Gladiator (11 page)

“He would be able to give you an answer. I can’t.”

“Did you ever see what happened to your brother?”

“No I just ran, and when he cried for help I failed. There was a lot of turmoil later, but that was just par for the course during that time. And then it was as if he’d never existed.”

“So no one mentioned him again?”

“I was little and he’d been little. They must have thought I’d forgotten about him. He’d been disposed of so easily it just scared me. I didn’t ask any questions. I wish I had now.”

“You were six and still getting over losing your mother. Your instincts protected you then. Your father and sister are cruel. They may have killed you if you had asked questions.”

“I don’t know. How I wish I could have helped him.”

“Wherever he is, I’m sure he knows that.”

“What about your mother and father? Where are they now?”

“Mom got sick from the fallout and died. I hadn’t heard from Dad in years before the war. But then, I didn’t make it easy on him or Donna. I was just so angry at them. After Mom died, things were even harder at home for me and Hope. We made the decision to stay and stick it out and for our troubles…you know…I don’t regret doing what we did. But I was a different man then in a dying system.”

“And now?”

“I was resigned to die in that arena. Fuck your sister until she got bored of me.”

“Why did you sleep with her? I mean, I get why she favored you. You’re tall, you’re strong, and you’re a sexual animal. And whether you realize it or not, your honor radiates from your core. You’re everything her weak willed loser of a husband isn’t.”

“An animal, huh?” She blushed. He chuckled. “I was a man who had given up on life. I was just angry and grieving and the only two outlets I had were fighting and fucking. Your sister wasn’t the only woman with whom I had angry sex. Every time I drove into her I was trying to make her feel the way my Hope felt in her last moments. I’m not proud of it, but your sister always got off on it. It was never romantic, it was never intimate, and it was never loving. Not with her or any of the others who paid a price to come to me. Rich, horny women are easily satisfied into submission. And then…they dump you in my cell and tell me not just to gain your trust, but to kill you…”

“Were you going to do it?”

“I may be a Gladiator but I am not a cold-blooded killer. And when they threw you in there I was sure we were both done for. You, because you were just unlike anything I’d ever seen, and me, for refusing to do it.”

“I have a lot to be grateful for. I have your children. I have you. So I have to give something in return for these gifts I’ve been given.”

“It may be your destiny to save the world. But when they threw you in my cell a year ago, it was proof you were meant to live. You said I was the only one who could kill you, but that if I wanted to, I could save you. Our destinies are connected. For good or bad, and for better or worse.”

She lay there for a minute, pensive. Then she spoke her mind. “I know you call me your wife, but… I want a ceremony. Even if it’s just us and Lucilla and Isaiah and the babies. Out here, before we set out again.”

“A wedding? It wouldn’t be official.”

“Why? Because the Crown doesn’t recognize it? I love you and I want to make it real.”

“I don’t have a tux. You don’t have a dress. We don’t have rings…” He tried to make light of it but she wasn’t having that.

“None of that matters to me. My mother told me if I was lucky I would find a good man to love me, the right man to protect me, a soul mate to stand by me. I was looking for a Protector. I got the whole thing right the first time around.”

He pressed her fingertips to his lips. “I never sought redemption. And I was never given a promise of salvation. But you, Alexandra, you landed in my lap almost literally!—and showed me there are some things worth living and fighting for. There are things worth dying for. And in you, and our small family, I’ve rediscovered that.” He placed her hand over his heart. “I am yours. I am forever yours.”

She rolled him to his back and began to kiss down his stomach. He groaned as she took his already stiff cock in her mouth and began to lick and suck, flicking her tongue up and down his shaft as she cupped and fondled his balls. She took him deep into her mouth, sucking so hard he knew he was coming before he could be inside her. But that was her intention. This was her way of submitting to him. She wasn’t a submissive lover very often, and as she lavished his cock with the wet, velvety feel of her tongue on his sensitive head, she tugged lightly on his balls and he came, shouting her name. As the sensations gripped him he surrendered to her every touch…and when she swallowed, his own yearning to be inside of her was heightened to an exquisite agony. He parted her legs and burrowed his face between her legs. Inhaling her scent made his abdomen tighten and he ran his tongue over her clit and drove his tongue inside her relentlessly, digging his fingertips into her ass as she rode him wildly, writhing against his face. Panting, quivering, moaning, he wanted her at his very mercy and when she came he licked her hungrily. When she cried out he worked her down from the heights of bliss to the gentle waters of his embrace.

