He didn’t answer.
“This is about Antonia, isn’t it?” I pressed. “The injured girl. You wanted to show me how easy it would be for me to wind up like her. How easy it would be for another fighter to beat me.”
He raised his head, his gaze boring into me. His eyes were red-rimmed, and his face, even clouded with hurt, was devastatingly handsome. “Yes.”
His admission should have filled me with anger, but it didn’t. Maybe it was because in that moment he reminded me so much of how Mael, with his ridiculous overprotectiveness, used to treat me sometimes. It wasn’t that Cai didn’t think I could handle myself, but he worried about me all the same. I hadn’t been imagining things the night of the oath taking. Cai cared about me.
He shifted again on the bed, clearly uncomfortable, and stifled a groan. I poured him a cup of cool water. He gulped it down thirstily, and when I reached for the empty cup to take it back, he circled my forearm with his long fingers.
“I was wrong, you know,” he said. “Your wrists aren’t weak. Nothing about you is.”
“Decurion—”
“Cai.”
“Cai—”
His hand ran up the length of my arm, then drifted upward to rest against the side of my face. His palm was warm, and I found myself leaning into his touch before I could stop myself.
“I’ve never known anyone like you,” he whispered. “Ever. Since that moment on the ship.”
“The moment when I tried to kill you?”
“No. The one when you put yourself at risk to help Charon, the man who’d put you in slave irons, in the middle of all that chaos and death. You are uncommon in your bravery, Fallon. You are stronger than any woman I’ve ever known.” He smiled ruefully. “And you seem determined to haunt my dreams.”
I stood abruptly, feeling my heart pounding in my throat. If Cai had been a slave, even if he’d been a simple merchant or tradesman, it would have been different. How laughable for a once-princess of the Cantii to even think such things. There was a time when he wouldn’t have been near good enough for me. Now he was so far above my station as to be in the stars. To even allow myself to be swept away on the tides of my imagination was madness . . .
“Fallon.” Cai pushed himself stiffly to his feet and took a step toward me. “Look at me.”
I did. I shouldn’t have. Embers of desire flared in his hazel eyes, and suddenly all of my reasoned arguments as to why this should never—could never—happen fell silent. A roaring silence muffled the voices in my head telling me to turn around, leave, don’t look back . . .
He was close enough to take me in his arms, if he wanted to.
But he didn’t.
“This can go no further,” I said in a choked whisper. “We both know—”
Cai pulled me tightly to his bandaged chest and held me there, even though I knew it must have hurt him to do it. I looked up at him, and he kissed me with a hungry desperation that tore the breath from my lungs. His hands tangled in my hair, and my arms tightened around him. He hissed in pain—or pleasure, I couldn’t tell which—but he didn’t stop kissing me.
Not for a long, dizzying while.
No one had ever kissed me like that before, not even Mael. I didn’t know anyone could kiss me like that. It seemed as if time stopped in that moment and everything I’d gone through—every hardship and horror that had led me to where I was—had been worth it for this. For him.
But then I felt his hands brush the iron slave collar I still wore around my neck. I heard the whisper-scrape of his soldier’s calluses on the raw metal and pulled away from his kiss. Cai’s eyes were shut, his chest heaving.
“Cai,” I breathed. My lips tingled from his kiss.
He opened his eyes and cradled my face, holding me so that I couldn’t look away. “I ask you again—I’m begging you—will you let me buy your contract, Fallon?” he asked in a fierce whisper.
I swallowed hard again and shook my head. “No, Decurion. I will not.”
Cai dropped his hands and stepped away from me. Then he turned, bending to retrieve his tunic from where it lay on the cot. He stood with his back to me for a long, aching moment. And his expression, when he turned back, was once more remote. It was as if he’d closed a heavy door and shut himself away from me.
“So be it,” he said. “Then you should know that one of my missives from Caesar to your Lanista was this: You and the other seasoned girls are to go on the circuit starting in three days’ time.”
“The circuit?”