Sullivan Saga 2: Sullivan's Wrath Read Online Free

of the antique books that he’d loved so much. She wondered how many of them had been left unread when he’d been killed by the bounty hunter Harvey. She wondered which of them he’d looked forward to reading as soon as he’d finished dealing with business-related matters.
    She spotted a book on the table beside his chair. She walked over to it, sat in the chair and picked up the book. It wasn’t a particularly old book. In fact, it was part of a series that her father had specially commissioned. But the contents of the book were ancient. She ran her hand across the embossed lettering on the front: Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. One of his favorite books.
    Kate opened the book and found that many of the pages had been bookmarked with slender strips of paper. She flipped to one of them and read the passage her father had marked:
And you will give yourself relief if you commit every act of your life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy and self-love and discontent, with the portion which has been given to you.
    She thought of her father’s last act. He had been opening a box containing a gift for her when he was attacked and killed by Harvey. His very last act was for her.
    She wiped her eyes and closed the book. She got up from the chair, glanced around and found the spot where Meditations belonged on the shelf. The volumes he’d had made were all bound in matching leather with gold embossing on the covers and gilded page edges. They were printings of the words of the ancient Stoic philosophers: Zeno, Seneca, Epictetus, Aurelius. The first she remembered her father talking about quite a bit. Zeno’s Republic had been believed lost for twenty-four centuries until excavations in the late twenty-first century uncovered the remnants of a private library in the city of Herculaneum. As in the nearby Villa of the Papyri, which had been excavated in the middle of the eighteenth century, over a thousand carbonized scrolls had been found. But in the three centuries between the two discoveries, the method by which the charred scrolls could be carefully unwrapped and stabilized by an adhesive coating had been perfected. The only obstacle was the Italian government, who sought to preserve the site by not allowing further excavation.
    A change in that policy, combined with the development of both less-invasive excavation and more reliable stabilization techniques, finally allowed the buried sections of Herculaneum to once again see the light of day. The most remarkable discovery was a scroll containing Zeno’s Republic which, until that time, had only existed in fragments quoted by other writers. Ninety percent of the text was recovered, and as one of the founding documents of the philosophy, it quickly became a crucial component of any collection of Stoic texts.
    Kate’s father had told her about this discovery when she was a girl and had, to show her the value of the discovery, read selections to her. Despite her father’s enthusiasm, she had never had an interest in Stoic thought herself and hadn’t read any of those texts for years.
    Now, with her father gone, she got the sensation that by reading some of these books again, she could bring him back, if only for a moment. She’d make a point to upload them to her tablet before they left for Faris.
    Kate was about to place the Marcus Aurelius in its slot but instead withdrew the rest of the leather-bound set and placed it in her hand next to Meditations . She did not only want to read the words her father had loved, she wanted to read the very volumes he had treasured. She moved back toward the entrance, took one final look around the study then stepped through and closed the door behind her.
     

6
     
    IT WAS MORNING. Brother Peter had slept fitfully and had woken up several more times. Still, he dutifully got up when his alarm went off, kneeled by the side of his bed and said his