They kissed, tasting one another on each other’s lips. She nuzzled him at his neck and held on tight. Tacitly, they realized they had to go back and confront Veronica and Oliver. It was akin to a death-wish. But first they had to get the twins to safety. While he and Alex might face certain death, the babies deserved a real chance at life.

“We have to send them ahead, don’t we?”

“As long as they have a chance, a part of us will live on.”

“So Lucilla and Isaiah will be their godparents?”

“Yes.”

“And if we live?”

“Then we get forever.”

PART III

Chapter Eleven

“You’re quiet,” he said. He didn’t have to ask why. The act of sending their children away had been especially hard. She hadn’t raised her voice, cried, screamed, or raged as he had when his children had been taken. Yet he knew her heart was broken. It hurt him, too, and the decision weighed on him. But with mothers it was different.

“I’m fine,” she said softly walking alongside him, wearing a Gladiator uniform borrowed from Lucilla. She carried a sword on one side, and an automatic service pistol on the other. He wore the same thing—only it was his own uniform, a reminder of a life he’d sworn only a year before he’d never return to.

“It’s okay to cry.”

“I’m not a little girl anymore, you know.”

“No. But saying goodbye to your children is hard. Especially when you do it with the knowledge you might never see them again.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

“And you think I do?” By now they were alongside the creek, which was frozen over.

“Then why are we doing so?” she snapped.

“Because they’re my children, too, damn it and I can’t have you pushing me away at a time like this. It’s self-defeating. I need you at my side, not mourning a life we’re fighting to save.”

“What do you want me to say? That I’m dying inside? That I want to go back right this second? That the world be damned as long as I’m with you and our twins? Fine! I’m dying inside. I can’t live without them. Fuck the world. As long as I have you and my children everything will be fine!”

“Alex…”

“No! You wanted this conversation and like hell you’re going to get it. Of course I want to go running back to them. But a life on the run is no life at all. The truth is, though, if you said turn around I’d do it, as long as it meant I was with you and the kids. But my sister isn’t about to let this go. She hunts us night and day. And even though we’ve been able to stay a step ahead of her up until now, it’s not going to stay that way forever.”

She still wasn’t crying. He was desolate without his children. But he was a man, and after years of fighting, only she had brought him to tears. He made to hold her in his arms and she pushed him away.

“Alex, please don’t do this to me, to us.”

She turned her back on him and lowered her head. “Loving me isn’t supposed to be easy,” she said softly.

He stepped up behind her and placed an easy hand to her shoulder, and turned her around. “That’s where you’re wrong.”

He gazed down into her eyes and saw what it was that made her so. “Your heart is unlike any other I’ve known.”

She tried to look away. “I’m a one way ticket to death.” Her words hit him hard. “I always have been. My mother, my brother. Now you. I don’t want to die, and I can accept my sacrifice is necessary, but not everyone else’s.”

“When I told you that I loved you, I didn’t mean only when it’s easy. Or only because you have a pretty face. And I don’t want to make love to you just because it’s pleasurable. I told you that I loved you because you make me want to fight for something more…something much more than another victory or a fucking session with a beautiful woman. When I said I loved you, I meant I was all in, and if I died in the process of protecting you, then that would be a price I was willing to pay.”

Alex sobbed, fell to her knees, and doubled over. Tristan bent down and gathered her up in his arms. She put her arms around his neck and looked up at the sky. “I’m so afraid. I don’t want to be. But I feel like I’m no match for what is about to happen to me.”

