“Whatever it was?” Vinnie repeated. “Whatever it was?”
She looked into those bluer-than-the-sky eyes and saw that he really, truly, had no idea what she was talking about. He was lying there, smug as you please, not remembering the events that even now unfolded in her mind with fresh, stinging clarity.
The warmth of Crixus’s arm burned her skin, and she could no longer share the space he occupied. She found her feet and walked away, arms hugging her torso.
“75 B.C.E.?” Vinnie prompted. “The Festival of Saturnalia?”
“Come on.” Crixus scraped to his feet and towered behind her, a living, breathing shadow. “No one remembers anything from a Saturnalia festival. That’s kind of the point.”
“Not even when your record as an undefeated gladiator came to a pale, pathetic end?”
His eyes darkened. Good.
“What the hell does that have to do with you?”
“What indeed?” Vinnie paced a circle around the demigod. He turned within it like the spoke of a wagon wheel, never giving her his back. “What did you do the night before that fateful fight?”
Watching him scour the banks of that foggy memory was nothing short of hilarious. A look of concentration was as at home on his arrogant face as the dead animal hat was on his head.
Vinnie indulged in an exasperated sigh. “The orgy?”
“Yeah, but which one?”
Vinnie’s eyes rolled heavenward toward a power she no longer believed in for strength it would not provide her. “The one where you found a woman with long red hair sitting alone and convinced her to come to your quarters?”
Crixus’s forehead creased.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” Vinnie groaned. “It happened right down there! In the Basilica Julia! I told you what I was, and that I’d never slept with an immortal before, and you told me it would change my life, and I told you I didn’t want my life changed, and you told me that you were kidding, and mostly you just meant that your cock was huge, and—”
“Holy shit. That was you?” Recognition spread across his features like the first fingers of dawn, quickly chased by clouds of irritation. “You drained me! You were the one who lost me that match!”
Three more sips of the awful violin player, and Vinnie might have had the strength to slap him. “After what you did, you’re honestly going to stand here and bitch about a little gladiatorial match?”
“What do you mean, after what I did? Those weren’t sounds of protest you were making when I fucked your brains out, as I remember.”
“You soulmated me, you son of a bitch!” The accusation echoed through the Forum’s empty streets louder than Vinnie would have liked. A ghost cry among ghost buildings. The admission of her wounded pride.
“I did what?”
The look of genuine confusion and shock on his face drained a measure of poison from the pocket brewing in Vinnie’s chest.
“You soulmated me. Imprinted me. Scarred me. Lit the twin flames. Took part of me and left part of you.”
“I don’t understand.” Crixus lifted his hand as if to scratch his head, felt the hat, and shuddered.
Moritasgus squeaked a muffled protest.
“You want a visual aid? I’m sure I could scare up a couple mimes to act it out for you.”
Crixus sat down hard. “That’s not possible. I’ve been with thousands of immortals. Tens of thousands—”
“Shockingly, this line of defense is not helping me hate you less.”
“I didn’t even know soulmating was a thing.”
“That’s because you come from a line of self-indulgent, hedonistic bastard offspring who are scarcely worthy to be described as gods. They hold nothing sacred save their own pleasure.”
“And you wonder why they don’t like you.”
“I don’t wonder,” Vinnie said. “I don’t care.”
Crixus looked up at her from his seat in the grass. “Self-deception doesn’t look good on you, Vinnie.”
“Big words for a man wearing a badger hat.”
“A badger hat I have to wear to keep you from blowing me the fuck up.”
“Excuse me for being a little peeved about having my soul torn in half for the last two thousand years.”
“But I didn’t even know that I had done it,” Crixus insisted.
“And that’s supposed to comfort me?” Vinnie could feel the last of her strength surging upward, flooding her limbs in a heady rush. She should stop. But these words had waited for too long. They had gathered the strength of a biblical plague, rising to blot out the sky with a black rage borne of ages. “You stole a piece of my soul. You made a void in me and took from me the only thing that could fill it. You altered my destiny. You changed me. And you remember nothing!”
