Liville sat alone at the dinner table. She was silent, staring at the food she'd prepared, nothing on her mind except the bitterness towards Coriolanus for pulling Sejanus away the moment he got home.
The boys had been gone for over an hour. Liville eventually placed the pot of stew back onto the stove to keep it warm.
She waited and waited.
And all she could think about, every second, was how much she wished she never allowed that awful man into this house.
Because now the home was already tainted with memories of arguments and screaming, whereas before Coriolanus got here the house was filled with giddyness and hope for the future.
She hated how cold he was. She hated how cold he made the home.
Coriolanus came back first. He walked in, and tossed a large bag onto the kitchen table in front of Liville, before swiftly returning to his room. He slammed the door loudly, as if he was the one who owned it.
Liville didn't look inside the bag, she already knew it was her stolen items from the market.
Her polite upbringing almost made her call out a 'thank you' to Coriolanus, not out of gratefulness but out of obligation. But she bit her lip and forced it away.
Sejanus came in a few moments later, looking flustered and uncomfortable. "Is that all yours?" he asked her.
She rifled through the bag and muttered a low, "Yes."
Sejanus set his gun by the door, taking off his helmet and dropping it onto the couch. "You went with him to the market today? At the Friar's barn?"
She shifted uncomfortably as she suddenly wondered if he was mad at her for doing so. She'd gone somewhere with a man Sejanus had once told her he didn't want her alone with, she realized. But things were different now, weren't they? They all lived together, certainly it was okay to go somewhere alone with him if they'd sometimes be at the house alone anyway.
Alone, and for the first time not wanting to be.
"Yes, Sejanus," she said, nervous of his reaction. "He was insistent. He said we couldn't wait for you."
"Was he..." Sejanus glanced at the door to his and Coriolanus's room, making sure it was closed. "...disruptive there? At the market?"
"Disruptive?"
"Yelling at the shopkeepers?" Sejanus asked. "Or being rough with anyone?"
"No," she said. She shifted in her seat, "Why?"
Sejanus paused again, "...He does not seem to be himself today."
Sejanus's mind flashed to the boy Coriolanus assaulted that morning. Coriolanus had never put hands on anybody during an arrest like that, not even the district citizens that tried to fight back.
"You two seemed to be in an argument earlier," Sejanus recalled. It'd been plaguing his mind with worry since he'd witnessed how upset she was. "He was not yelling at you was he?"
Liville's lips formed a thin line before saying, "He doesn't want me here, and he's still making that clear."
Sejanus wanted to admit what happened that morning, tell her how Coriolanus lost his cool on the drunk boy, tell her that he beat him to unconsciousness. But he felt like saying that would be betraying Coriolanus, so he forced himself to just say "He's just been very angry."
At her, she knew.
"Do you remember what I said yesterday?" Sejanus asked. "About how you refusing to go home might make him feel ill about him not being able to?" She gave a short nod. He sighed, "I'm now wondering if you being here is finally making him process the fact that he's not getting out of here for a long, long time."