“You haven’t been afraid this whole time. Why now?”

“Because I was running away from it. I was preparing for a life after it. And now, either way, I could lose you. And it’s too much.”

He kissed her tenderly and cradled her face. “You said it yourself. We can’t control the future. We can only play our part in it. But I’m in it for the long haul, my love.”

She shuddered. They weren’t exactly dressed for the winter they were in. He took off the backpack he’d been wearing with all of their supplies and pulled out two coats. He slid into his and then helped her with hers. They sat there for a while.

“Do you think we’ll ever see them again?”

“You told me I would see Kevin and Elizabeth. I have to believe we’ll see our children again, too.”

“And if we don’t?”

“Let’s not think about that.”

Tears were quietly falling down her face. He knew he couldn’t comfort her fully. She hadn’t in all their time together had a meltdown. As many times as she’d teetered on the brink of death, she’d come back again. He knew a lesser woman would have given up sooner. It was almost as if every pain ever inflicted upon her was looking for a release and walking away from Daniel and Hope had been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“You’ll see them again,” he promised.

“Isn’t this precious?”

That sarcastic voice. She’d know it anywhere. Alexandra gripped Tristan tightly. He looked up in time to see Veronica sitting high upon a white stallion, before he felt the flat of Damien’s sword slam into his head, knocking him down.

The Military Elite grabbed a screaming Alex as she tried to cover him. She reached for her gun, but the soldier was quicker. He twisted her wrist roughly and pinned it behind her back. Tristan staggered to his feet and lunged forward but was quickly subdued by Damien and his fellow soldiers.

Alex continued to fight. In her face he could see the feral look in her eyes as she struggled to get free of her captor. “Let her go!”

“Come now, Tristan, you really didn’t think you two would get away forever did you? Your plan was ingenious. Really. My very own sister, setting the slaves free. It took me a while to find you, but once Damien returned to me, you were never that far ahead.”

A soldier dug his knee into Alexandra’s back and she howled in pain. Tristan yanked himself free and went for the man doing Veronica’s bidding. He pulled Alex free and drew his sword.

Veronica cocked her head to the side and asked, “Now you really don’t think I can let you get away with that, do you?”

“You will not take us alive.”

“Brave, hollow words. Men, take him. Damien, wound her and leave her for dead.”

“Mark my words. If you do anything to harm Alex, I will skin you alive and leave you gutted in the arena.”

Veronica looked at her sister with disgust. She spat, and looked angrily at Tristan. “I favored you above the others—and all you had to do was kill her. Instead, you fuck her and create children with her. Has your life not taught you anything about begetting children?”

His rage swallowed him whole. He went for Veronica’s throat but was quickly overpowered and chained.

“Seeing that he desires her so much—chain her to him and throw them into the coach.”

* * * *

Alexandra looked Veronica in the eyes and said nothing. But her amber eyes began to burn with purpose, and they wouldn’t stop until their destiny was fulfilled.

* * * *

They had been separated after their arrival in D.C. Tristan had been sent to the Inquisition Room. Veronica stayed to oversee what was usually her husband’s remit.

As the Military Guards strapped him into the electrical bed and prepared the equipment with which to torture him, he looked at her with indifference, and a hardness he reserved for the worst of his enemies. “Where’d you take her?”

She curled her lip. She placed a hand on the control for the lowest level of electricity, and with her other one yanked his head back and tried to force a kiss. When he didn’t respond, she pulled the lever, sending volts of electricity coursing through his body. He’d been in this situation before; but at the time he had lost everything and was willing to die to be with his wife again. Life was different now. Life was worth living. Life was worth fighting for. And just when he thought he could take it no more she pulled the lever back, causing his juddering body to drop back to the metal bedframe.

“Oh don’t worry about your precious wife. Damien is keeping an eye on her.”

Anger and fear fueled him, and he tried to break free. Veronica threw her head back and laughed with fiendish glee and then threw the lever again. This time he screamed in mind-numbing pain. Again, she took him to the brink before she pulled the lever back again.