by Vi Voxley
Isolde shook in frustration. She should have told him, should have told Diego when she left the station. Definitely should have told him before he fought that beast who could easily kill him…
She dashed out of her room.
--
Isolde found Eleya in her office or whatever passed for it in the great palace. The Brions stared at her as she hurried, Deliya and Narath making way for her. Some of them seemed pretty important, one or two wore senator’s robes and Isolde probably should have stopped to greet them, but she had denied herself for too long. She had to tell Diego. At least that. If he died, if she never got to be in his arms again, at least he’d know…
Eleya was, Isolde noticed with slight annoyance, not surprised in any way. The senator smiled as words simply poured out of Isolde, uncontrolled, unchecked. Telling her anything she could to convince Eleya to let her speak to Diego.
“It is not that uncommon for someone to have an epiphany before fighting Crane,” Eleya said, amused. “Only usually it is the one fighting him reevaluating his life choices.”
“Can you send him a message?” Isolde pleaded. The focus of her life had suddenly become getting those words to Diego.
“He is already on his way to the arena,” Eleya said, regretfully this time. “We will join him there.”
“Can I see him before the fight?”
“No. But we can take seats right at the edge. He can see you there.”
It had to be enough, although Isolde would have preferred not to have thousands upon thousands of Brions as an audience to her confession.
Deliya and Narath joined them in the wait to the beginning of the fight suitably held very close to the senators’ palace. On the walls of Eleya’s office, screens showed the arena, clearly the event of the year.
“Everyone is rooting for Diego,” Deliya said supportively. “There should not be sixteen generals. Eren is not making himself popular with this. And everyone knows Crane is unfit for command.”
Isolde could only nod as she watched the preparations for the upcoming fight. Then something huge passed before the screen, blocking almost everything in sight despite the object seeming to be some distance away from the camera.
Isolde’s breath caught as it stepped into the fading light. It reminded her of the beast in Diego’s trophy room. She wasn’t entirely certain her eyes weren’t fooling her, and it wasn’t actually the trophy come back to life to have its revenge.
“What… is that?” she dared ask, although the answer was obvious.
“That is Crane,” Eleya said, and even her voice sounded quiet.
The trophy beast howled, prowling the arena. In zoos on Terra, Isolde had sometimes seen wild, caged animals roar like that.
“I’m not a warrior, but – how is it even possible to fight that unarmed?”
There were three warriors in the room with her, who were supposed to know. None of them answered.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Diego
To those who didn’t know Diego Grothan at all, it might have looked like he was a man preparing to die. In a way, he was. Fighting a monster like Crane barehanded was not something one could afford to take easily.
Diego was confident, but not cocky. His training had been the best Briolina could offer, and he swore not to shame it that day. A Brion general didn’t make a fool of himself. There was honor even in losing, if you went down fighting. He planned to do no such thing, but he was aware that everything he did in the arena would be watched and judged. His words would carry the weight of whatever his image was after the fight ended.
Crane was not someone to be underestimated, but Diego had not been grothan for so long by not knowing his advantages and weaknesses. Crane was bigger, which meant he was slower. He lacked self-preservation, which made him dangerous, but also uncaring about the wounds he received. Both those things and many more could work in his favor.
Faren and Atren had joined him under the arena. Briolina’s two moons had risen, casting the world in twilight. Diego wished he could have said something to Isolde. He hoped she’d be at the ringside, so he could get one last look at those beautiful green eyes, if it was meant to be his last. He would fight to the end, to his dying breath to get another.
“Report,” he commanded.
Atren sighed. “No modifications to his skin and flesh, but I would look out for his punches. My sources and Eleya’s suggest there may have been some reinforcing surgery on his bones. Nothing certain. He spent some time in the facilities on the other side of Nerth, healers specializing in bone tech were present, but that is it. Could be a false lead.”
Diego thought it over, adjusting to the new information and the possibility it was fake. “Very well,” he said. “The other thing? Are your tasks clear?”
There were affirmative nods from both.
He sent them away, taking the last minutes of preparation for himself. On the door, Faren paused. “I will keep her safe,” he said and left.
That had to have been the most shocking thing to happen to him that day, Diego thought with morbid amusement. Never mind Crane and the very real possibility he’d have his head ripped off in front of Isolde’s eyes. Faren hadn’t meant keeping Isolde safe after the fight, where the situation was anybody’s game – until the result, they all behaved nicely, but Diego was making no illusions that it all bordered on the edge of a knife. Atren would take care of that. He had meant that if Diego was to die, he would see his gesha was delivered to safety and kept so.
He’d be damned, that had to have been the most sentimental thing Faren had ever said. Maybe Eren was right and they were going soft.
Diego allowed himself a chuckle at that. He flexed his muscles, feeling the pure, unrestrained strength pulse beneath his skin, the stimulants racing through his blood. It was good to be strong. It was good to be alive. He would remain so.
“Diego,” a voice said then. A voice that he had used to look forward to hearing, but which only seemed to bring him exasperation lately. He turned to Aneya, again pale with fear. It was not a proper look on a Brion woman.