Crickets chirred into the silence left by the absence of her voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“No,” Vinnie said. “You’re not. You don’t even know what that word means. You’ve plowed your way through life’s field one ass at a time while I watched my kind fade into nothing. You’ve laughed while I wept and played God while I created. So don’t tell me you’re sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I met you. I’m sorry your deluded superiors think that I have something to answer for in the world they’ve driven to ruin. But most of all, I’m sorry I look at your face and still see something I—”
She fell.
The ground did not rush up to meet her in a last embrace. It had been blocked by Crixus, whose arms caught her. Held her. Lowered her gently to the warm earth.
“Vinnie?” The frantic note in his voice was a cool salve for a wound too large to heal. “What’s wrong? What happened?”
“You,” she whispered. Her eyelids lowered, a shroud of black silk descending over this loud world full of empty people.
Oblivion arrived with the easy smile of an old friend.
*****
The weight of Vinnie’s head was heavy in Crixus’s hand, heavier than the leaden lump dead center in his chest.
What had he done?
This was not a question he would have asked himself even six months ago, and never in the thousands of years that preceded it. There was only what he wanted, and how to get it. The means didn’t matter to him nearly as much as the end.
And the end had always been for his benefit.
But that had been before. Before Matilda, whose tears stung him like acid, and whose rejection had cracked open his ribs and left his heart a bleeding target. It was a pain altogether new to him, much like the sensation he experienced looking down into Lavinia’s face, her lips blanched pale.
“What’s happening to her?”
Crixus repeated the question several times before remembering that the badger would be unable to answer. He tore off the strip of tape to the protest of a startled howl.
“My snout has been denuded,” Moritasgus whined. “I can’t possibly answer questions when I look so ridiculous.”
“You’re a badger hat! You’ve never not looked ridiculous!”
“Oh sure, rub it in. If I still had vertebrae, I would—”
“Just tell me what’s wrong with her, you little shit!”
“Now we’re back to the name-calling? My motivation to assist you is decreasing at a most rapid rate, turd-pig.”
“Cookies!” Crixus shouted. “I will get you a whole Girl Scout troop worth of cookies if you help me.”
“As long as they are not of the variety that is both thin and flavored of mint. They are offensive to my sight.”
“Yes, fine, whatever you want. Just tell me what’s wrong with her.”
“She’s starving, of course. Weakened to the point of fading. You could take her to Hades right now, if you wish. She can no longer fight you. And with what Calliope has planned for her, that is probably for the best.”
“What does Calliope have planned?”
“Gladiator, there aren’t enough cookies in the world for you to buy this information from me. Let me just say that be
ing made into a hat is a fate many would have envied me.”
Crixus eased Vinnie’s head onto his lap and looked down at the dark lashes feathered against her creamy cheeks. He pressed his hand against the swell of her breasts and felt the dulling pulse of her immortal heart recede from his palm.
Life was leaving her. He couldn’t bear the thought of the flame in her eyes dying away. All that vibrant energy winking out without a whisper.
“Do something,” Crixus ordered. “Heal her.”
“Ahh, but it is not I who must heal her, but you.” The tiny points of one claw tapped Crixus between the eyes. He resisted the urge to tear the hat from his head and stomp it down to Hades.
“How?”
“Feed her.”
A ragged breath filled Crixus’s lungs. He leaned close enough to feel the cool silk of her forehead beneath his lips.
“You’ll have to take me off for this bit,” the badger said. “She can’t drain your energy through me.”
The demigod closed his eyes and let remembered shouts from the Coliseum fill his ears. He had been a warrior once, and willing to die a warrior’s death. He advanced to the sword and the spear with metal in his spine and fire in his heart. The sand would be wet with blood at the close of every day, either his or his opponent’s. Never had this knowledge kept him cowering behind the gate.
