face the direction they had come.
Vesuvius, proud and distant as an old stone sentry, shattered.
‘Jupiter,’ Maxim muttered.
Every piece of the world apart from the mountain froze as a plume of debris rocketed skywards, a curled fist punching heaven. Tongues of red lightning forked through the cloud, muffled crackling like faraway thunder.
Watching the storm unfold from Vesuvius’s maw, Loren felt both removed and excruciatingly near. He couldn’t break away. A tear streaked down his cheek. He’d been there, barely a day earlier. He’d stood on those same rocks, walked in the same crater, felt the sting of steam and burning gravel. Had knelt there, touched Ghost-Felix’s face, and failed to make the right choice once again.
His first thought: the helmet. Without Loren to stop him, had Felix put it on? But as soon as it crossed his mind, he knew in his heart it was wrong. Felix had said he wouldn’t. And despite his claims otherwise, Loren was far more the liar than Felix had ever been.
His second thought: he should have listened to the ghost.
Black wave. Copper streak.His mind raced to sift through what he thought, what he knew and where those diverged. He filtered his catalogue of visions through this new lens, the death and ash and the ghost’s tears. Vesuvius, present in all his dreams, the ghost’s wordless warning. Had Ghost-Felix ever been as cruel as Loren accused? Or had he been another victim of Loren clinging to control, desperate to prove himself a hero?
In doing so, he’d doomed them all.
A force barrelled into Loren from behind. Though disarmed and bloody and facing the world’s end, Maxim wasn’t out of the game yet. He tackled Loren, and together they tumbled off the steep hill.
Loren dropped the sword, arms flying to protect his face. Shards of rock sliced his flesh. Momentum propelled him in a tangle of grabbing hands and kicking feet, landscape and sky swirling sick, but Maxim refused to let go. They slammed to a stop at the bottom of a harsh ravine. A dull echo thudded in Loren’s ears.
Maxim rolled Loren on his back, pinning him to the ground, knee digging into his stomach. Loren thrashed against the weight, but Maxim was built like a bull.
Hands closed around Loren’s throat.
Panic swallowed his senses. In the back of his air-starved brain, Loren wondered if Clovia and Umbrius and Julia’s father had felt this same fear, an invisible strand connecting the four of them in death, if nothing in life did. Loren’s vision bled black.
He couldn’t breathe.