“How did you get in here?” he asked, annoyed. The preparation area was supposed to be restricted to anyone he didn’t personally invite there.
“My family can get to most places it wishes,” Aneya said. “I asked them to let me through. I had to see you before you went. Diego, the reinforced bones…”
“Will be no use to him,” he replied tersely, even more furious that she’d doubt him. “Leave, Aneya.”
“No,” she pleaded. “You may die. I just wanted to tell you that I will wait for you. And that I am yours, always.”
That again. Diego sighed, drawing on his last reserves of patience with her. “You are not. Now leave and abandon this foolishness.” Of course, it was difficult to watch her struggle with her emotions, yet he had to be firm. His mood soured, being in the presence of her longing desperation, one he could do nothing about, nor soothe in any fashion.
Then Aneya finally crossed the line. “You are only doing this because you feel protective of her, she is in danger and you are…”
Diego’s glare silenced her at once. He took a step closer, eyes shooting daggers at her shivering form.
“You are either saying I lie about my bond or that I cannot recognize one,” he said, quiet and deadly. “For all the help you are and for the person I remember you to be, who I hope you still are when you finally come to your senses, I will not kill you where you stand. Get out, and thank the gods I have to kill someone already today, or I would not have been able to stop myself from making you pay for your words.”
Telling her to go usually resulted in her pouting, but this time it brought despair. Aneya sobbed. “You will see,” she said. “There will come a day when you will see. Diego…”
When he turned his back to her, furious and annoyed that she’d ruined his focus with a matter that should have been concluded a long, long time ago, he heard her leave, although her shaky breathing echoed back for
several moments.
He belonged to Isolde alone. His life, and if need be – his death.
---
As he walked to the arena, Diego felt calm, as he usually did before a fight. He wasn’t a man to walk into battle unprepared. He felt he had done everything he possibly could have.
The crowds roared above him, up on the balconies and on the seats around the arena. He saw the senators, gathered in force to see two Brion generals battle to death. It wasn’t something that happened every day, after all. This was nothing short of a rarity. The crowds roared his name, but Diego’s heart called to only one.
He had done everything he could. Atren would join Eleya and Isolde in providing protection if needed, and Diego was almost certain it was. Whether he’d win or lose, Eren wasn’t about to let them take his victory. A part of Diego understood. It was not the Brion way to accept defeat, or insult.
And now that he knew who Eleya was – among other things explaining her anger at him and the other generals for letting Eren rip her from their ranks – he’d instructed Atren to extend his protection to her as well. She was not helpless, of course, that would have been a terrible insult, but Eren had Brion generals loyal to him too. A fighting arm would not go to waste.
The rest of their allies were in orbit, keeping an eye on their enemies and holding the defensive line in case someone tried to run. The Triumphant, the Unbroken and the Fearless, under the commands of their seconds, were among them.
And Faren was on his way to the Elders. They could not be awoken with force, but it was possible, in ways that defied Diego’s knowledge, to point out the urgency of matters that called them out of their meditation. Faren would also keep away the senators trying to influence the Elders. There were few generals that would dare to cross him, much less warriors, not to mention senators without military training.
Yes. Diego felt ready for whatever the fight was to bring. It was not the Brion way to despair or fear death. It would come when it was supposed to, neither sooner nor later.
A voice called to him. Over the roar of the crowd, it nearly drowned in its midst, but a single syllable was enough for him to know. Out of the other end of the arena, he saw Crane thump forward. He was as big as Diego remembered.
Isolde stood at the ringside with Eleya and her guards. Her eyes shined in the moonlight with a passion Diego had only rarely seen in them, and never like that. His heart went wild and the combat hormones didn’t help. He barely noticed moving when he was already standing before her, holding her in his arms over the reeling.
Isolde’s soft, gentle hands were in his hair, twisting them as hard as she could, sending sparks of pleasure through Diego’s groin. The absolute worst time to get aroused, but he could not bring himself to break the embrace. Her breath shivered on his neck, tickling in a sweet, maddening way. It was a perfect moment, the eye of the storm and even with all the battle excitement, Diego found himself never wanting to leave it. Only, perhaps, to lift her over the separating edge and take her right there before the crowd.
Isolde was shaking. He couldn’t fault her. To a human, Crane must have looked monstrous. He looked so even to the Brions.
“Don’t die,” she whispered. “Don’t die, Diego. Not now.”
He froze.
“Yours,” Isolde said, her voice shaking so hard as to nearly make it impossible to hear. “Yours. I am yours.”
Diego pulled her head back and kissed Isolde so hard it had to have hurt her. It didn’t seem to matter, though, because she almost purred into the kiss, biting his lip in revenge. If he had been half-hard already, that hurt as his cock strained against his pants, begging to be slammed into Isolde’s soft, warm pussy.
He pushed his tongue deep into her mouth, reveling in the sweet taste, and even more so in the moan it ripped from her throat, audible even over the crowd that cheered for them. His mouth left Isolde’s lips swollen and red and his gesha herself breathless, gasping for air – a sight so tempting it took all his willpower to press another quick kiss on her lips and then turn to Crane.