He would not cower now.
Night air was cold on Crixus’s forehead where the fur had made him sweat. The hat fell away, tossed from arm’s reach with the bravery of the damned.
An equally reckless advance brought his lips to hers.
Crixus would have sooner believed one of Zeus’s errant lightning bolts had split his head wide open than a kiss would be capable of producing this.
He remembered. As clearly as if the Fates had wound his long life back onto the spool, and he was within his first thirty years on Earth. Aware of what he was, but too ignorant to know what it meant. Unbeatable. Unbeaten. Unstoppable.
Yet for all that had changed, the sensation remained constant.
Lust then. Lust now.
Innocence he had thought feigned. Just another coquettish ploy designed to spark the desire that needed no assistance to burn beyond his control.
Her laugh skipping through the courtyard as she ran and he gave chase.
Her mouth yielding to his hungry exploration, her back against the marble.
How she had dissolved like sugar in his arms when the mid-December rain pounded down on their naked, chilled skin. The smell of her arousal mixed with the wet concrete. His knees going weak as she sheathed him in silk.
The same electric ebb and flow crackled between them on the summer air, fusing their lips with heat.
Vinnie’s body jerked under his touch, rising beneath his palms like they were the paddles of a defibrillator. Her hands swung up and gripped his hair, pulling him closer as she drank from him. Slowly at first, then in hungry, urgent strokes, she tasted him, teased him, tempted him.
She broke the kiss long before he was ready. Her hands planted on his chest, shoving him away from her. The storm inside him ceased as quickly as it had begun. He was in the eye of a tornado and filled with the unnatural, thick calm of impending destruction.
“No,” she growled. She got as far as an old tree by the older brick palace wall, still weak, half walking, half leaning.
Crixus spun her around to face him.
“I don’t want this.” She tried, and failed, to slip around him. “I don’t want you.”
“Liar,” he said.
Her hand flew to slap his face, but he caught her by the wrist and pressed the flat of her palm against his chest. Her touch was cold through the fabric of his shirt.
Fingers laced with hers, he drove her hand down. Down the ridges of his abdominal muscles. Down to the hem of his T-shirt. He lifted it, never breaking eye contact, and placed her chilly hand on his bare skin.
“Take what you need,” he said.
She snatched her hand away. “I need nothing from you.”
Crixus took a step toward her, backing her into the tree. “I’m not a painter. I don’t sculpt stone, or sing songs, or pluck strings. But what I have to give is yours to take.” He took her cupped palm and pressed it against his blood-heavy cock. “All of it.”
“Oh, please.” Vinnie wiped her hand on her skirt. “Vitamin D is vitamin D. You can find it in any old mackerel.”
“Vitamin what?”
“Dick. It’s painfully easy to come by. Just like arrogant demigods. Keep it in your pants, Junior.” She patted the front of his jeans. “I’ll pass.”
Any one of a thousand things could have changed, and what happened next might not have happened at all.
If she hadn’t been wearing a skirt.
If she hadn’t been barefoot.
If she hadn’t driven her knee into his groin.
If she hadn’t missed.
The shearing pain doubled Crixus over in a reflexive jerk and they head-butted each other with staggering force. They both dropped to the ground at the base of the tree, swearing.
And Vinnie tried to run.
Chapter Eight
Vinnie should have seen it coming, she supposed. When a lion is in the bushes, common sense recommended pretty much any other path than the one she had chosen. Which is to say, poking a stick in the lion’s eye and blowing a raspberry.
No sooner had she scrambled to her feet when the demigod’s hand closed over her ankle. She went to the ground in a heap of skirts with one effortless tug. His full weight came down upon her back, pinning her to the earth, grass itchy and damp with dew beneath her cheek.
“Let me go!” The more she squirmed, the more insistent the throbbing heat pressed against the small of her back became. What little energy she had drained from him surged through her veins as rage.
