Page 29 of Of Love and Treason
The knife clattered on the table. Her father fell silent. “I’m sorry.” His voice cracked and broke. “I did not agree to his offer. I merely listened. He should not have come here. He should not have—”
She moved toward him, shoving her anger beneath a lid of calm. “Is it really as bad as he said?”
Pater was quiet for so long Iris thought he would never answer. “Yes.” His voice came low and hoarse. “And I don’t know what to do. If I don’t agree, I’ll be sold to work in the mines and you’ll be sold too, but in your condition there’s not much for you besides... At least the tribune is onlyoneman.”
The memory of his hands on her set her whole body shaking. “Is there no other way?”
He didn’t answer. Fear wrapped around her ribs. She felt astrapped as she had when she’d awakened to find her world suddenly plunged into a darkness she couldn’t escape. She sank onto a stool and gripped the edge of the table, trying to keep the panic at bay as her brain spun for solutions.
“Iris.”
She barely heard Pater speak.
“It’s going to be all right.” His voice sounded far away, like he was talking to her from deep inside the sewer tunnels of the Cloaca Maxima. Echoing, hollow, full of—
“This is all my fault.” The words nearly choked her.
“No.” Pater spoke in a soothing voice, but he’d hesitated long enough to make tears spill down her cheeks. “Iborrowed the money.”
“But you borrowed it for all the physicians and offerings. You borrowed it forme.”
“And I’d do it all again.” A cup banged on the table in emphasis.
She heard the high-pitched gurgle of liquid poured into a cup and the clunk of the jug being set down again. The sound of him drinking and swallowing.
“Can you renegotiate the repayment time?”
He didn’t answer and she assumed he’d shaken his head.
“What can we sell?”
“There is nothing.” He sighed, defeated.
“We can’t just give up, Pater. There must be something we can do.” She shuddered. “I won’t go with him. I’ll die first.”
They sat in silence, thinking.
“Could we run?” Iris asked. If they could run as fast as her whirling thoughts, they might have a chance.
“We don’t have the funds to get very far.”
“But if we sold our things, ate only the bread Paulina gives me, and saved my earnings?”
Quintus sighed again and she heard him scratching his head. “Perhaps,” he wheezed. It took Iris a moment to realize he was crying.
“Pater, please don’t.” She pressed her lips together, still angry and in no mood to comfort him.
She blinked. Her father’s shape swam into focus, bathed in the yellow light of a lamp.
Her heart seized in her chest. She gasped and stared.
He looked just as she remembered him, though lines etched deeper grooves on his face. Gray swaths cut into the short brown hair just above his ears. He needed a shave. A white scar ran through the black stubble across his throat from a prisoner’s escape attempt. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, wide shoulders shaking.
“Pater.” All anger drained into shock. Her chest began to heave as she realized that what she saw was real. “Pater, I can see you.”
His head jerked up. “What?”
“I can see you.” Terror that she would blink and lose him again choked her awe.
