So when my phone buzzes on the morning of the fourth day and her name appears, my whole body goes still.
Sophia:I was wrong to ask for space. I need your help. Can we talk?
I’m there in four. Only because I force myself to walk instead of run.
I close the door softly behind me.
She’s on the far side of the table, laptop open, body curled in on itself. Her eyes look wrong—red and dry at the same time, like she’d cried everything out already, and it still wasn’t enough.
Seeing her like this feels worse than any wound I ever took in the arena.
“Sophia,” I say. My voice scrapes out rough.
She looks up fast, as if she’s braced for judgment. For anger. For me turning away.
“I’m glad you came,” she says, but her voice shakes on the last word.
“You said you need my help.” I move closer, slow, leaving space so she can decide if my touch is okay. “What happened?”
Her hands are trembling when she turns the laptop toward me.
“She published it,” she says. “My framework. Under her name.”
Blackwell’s name sits at the top in big letters. Everything under it is a thick forest of English words. I could fight through them, one at a time, but it would take hours. Days.
I don’t need to read to understand the look on Sophia’s face.
Her breathing is too fast. Her jaw is clenched so hard I can see the muscle jumping.
“What is this?” I ask quietly.
She lets out a sharp, broken half-laugh. Swipes at the new tears in her eyes as if they offend her.
“It’s her paper for the conference presentation,” she says. “The one she’s been working on. The one she pretended we were ‘developing together.’”
She swallows, hard.
“It’s my work, Flavius. My framework. My language. My analysis. Everything except the name at the top.”
Heat starts behind my ribs. Slow, controlled. The kind that only comes when something truly wrong is happening.
“Shestoleit?” I ask.
“Yes.” The word comes out on a shuddering breath. “She stole it. And she started before I even got here.”
I sink into the chair beside her, turning toward her, not the screen.
“Tell me,” I say. “From the beginning. Like I know nothing.”
She shuts the laptop with a small, shaky thud, as though she can’t bear to look at it another second.
Then she starts talking.
It comes in bursts at first. Stops and starts like a bad wound bleeding under pressure.
Her fellowship proposal. How she poured every early idea into it—collaborative methods, gladiators as co-theorists, all the bones of the framework before it had flesh.
“Blackwell was on the review committee,” she says, voice going flat. “She saw everything months before I ever set foot in Missouri.”
