“What will you do now?” I ask.
“Work,” she says. “Real work. The kind that matters.” She takes a breath. “I have interviews scheduled with Cassius, Lucius, and Quintus this week. The framework is mine, but it’s built from all of you. I want to make sure I honor that.”
Pride surges through me. “Then I leave you to it,” I say.
She blinks. “You’re leaving?”
“You do not need me here,” I say. “It’s your fight. You chose it. Now claim it.” I reach out and tuck a strand of hair behind her ear. “I will be in the training yard if you want me. But you do not need me.”
Understanding softens her face.
“No,” she says quietly. “I don’t. But I like knowing you’re close.”
“I am,” I promise. “Always.”
As I walk away, I think: This is what it means not to be the Jester. To know when to stay. To know when to leave. To trust her to stand without me.
This is what it means to care about someone in a way that makes both of us stronger.
To walk beside her—even when we’re not in the same room.
Chapter Twenty-One
Sophia
Hours after filing the complaint, I find myself unable to focus on anything else.
I tried returning to my research—interview prep for tomorrow’s session with Cassius, notes from last week’s work with Thrax—but every thought circles back to the same question: Did I just destroy my career?
The answer my brain keeps offering isn’t data. It’s Laura’s face across the desk three days ago, the moment she set down her pen and asked, “What do you need from us?” without a single qualifier. My mind flashes a picture of what happened when I spoke with the gladiators: Thrax’s nod. Cassius’s flat certainty: “We tell them whatever you need. We tell them exactly what happened.” Quintus leaned forward with perfect Romanbluntness. “She took your work.” Not a question. Not a maybe. Just fact, stated the way men state things when they’ve already decided.
I had walked out of those conversations expecting to feel relieved. Instead, I felt something I didn’t have a word for until now: witnessed. Like the work was real because other people had seen it happen and were willing to say so.
That should be enough to quiet the spiral. It isn’t. But it helps.
Eventually, I abandon my cabin and walk. Not toward people. Toward the one place at the sanctuary that feels like it might have answers.
The Roman garden offers a stillness that the rest of the sanctuary rarely does. The faint clang of metal and the murmur of tourists drifts to me on the late-afternoon air. But inside the low stone walls—between clipped hedges and clean, geometric gravel—the noise softens into something manageable. Predictable. Ordered.
My shoulders loosen as I step forward.
Crushed-stone walkways segment the space into clean rectangles. Herbs, low shrubs, and a few carefully pruned trees. Columns shaped to resemble marble stand like markers from a reconstructed world—someone’s thoughtful attempt to echo the era Flavius came from. Not authentic, exactly. But intentional.
And at the far end, on a raised stone plinth, waits the sculpture that’s captured my attention since I arrived.
Fortuna.
Charity welded her—Laura mentioned it once over lunch with an expression filled with admiration. “Draco’s girlfriend sent us a goddess,” she’d said with a helpless laugh.
From far away, she looks like oxidized bronze, but up close the welded seams reveal themselves—lines catching the afternoon light. Her form is stylized: layered folds suggesting robes in motion, an outstretched arm, a head tipped in a posture that can read as mercy or warning depending on your mood.
Beside her, cradled in the sweep of one raised arm, stands the wheel.
It’s taller than I am—spokes radiating from a central hub, each wedge etched with symbols: waves, laurel leaves, a ship, a theater mask, a sword, a coin. Sunlight sharpens the metal edges; the shadows between spokes fall deep.
The Wheel of Chance.
I stop a few feet away, arms loosely crossed.
