She touched me first.
It started innocently enough. She'd find excuses to come to the warehouse, ask me questions about inventory, laugh at my jokes. Then the questions got more personal. Then the touches got less accidental. Then one afternoon when Marcus was away on business, she appeared in my room.
I was young and stupid, and she was beautiful and wanted me. Of course I said yes.
For three months, we were careful. Stolen hours when Marcus was at the docks, quiet afternoons in my small room, the kind of secret that feels thrilling when you're too young to understand how dangerous it really is.
Until the day Marcus came home early.
He didn't shout. Didn't rage. Just stood in the doorway of my room, watching Livia scramble for her clothes, watching me realize my life had just ended.
"Get out," he told her. Then he turned to me. "You stay."
I thought he'd kill me. Honestly, death would have been kinder.
Instead, he sold me.
Not to another merchant. Not to a mine or a farm where I might work my way to freedom. To aludus. A gladiator school. The kind of place where the average life expectancy is two years, where you fight and die for the entertainment of people who wouldn't piss on you if you were burning.
"You wanted to be treated like family," he said as the slave traders chained my wrists. "Family means consequences. This is yours."
Livia never said a word. Never tried to stop it. Just watched from an upstairs window as they led me away.
I learned two things that day: Rich people's kindness is always a loan, not a gift. And the interest is your life.
I throw off the covers and sit up, my heart pounding like I've been running.
This is exactly how it started before. Comfortable bed. Wealthy benefactor. The feeling of being saved.
And I'm already thinking about Charity the way I thought about Livia—like she's different, like this time will be different, like the class divide won't eventually eat us both alive.
I'm smarter now. Older. I've survived things that would have killed that stupid fifteen-year-old boy three times over.
Which means I should know better than to stay.
I start packing my few belongings in the pre-dawn darkness. It doesn't take long—I learned centuries ago not to accumulate things that slow you down. The coin goes in my pocket, the spare shirt gets rolled into my magic kit, and the makeshift bedding gets straightened to hide any trace I was here.
I should leave a note. Explain somehow. But what would I say? "Thanks for the shelter, but I can't risk caring about you because the last time I got involved with a rich woman it destroyed my life?"
Yeah, that'll go over well.
Better just to disappear. She'll be disappointed, maybe hurt, but she'll get over it. Rich girls always do. She'll find some other project to occupy her rebellion, some safer way to feel alive.
And I'll go back to being what I've always been—a survivor who doesn't stick around long enough to get attached.
The early morning air is crisp as I slip out of the cottage, my bag slung over one shoulder. I take the long way through the woods, partly to avoid being seen from the main house and partly because I want one last look at this place that felt, for a few brief hours, like it might be home.
The city's quieter at dawn—just delivery trucks and early commuters, people with purpose who don't pay attention to one more guy walking the streets. I head south on Lexington, no real destination in mind. Away is enough.
I'm checking behind a restaurant on Lexington in the low 80s—force of habit, always good to know where the best dumpster diving is—when I hear the soft whimper.
There, wedged between two garbage cans like he's trying to make himself invisible, is a dog.
I freeze.
He's a mutt, maybe forty pounds of mixed breeds that probably includes some terrier and definitely includes some survivor. His fur is matted, dark brown streaked with gray that might be dirt or age. One back leg is held at an awkward angle—old injury, from the look of it—but he's moving around well enough on his three good legs. Not bleeding, nothing that screams emergency, just sore.
Most people would walk past without a second glance. Just another stray, just another casualty of city life.