“No.” Crixus’s voice was hot in her ear. His hands clamped down on her wrists, forcing them away from her body, but more important, from his.
Dirt collected under her fingernails as she clawed the earth for leverage. Her traitorous body undulated against his sex, wringing a strangled cry from him. His grip tightened on her as he grunted a curse into her hair.
“I wonder if you still fuck as hard as you fight,” Vinnie purred. An invitation.
He parted her thighs with his knee and forced them apart, pushing his sex against her upturned ass. “Harder.”
“Prove it.”
The dare produced the desired effect. He released her hands and seized his zipper, giving her just enough time to roll beneath him and kick out hard.
She made it to her knees this time.
Unfortunately, they were the first things to go when Crixus pulled them out from under her in a swift takedown befitting the Circus in the city sparkling below.
“Fucking gladiators,” she snarled. She lunged for his neck, but only caught handfuls of his T-shirt. When he tore her fists away, the shirt ripped straight down the middle, revealing the bronze expanse of his pectoral and abdominal muscles.
Vinnie swallowed a sudden rush of saliva that seemed to liquefy at her center and reappear between her legs.
His chest rose and fell with rapid breaths from their struggle. And Vinnie knew she wanted to see him breathe harder. Wanted to see that body covered in sweat, shaking with the need for release. Wanted to feel her name echo through that chest as she bled him of stamina.
She wanted to hear him scream.
Cry.
Beg.
“Fuck me,” she demanded, shucking the remnants of his shirt from his broad shoulders. Her mouth found his neck, biting, licking, sucking the smooth, salty skin.
His breath came in gasps. “I feel like…this is a trap.”
Working quickly, she freed him from his jeans and wrapped her fingers around the satin and steel she discovered. “The only thing I want to trap is this cock inside my hot, wet—”
The growl that erupted from his throat was something between a warning and a promi
se. Crixus grabbed her skirt and tore it straight up the middle. The sound of it yielding to him leveled Vinnie with a wave of dizzying lust that ended with the demigod inside her.
Vinnie’s back bowed from the pleasure. A line of pure, ecstatic heat beginning at the base of her spine and sweeping upward to burst from her mouth as a note of pleading.
Life, his life, singing through her veins in a draught so pure, so primal, she nearly wept with the savage beauty of it.
His hands pushed beneath her tank top, exposing her breasts to the night air. He filled his palms with them, brushed his thumbs over her stiff, aching nipples, then lowered his mouth to take first one, then the other between his lips.
She threaded her fingers into his hair as his tongue worked around the tight bud. Vinnie knew he could make her come this way—with only the pressure of him inside her and that wicked mouth on her.
But she wasn’t ready. Not yet.
“Enough,” she gasped.
He sucked harder, nipping the tender flesh with his teeth.
Her fingers fisted in his hair and she jerked hard enough to bring the gladiator’s head upright.
Teeth clenched, Crixus drove himself deeper in reply. Vinnie’s torso bucked from the ground and he captured her neck, hand clasped below her chin, fingers digging into her jaw.
“It’s enough when I say it’s enough,” the gladiator said.
He kissed her then, as much as an act so invasive could be called a kiss. His tongue slid between her lips, claiming her mouth with bruising force. His hand slipped behind her head to tangle in her hair, pulling her head back as she had his, opening her mouth to him.
Vinnie bit down on his tongue. His anger and ardor mixed like jet fuel in her blood. The more she took in, the more she wanted. He was filling her with a power only equaled by her need for it.
And he wanted to give it to her.
She drank the knowledge from his thoughts. The undercurrent of violence in him. His need for action without consequence. Delicious force tinged with the sour taint of fear. His fear of hurting her. His fear of loving and losing.
Again.
It was the again she took issue with. That a mortal woman dared stray into his thoughts while he yet swelled inside her. That he held back because of fear bred into him by the loss.
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