I laugh under my breath. “That is… an image,” I say.
He smiles for real this time, quick and bright, and I feel the echo of the Jester there, softened, integrated instead of hiding something.
“Sophia,” he says quietly, more serious again. “Whatever happens with your complaint… you are not alone in it.”
I know that. Intellectually. Laura, Maya, and the sanctuary staff—they’ve made that clear. But hearing it from him, right now, with the echoes of the sparring still in my ears, hits differently.
“I know,” I say, my voice low. “And I’m… glad it’s you. Standing beside me.”
His hand covers mine on the rail for just a second—warm, deliberate, saying everything he’s not ready to put into words. Then he pulls back, but the warmth stays.
His throat works once, as though he’s swallowing something he’s not ready to say.
The sun edges higher, brushing the sand with gold. Someone calls his name. He doesn’t look away from me right away, and neither do I.
“Watch,” he says finally. “Learn. Later, you tell me what you saw. Not as researcher. As Sophia.”
“Deal,” I say.
He pushes off the fence and turns back to the yard, shoulders squaring, posture shifting again into readiness. The rail is warmbeneath my palms when I lean into it, grounding myself in something solid, unambiguous.
The warmth seeps into my skin, steadying me. My body files the moment away with the precision of a timestamp:
Safe. Seen. Awake.
I lift my head, breath steadier than a moment ago, and watch him walk back into the sand—into his world, and somehow, into mine.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Sophia
By the time we leave the training yard, my pulse has dialed back from full thunder to something like a strong, steady drumbeat.
Sand clings to the cuffs of my jeans. I don’t brush it off. It feels… honest. Proof I was really there, not just taking notes at a safe distance.
Flavius walks beside me along the packed-dirt path, a few inches away, close enough that our arms brush occasionally. Neither of us moves away.
The sun is higher now, turning the arena railings bright and throwing little shards of light off the metal buckles of his training gear.
He’s quiet.
If it were anyone else, I’d assume he didn’t know what to say. With him, I recognize the shape of it—deliberate silence. Space offered instead of words. Attention without pressure.
I replay what I just saw, frame by frame.
The precision of his body—efficient, lethal, graceful in a way that has nothing to do with performance and everything to do with survival. The moment he stepped right up to the edge between sparring partner and living weapon… and then stepped back because he chose to. And the way Cassius trusted him to make that choice.
He’s not an abstraction, someone I used to study. He’s a man whose nervous system was carved by violence, who now spends his days teaching tourists not to hurt themselves and making sure I eat.
And I love him.
The thought sits in my chest with the quiet certainty of a solved equation. No fireworks. No cinematic swell. Just… there. Correct.
I don’t feel like I’m falling. I feel like something inside me has finally slotted into the right place.
“Your shoulders are doing the thing,” he says, voice low.
I blink. “The thing?”
