As he raced through the night, eventually leaving Volterra behind him, he stayed to the rural areas as much as possible, feeding on some poor vagabond along the way without really noticing whether the figure was that of a male or female or how old or young they were.

Eventually he reached the outskirts of Rome, the city lit up like a field of stars in the distance. He was in the same field of wild flowers that he and his wife had come to that first night. It had been easy enough to protect the area from development, after all, he had unlimited wealth at his disposal. Of course, it also didn’t hurt that the area was considered haunted.

The rumor of spirits haunting the space had been around for centuries, over two millennia really, ever since the night when a sculpture of a beautiful woman with an impish smile had appeared in the middle of the field from one day to the next.

Over the centuries the statue had been taken care of, dirt and vines being cleared away, the cold marble polished, but no one ever saw who cared for the image of the beautiful woman. The statue was a mystery to the people of the area. All it said at the base was “Didyme.” Since there were several women that had had some sort of political power through the ages with the name, scholars who had snuck onto the private property could not figure out who the statue represented.

Whenever they had made speculations they had gotten it wrong. Marcus did not bother to correct them, and he had prevented several cultural entities from removing the statue. Many had wanted to lock it up in a museum or private collection in order to “preserve it.” They didn’t realize that it was safer where it was than anywhere else.

Once the statue had been stolen, but it had been taken back as soon as it appeared in a museum in Madrid a year later. Overnight the statue had been returned to the field and the bodies of those responsible had been found strewn around the statue like fallen leaves.

No one had dared to move the statue since.

Walking into the field now, Marcus approached the statue and sat near the base of it, staring up at the perfect face immortalized in stone as it smiled down on him. He came here when he could and just stared at it.

Didyme.

He remembered when he had carved the piece. It had taken him impossibly long, the sketching sessions where she had sat for him had inevitably ended up with lovemaking sessions that lasted for hours and after he had finally developed enough self-discipline to get through the sketching and move on to the actually carving and chiseling work, he had been so distracted by carving her perfect form that his thoughts would always turn to holding her in his arms again and bringing them both pleasure, so he would abandon his work and go in search of her.

He almost smiled at the memory, but not quite.

He barely felt the tall wild flowers brushing against him as he continued to sit there, staring. This likeness, even more than that of the painting, almost made him feel as if she were standing there in front of him, almost, but not quite.

The features were the same, the graceful way that she carried herself, but the eyes were cold, blank, empty, and the hair, well, there was no way that that could even be compared.

He remembered the night when he had made that fateful decision to turn her skin to the same cold, hard, stone like texture that was so similar to the piece of art in front of him it would have been eerie to anyone else, but he knew this figure would not react to his touch the way she had.

Without much thought he stood up and was up on the pedestal carved into the base of the statue and his arms wrapped around her. No, the figure could not react, but he could pretend, if only for a moment, that he was holding his living statue in his arms.

Didyme.

After a moment he whispered in the unhearing ear, “I’m so sorry.”