Phoenix Unbound
Page 4

Desolation turned to desperation. She clutched his arm. “Please, I beg you. Have mercy. Say nothing. Other lives depend on this deception.” He stared at her, then at the hand gripping his arm, letting his silence play out. It unnerved her as he had hoped. She dropped her hand in favor of curling it into a fist. “I have nothing to offer for your silence.” She admitted this failure between clenched teeth.
“You can give me my freedom.”
Her jaw sagged, disbelief lifting her eyebrows. “What?”
Again, he’d shocked her. “You can change faces.”
“Yes.” The guarded look masked her features once more.
“Tomorrow, after the burning, you’ll come back to the catacombs as Hanimus and unlock my cell door.”
She gave a croak of laughter. “You are mad. We’ll be discovered. They’ll kill us both before you can step outside this cell.”
He hadn’t survived ten years and the savagery of the arena to die in the dark at the hands of guards no more intelligent than their own shit. Death wasn’t an option. Not now. But she didn’t need to know that. “Better dead than held here any longer.”
“Good for you,” she snapped before lowering her voice. “I don’t have that choice. I can’t die. Not yet. Beroe depends on me, on this lie. Find another to help you. I help enough already.” Bitterness poisoned each word.
“There is no other. You’ll do this.” He’d expected her resistance and planned for it.
Her face hardened. Finely cut cheekbones stood out, and though shorter than he was, she managed to stare down her nose at him as if he were one of the filthy puddles dotting the floors.
A subtle shift in the air lifted the hairs on his nape, and he straightened, arms hanging loose at his sides. This woman was no match for his prowess. Still, that inner alarm put him on guard, growing louder when she lifted her hands, palms cupped. Within the cages of her fingers, a blue-tinged flame burned brightly.
She was indeed an agacin—a fire priestess—and watched him with an imperious disdain worthy of the goddess who bequeathed her such power. “I’m not only safe from fire, gladiator,” she said, her fury as hot as the fire she held. “I can burn you to ash where you stand.”
Azarion laughed aloud. No helpless martyr here. She was as fierce and stubborn as any Savatar woman. Her initial passivity was no more real than the illusion of her crossed eyes or plump body. His admiration for her grew, as did his sense of purpose. She’d help him or he’d kill her.
Undeterred by her threat and the flames leaping in her hands, he stalked her until he backed her against the wall near his pallet. Her shallow breaths warmed his neck as he braced an arm on either side of her head and leaned closer to nuzzle her ear. Heat glazed his sides, warning that her fingers still blazed.
She might be as fierce as a Savatar, but she lacked the honed instinct that signaled danger. This close and he could snap her neck before a single hot ember touched his skin.
His mouth drifted lower until he reached her neck. She flinched when he grazed his teeth across the long vein below the skin and felt the heavy pulse of her blood surge under his lips. “Another knows your secret and will only keep it as long as I’m alive. Burn me,” he murmured, “and you seal your fate and the fate of Beroe.”
His heart beat as hard as hers did as he waited to see whether she’d sniff out his lie and call his bluff.
Rage bubbled in her voice, deepened it until she was almost growling. “It would be worth it.”
She didn’t break easily. A woman who willingly suffered through the Rites of Spring each year for half a decade wouldn’t. Strands of her hair, fine as silk threads, tickled his nose. “Would it?” He drove the point home. “Do you want Beroe to become another Midrigar?”
Midrigar. The township that once refused to tithe its women and grain to the Krael Empire and paid a terrible price. Even for those who thrived on watching the violence and bloodshed of the arena, the destruction of Midrigar was an abomination, its name spoken only in whispers.
For a moment, the heat strengthened, searing his sides before disappearing altogether. A soft sob broke the tense silence as gladiator and witch stood together. To other eyes, it might seem as if they embraced, his face hidden in her neck, her hands now resting against his ribs.
“You bastard,” she said in a defeated whisper.
Azarion kept her trapped, determined to gain her cooperation and content to taste her skin. “What say you, Agacin? Help me and none will ever know the village of Beroe has made a fool of the Empire.”
She leaned away from him so that her gaze met his, and in the dark depths of her eyes a calculating hatred settled. “What do I have to do?”
Triumph nearly made his knees give way. The plan he had strategized for the last three years, with this agacin at its heart, had only a slim chance of working, but it was at least a chance. Without her consent, extorted via threat, it had no chance at all.
He had only moments before the guards came for him, and he kept her trapped against the wall as he spoke, the wandering caress of his hand over her shoulder and breast in sharp contrast to his pragmatic instructions. Anyone watching might think the Gladius Prime wooed his plain companion to his bed.
She listened with a close ear and barely checked anger. “It won’t work,” she muttered when he finished, and swatted his hand away from her hip.
“It will.” He cupped her buttock to pull her into him and buried his nose in her hair. “It must.”
The clatter of keys and a thump on the cell door signaled visitors. He kept his back to the door, but the girl’s face had gone a sickly pale shade as she stared past his shoulder at the barred window. Azarion casually turned to find a face leering at them.
“Time’s up, bull. If you haven’t tupped the bitch yet, it’ll have to wait. Herself is wanting you. Now.”
The agacin retreated to a corner as far from him and the guards as she could get. She busied herself with righting her tunic and retying the laces.
The guard gave Azarion a puzzled look. “I saw this year’s offerings. You could have done much better than her.”
Azarion didn’t reply. He almost never spoke to the guards, and they had learned long ago he was far too dangerous to tease without risk. He kept his attention on the second guard, who trained the crossbow on him and held the hated shackles.
That first guard motioned him forward. Azarion held still as the iron collar encircled his neck, growing heavier—tighter—when the guard snapped it closed. A length of chain hung from the iron ring bolted at its center, the links kept short so that he was forced to hunch when the guard attached it to the chain connecting the shackles that bound his wrists and the ones that gripped his ankles. Trussed in irons, he shuffled after his escort as they led him through the door and into the corridor—a broken beast of burden. It was how the empress liked to see him when he first entered her apartments.
He sighed inwardly when no cup of drugged wine was forthcoming. It seemed the empress hadn’t yet had her bloodlust appeased, even after witnessing a full day of slaughter in the arena. He wondered whom he’d be forced to fight and kill for her pleasure before she bedded him.
And kill he would. Again and again. With his freedom at the tips of his fingers, he’d do whatever it took to stay alive and fulfill that dream. He glanced at the agacin huddled against the wall. She stared at him, eyes wide. Frightened. Hostile.