I remembered looking up at Olivia from the sand-covered arena floor.
“Roman, stop!” she’d cried. “He’s your brother.”
Was she right? Was this loathsome man who’d been my sworn enemy in Rome really related to me? Had he been the twin brother I’d longed for? We looked nothing alike. And yet, how could he have traveled if he wasn’t a Timeborne?
My questions crowded up against one another in my mind, creating a pile of confusion.
Think, Roman, think. What was the first thing I did when I landed in Rome?
Find a way to survive.
The woods stirred some vague memory just out of consciousness. This was definitely not Rome, but what century were we in? What part of the world?
Behind me, violent retching noises came from where I’d left Marcellious. The man was in worse shape than I was.Good. He could vomit himself to death as far as I was concerned.
I turned in a slow circle, hearing bird songs and the distant sound of a running river or a creek. We were surrounded by deciduous trees and a few evergreens.
Where the hell are we?
Marcellious let out a grunting, wheezing sort of noise.
I whipped around as he charged at me, head down, like a mad bull. I tried to step out of his path, but he still clipped my side. We tumbled to the ground.
He only managed to land a few feeble blows on my face before I rolled him over. I pinned him to the forest floor by his scraped and bruised arms.
“Stop fighting, Marcellious. We’re not in Rome any longer.”
“I don’t care where we are. I want you dead.” His face was an ugly grimace. He writhed against me but didn’t have the strength to accomplish anything. “What did your little bitch do? Why are we here?”
I hauled back and punched him. “You willnotrefer to Olivia that way.”
Marcellious spat blood from his mouth. “Is calling her yourwhorebetter? What the fuck did she do to get us out of Rome?”
I cocked my arm back, ready to slug him again, but I thought better. Endless fighting would never get us anywhere.
I crawled off him and placed my sandal-clad foot on his bare chest. “We can’t afford to keep arguing. We’ve got to figure out where we are and how we’ll survive since we’re obviously far away from Rome.”
Marcellious tugged at my foot, intending to throw me off balance. But he’d lost too much blood and sustained too many injuries to even wrestle with a cat.
In truth, I wasn’t much better—he’d managed to carve me up with some nasty gashes.
“Would you just shut up? We have to figure this out. How is it you can time travel?” I glared down at him.
“How is ityoucan time travel?” he countered.
The glint of a blade peeked out from under some leaves. I removed my foot from Marcellious, strode to it, and picked it up. It was the other time-traveling dagger—the one I thought belonged to Marcus, my former best friend whom I’d been forced to kill. The same man I’d thought to be my real twin. But, if this was Marcus’ blade, it wouldn’t have worked on casting Marcellious to another place. The daggers of the Timeborne came into existence when we were born. To my knowledge, each blade was unique to us.
Marcellious uttered another strangled cry, scrambled from the ground, and lunged at the knife.
I held it out of reach, pushing him back with my other arm.
He lost his footing and fell back.
“Give that to me,” he bellowed, struggling to get back up. His movements were clumsy and awkward when he got to his feet and hustled toward me. “Where did you get that? In Rome, I mean.”
“It looks like the one Olivia and I found in my prison cell. It had been tucked inside a hiding hole carved in the stone.” I held it high over my head.
“It’s mine! That used to be my cell in the hypogeum. Give it to me.” He summoned his strength and leaped at me, knocking the blade to the ground. He raced toward it and snatched it up. “Now I’m going to kill you.”
