Fantasy Lover

'No,' he whispered. 'I've never told anyone.'

'Then tell me.'

'No,' he said firmly. 'I don't want to relive it.'

'If you're reliving it every time you dream, then what's the difference? Let me in, Julian. Let me see if I can help.'

Dare he even hope that she could?

You know better.

And yet…

He wanted to purge the demons. He wanted to sleep one night in peaceful slumber, free of torment.

'Tell me,' she gently insisted.

Grace sensed his reluctance as he rejoined her in bed. He remained seated on the side, his head in his hands. 'You asked me earlier how I became damned. I was cursed because I betrayed the only brother I ever knew. The only family I ever had.'

His anguish reached deep inside her. She wanted desperately to run her hand over his back in a comforting manner, but didn't dare touch him lest it make him withdraw again. 'What did you do?'

He ran his hand through his hair, then balled his fist in it. His jaw more rigid than steel, he stared at the carpet. 'I allowed envy to poison me.'

'How?'

He paused for a long minute before he spoke again. 'I met Iason not long after my stepmother sent me to live in the barracks.'

She vaguely remembered Selena telling her about the Spartan barracks where sons were forced to live away from their homes and families. She'd always thought of them as a kind of boarding school. 'How old were you?'

'Seven.'

Unable to imagine being forced from her parents at that age, Grace gasped.

'There was nothing unusual about it,' he said without looking at her. 'And I was big for my age. Besides, life at the barracks was infinitely preferable to living with my stepmother.'

She heard the venom in his voice and wondered what the woman had been like. 'I take it Iason lived in the barracks with you?'

'Yes,' he whispered. 'Each barracks was divided up into groups where we chose the boy we wanted to lead us. Iason was the leader of my group.'

'What did these groups do?'

'We functioned like a military unit. We studied, performed chores, but most of all, we banded together to survive.'

She started at such a harsh word. 'Survive what?'

'The Spartan lifestyle,' he said, his voice laced with acrimony. 'I don't know how much you know about my father's people, but they didn't have the luxuries of the other Greeks.

'The Spartans only wanted one thing from their sons. They wanted us to grow into the strongest fighting force of the ancient world. To prepare us for our future, we were taught how to survive with only the barest of necessities. We were given one tunic to last us the year, and if it became damaged or lost or we outgrew it, we had to go without one. We were only permitted a bed provided we made it ourselves. And once we reached puberty, we were no longer allowed shoes for our feet.'

He laughed bitterly. 'I can still remember how badly my feet would ache in the winter. We were forbidden a fire or blanket to keep us warm, so we tied rags around our feet at night to keep them from frostbite. Then, in the morning, we would carry away the bodies of the boys who had died of exposure in their sleep.'

Grace cringed at the world he was describing. She tried to imagine what it must have been like to live in it. Worse, she remembered the fit she'd pitched at age thirteen for a pair of eighty-dollar shoes her mother had said were too mature for her, while at the same age, Julian would have been scrounging for rags. The injustice of it cut her. 'You were just children.'

'I was never a child,' he said simply. 'But worst of all, we were never given much food to eat, so we were forced to steal or to starve.'

'And parents allowed this?'

He cast a sardonic look to her over his shoulder. 'They considered it their civic duty. And since my father was the Spartan stratgoi, most of the boys and teachers despised me the instant they saw me, and I was given even less food than the others.'

'Your father was what?' she asked, not understanding the Greek term he used.

'The top general, if you will.' He took a deep breath and continued. 'Because of his position and reputation for cruelty, I was a pariah to my group. While they would band together to steal, I was left on my own to survive as best I could. Then one day, Iason was caught stealing bread. When we returned to the barracks, they were going to punish him for being caught. So I stepped forward, and took the blame.'

'Why?'

He shrugged as if the matter were of little importance. 'He was so weak from his earlier beating that I didn't think he could survive another one.'

'Why had they beaten him earlier that day?'

'That's the way we always started our day. As soon as we were dragged from our beds, we were severely beaten.'

Grace winced. 'Then why would you take the beating for him, if you were sore, too?'

'Being born of a goddess, I can take quite a beating.'

Grace closed her eyes as he repeated Selena's words from that afternoon. This time, she couldn't resist reaching out to him. She placed her hand against his biceps.

He didn't pull away.

Instead, he covered her hand with his own and gave a light squeeze. 'From that day forward, Iason called me his brother, and made the other boys accept me. Though both my mother and father had other sons, I had never had a brother before.'

She smiled. 'What happened after that?'

He flexed the muscle beneath her hand. 'We decided to join forces to get what we needed. He would distract and I would steal so that if we were caught, I would be the one who suffered for it.'

Why? was on the tip of her tongue, but she bit it back. In her heart, she knew the answer already. Julian was protecting his brother.

'As time went by,' he continued, 'I started noticing that his father would sneak to watch him in the village. The love and pride on his father's face was indescribable. His mother was the same way. We were supposed to be scrounging for food on our own, and yet every other day, he'd find something one of his parents had left for him. Fresh bread, roasted lamb, a flagon of milk. Sometimes money.'

'That's sweet.'

'Yes, it was, but every time I saw what they did for him, it cut through me. I wanted my parents to feel like that about me. I would gladly have given up my life to have my father, just once, look at me without contempt in his eyes. Or to have my mother care enough to come see me at all. The closest I could ever get to her was to visit her temple at Thymaria. I used to spend hours staring at her statue, and wondering if that was really what she looked like. Wondering if she ever gave me a passing thought.'

Grace sat up and leaned against his back, then hugged him about the waist. She rested her chin on his shoulder. 'You never saw your mother as a child?'

He encircled her arms with his own, and leaned his head back against her shoulder blade. She smiled at the gesture. Even though he was tense and stressed, he was trusting her with things she knew he'd never shared with anyone else.

It made her feel incredibly close to him.

'I haven't seen her to this day,' he said quietly. 'She would send others to me, but she, herself, would never come. No matter how much I implored her, she refused to come to me. After a time, I ceased to ask. Finally, I quit going to her temples altogether.'

Grace placed a tender kiss on his shoulder. How could his mother have ignored him so? How could any mother