Just as the gladiator sliced through the rope, Attia neatly twisted the knife out of his hands, whipped around, and kicked him hard in the hip. She followed the strike with quick blows from her elbows aimed at his head and neck. Using the wall behind her for leverage, Attia leapt forward and drove her knee into his side. The gladiator gasped softly and bent at the waist, cradling a newly cracked rib.
Attia adjusted her grip on the knife and pressed the blade against his throat. “You will never touch me,” she said. “No man will. And you’re not even a man. You’re nothing but Timeus’s monster.”
The gladiator took a deep breath before slowly straightening. “You’re right. So what are you waiting for? Kill me.”
“I plan to.” Just a quick flick of her wrist. That was all she needed.
“Sometime this century?”
Attia pressed the blade harder against his skin. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Afraid? I would be honored to die at the hands of a Thracian. A daughter of the Maedi. That’s what you are, aren’t you?”
When she didn’t answer, the gladiator slowly fell to his knees before her. Attia froze, her brow creasing in disbelief. Whatever she’d expected from the champion, this was certainly not it. Her small blade pressed against his skin, and a thin trickle of blood ran free.
“I didn’t ask for this,” the gladiator said again. “I didn’t ask for any of it. You can believe me or you can kill me. Whatever Timeus says, I won’t touch you.”
Attia started to shake her head. Why should she believe him? He was a champion of Timeus’s house, of Rome. By everyone’s account, he owned her. Why should she trust anything that came out of the man’s mouth? That was when she saw it—the deep sorrow etched into the gladiator’s face, the fatigue that weighed on his strong body. He hadn’t tried to fight off her attack, and even now, he kept his arms limp at his sides, resigned to the fact that she was about to slit his throat. Why?
They said nothing to each other as the rain continued to beat against the walls. The gladiator spoke of her home, but Thrace suddenly seemed so far away. Another world. Another lifetime. She clenched her teeth to hold down the sob welling in her throat, because the truth was, the gladiator was wrong. She wasn’t one of the Maedi anymore. She had already betrayed every legacy, every piece of the heritage that her father had passed on to her. She’d let him die on that hillside. She’d allowed her people to be massacred. She was no warrior. Not anymore. How could she ever again call herself anything more than a slave? For the first time, she thanked the gods that her father was no longer alive to witness her shame.
Attia slowly lowered the blade from the gladiator’s neck. She almost couldn’t feel the hilt of the knife in her palm.
“If you’re not going to kill me tonight, will you tell me your name?”
“My name is Attia.” She could hear the defeat in her own voice and was sure the gladiator could, too.
He was silent for a long minute though his gaze held hers. “They call me Xanthus.” He gestured half-heartedly toward the bed. “Timeus will want to know he’s gotten his way. Let him think it. You can have the bed. I won’t touch you.” Then he took the rough blanket and spread it out on the floor at the farthest end of the room. Attia watched as he lay down, his back to her and his face to the wall. Within a few minutes, it seemed he was fast asleep.
Attia stood where she was for a while longer, never taking her eyes from the gladiator’s back. Only when her legs threatened to give out from sheer exhaustion did she gingerly crawl onto the gladiator’s bed, pressing her own back against the wall and bringing her knees to her chest. She kept the little knife clutched tightly in her hand. She didn’t make a single sound, though every piece of her felt raw and frayed.
The heavy rain continued outside, and Attia wished the sky would release an ocean onto the house. In the silent depths of her heart, she grieved for her people, for her father, for herself. For the promise of honor and glory and freedom. For the warrior that she was and the queen that she should have been.
Her thoughts turned to the gladiator sleeping just a few feet away, and she wondered if he grieved for something, too. He obviously didn’t fear death. No, in some manic, desperate way, he almost seemed to welcome it. Maybe that was why he hadn’t tried to stop her attack. Maybe that was why she couldn’t bring herself to kill him. Because maybe in this house, in this prison, they both wanted the same impossible thing: to be just a man and just a woman, standing free in the rain.
CHAPTER 6
The house of Timeus was a maze of stone. Doorways hid in the shadows. Corridors branched off to other corridors in wide and narrow angles. Stairways plunged down to cold cellars and dark basements. Arched passages led to rooms lined with marble and granite. And everywhere, there were guards. Dozens of them, maybe more. All armed with swords, daggers, even small mallets that hung from their belts. The guards on the upper floor wielded bows, and their eyes moved constantly over the courtyard and the gates.
Every now and then, Attia glimpsed a dark-haired woman walking listlessly through the halls, often dressed in a black stola that clung to the curves of her body. But Attia could never get close enough to really look at her before the woman disappeared down some corridor.
All of it was so foreign and cold that Attia found herself shivering despite the mild southern climate. As swordlord of the Maedi, her father moved constantly from camp to camp, village to village with his soldiers—ensuring peace and protecting their borders. Attia’s room had been a tent on a hillside or a single pallet in a dense wood. She had been surrounded by hundreds of Maedi nearly every minute of every day, and still, the guards in Timeus’s house made it difficult for her to breathe under their oppressive watch.
None of them spoke to her or even met her eyes, but she could feel their gazes boring into her back. Attia ignored them. All she knew was that as soon as she regained her full strength, she would kill Timeus and escape this house. In all likelihood, she would be struck down somewhere in the process, but she couldn’t bring herself to care about that little detail. After all, what else was left for her? Another tense night in a gladiator’s bed?
Xanthus had told the truth; he never touched her. He was gone by the time she opened her eyes that morning, even before the sun had completely risen. In the half-dark, she slipped out of his room, pausing at the archway of the training yard when she heard something that made her body tense instinctively—the surprising sound of synchronized movements and the unmistakable clang of swords.
In the shadowy yard, she could see six men paired off and sparring with one another. They wore no armor. Their weapons were cheap. And their movements—while brutal and effective—were much too chaotic for the auxilia. Not soldiers, then. Timeus’s gladiators. And Xanthus was among them. None of them had seen her, and she didn’t stay long to watch.