There was no future, no Isolde, no anything if he couldn’t kill that monster of a man.
Walking to meet Crane, Diego felt like he really believed in fate for the first time. Of course he was a Brion and had trusted in the fates to know better all his life, but in that moment, he felt everything was always supposed to come together like that. He felt whole. Wasn’t yet, not before the binding, but now he was fighting for something he wanted more than he had ever wanted anything in his life. What might have been a distraction for others was only incentive to him.
He didn’t look back. Seeing Isolde breathless, her eyes clouded over with desire – now that would have been a distraction. Crane was not an enemy you could let out of your sight.
Despite Faren and Atren, in their own ways, already counting him dead, Diego Grothan would have bet on himself if he’d have considered that honorable.
Minutes later, Diego was circling his enemy warily, but he couldn’t keep out of his reach forever.
Crane’s fist, hard as rock, slammed into his gut, sending him sprawling backwards. Diego had a second to thank fate for Crane not having the sense to grab on to his shirt and yank him to the death grip of his huge hands. Small mercies. The brute didn’t seem to catch on to the fact the easiest way for him to kill Diego would have simply been catching him when he came close and strangling life from him second by agonizing second.
He had done that, Diego remembered, when he had still been sane. The sounds had been horrifying. Looking now into his monstrous opponent’s eyes, he was not the warrior Diego remembered. He had actually been a warrior then. Vicious, terrible, but not without reflection. The deranged look of bloodshot eyes that stared at Diego now, the snarl on his lips, frozen on Crane’s face… that was merely a monster.
It seemed Crane no longer comprehended what he was. His objective seemed to be beating Diego to death, which could have worked quite well for him as well, given that his punches were not something Diego wanted to receive more than once. Even a single one had not been fun and he’d taken a heavy beating already.
He wondered why he kept joking in his mind, when it was very clear Crane was a walking murder machine that didn’t even blink at any of the blows he’d landed. His flesh wasn’t strengthened, that much Diego could tell by the few punches he’d dashed in, only to jump clear of the monster the next. But even his real flesh, hardened by decades of battle and whatever they had done to him in the cage where they kept him, was hard as steel. The best he could have hoped for was that Crane would have bruises. In a few days.
There was an emptiness in Crane’s eyes that he dreaded the most. The monster didn’t stop to rest or wait for an opportune moment. He just kept coming at him, never giving him respite, denying him rest not because it was a strategy, but simply because Diego wasn’t dead yet.
The crowd had fallen silent. They were Brions too. They could see how little damage Diego’s hits did and how much Crane’s when Diego was too slow to dodge.
The last one nearly cost him his life when Crane jumped after him with a deafening crash, landing, knee-first where he’d just been.
Despite all that, Diego still considered himself to be in control. Only every sign that might tell him if his tactics were working seemed useless with Crane. How do you tell if someone is tiring, when they have no emotions, not even grunts of pain, no change of pace to be seen? That was why fighting madness was so dangerous. Crane could have been exhausted to death and might fall in a minute, or he could snake out one of those massive hands and crush Diego’s throat before he could even lay a hand on him.
There was no choice. He had to make a move before he got too tired, which meant he had to get close.
He was circling Crane, eyes watching every movement the other general – an insult to the title if there ever was one – made, his senses pushed to their limits in a way that sharpened everything to the point of almost seeming unreal. Diego waited. Crane just kept comin
g, changing direction every time he did.
With years of experience, Diego went for the opening in the brute’s defense the moment he saw it, not second-guessing himself for a moment.
His surprise was fast and unpleasant as Crane sidestepped him faster than he would have thought the big general could move. Protecting the leg Diego had been going for in order to pull the monster down and deal with him from there, Crane caught him instead at last. One hand holding him, the other twisting around Diego’s neck, pressing it against his chest, Crane went still.
The pressure felt like being crushed under an airlock’s triple-reinforced door. Clawing at the hands holding him, faced away from Crane, Diego saw the crowd frozen silent. Distantly he wondered if Crane really was mad and some of his fighter instincts had simply remained, or if it had been Eren’s ploy to make him underestimate the monster after all.
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was survival.
He had to be quick. Crane could have strangled him fast, but fate – the blessed, ever-giving fate – had kept some of the mad, sadistic need to feel someone suffer. That gave Diego seconds.
Instead of trying to pry the hand suffocating him away from an uncomfortable angle, Diego slowly forced the hand holding him flat against Crane and away from him. Strong Crane could be, but Diego Grothan was not made out of paper either. Both his hands pushing Crane’s right arm away from his body, his entire weight behind it, levering it from Crane’s own chest, Diego could do what he had planned to do from the beginning.
Of all the bodily modifications, he had always found reinforced bones to be the dumbest idea. It seemed to give such advantage to a warrior’s strength. He could feel it himself at that moment, Crane’s immense strength combined with steely bones, cutting his air off in its merciless, unrelenting press.
But it was also dangerous to carry that much hard material in your body. From the moment Crane announced his choice, it had been clear to Diego he wouldn’t be able to overpower the monstrous general physically. He had to use the only weapons available, weapons Crane had brought to the arena inside him.