Chapter 34
Chapter thirty-four
Marco: Fatal Vow
Robin’s barely left my side all this last week, ever since I scooped him off the floor outside Evander’s surgery and brought him home with me.
He didn’t argue, or fight with me to stay in the dungeon that night, to keep up appearances. He came broken and exhausted, and like he’d left a piece of himself there.
Every day it’s been all I can do to try to rebuild him. Us.
We go back there each morning, of course we do.
There’s work to be done, matches, besides our own, to prepare for.
But we’re done sneaking around, keeping this a secret from the men.
It doesn’t matter anymore what the remaining few think, or what the guards might say, because they all know it can’t last.
This time tomorrow, one of us will be dead.
Our last remaining hours are to be spent at the villa, just like every other spare moment has been.
A rotation of meals taken together, baths where I hold him close and while away hours in steamy serenity.
Nights here he’s mine and I’m his. Where, in the dark safety of our own room, I can tell him all the things I wish I’d told him from the start.
All that time we wasted. And now it’s almost gone.
Today, lying on my lawn as if we’ll both see this world again, it’s me and Robin, and this vast blue sky that’s so hard to imagine stretching over Atrea too.
Hard to imagine this is the same sun that beats down upon that lost land.
Harder even to think that one week from now I could be standing on its shores again.
Seeing my mother, my father, my brother.
How they must have aged. How tall Lucas must be. Robin says he grew almost as tall as me. My little baby brother.
Yet even as my heart breaks for them, for the lines the misery of my loss must have etched into my parents’ faces, that same idea turns over in the back of my mind: what if it wasn’t Robin I were to face tomorrow? Would I stay if I won? Could I stand four more years?
I could teach Robin everything I know in that time. I could study the men he’s to kill, help him learn their weaknesses, help him fight his way through until he’s free too. I could get a job as a guard at the dungeon, see him every day.
At night, Evander could let me in, take me to him.
I wonder, could I handle it? Four more years of the dark of that dungeon. Could I bear to never see the sun under my own terms in all that time?
But when Robin shifts his head in my lap, when the folds of golden hair splay across my hand, I’m sure, in my heart, he is all the sunshine I need. That I’ll ever need.
My soul wants to cry out at how unfair it is. But it’s simply life. There is no fair or unfair. There is just fate and where it sweeps you, and the bitter knowledge that nothing, for as long as I live, will be so precious as these last few moments with Robin.
His eyes follow white clouds through long, delicate lashes, and his lips are as soft and fresh as a new dawn. But his brow’s dark.
Why wouldn’t it be? We both know what’s coming. Yet nothing’s changed. Not since I combed his beautiful hair on the floor of the gym. Not since he stood before the Emperor in that grand ballroom and blocked his path, protected me from him. Not since he held me down and claimed me as his.
It was always Robin. It was always going to be Robin.
Star-crossed.
I touch fingertips to his brow, smoothing it, and he starts, as if he’d been too deep in thought to realize where we were.
“Are you worried about Cas?” I ask him.
Even after all the effort Evander’s taken to save him, Cas is likely to die today. He took a fever a few days back, and Evander’s watching him round the clock. Robin’s begged him to call us to the dungeon if it looks irretrievable.
“I am,” Robin says. “Though he’ll be better off if he passes, most likely. He won’t have to deal with this place anymore.”
My heart goes out to him, tight with the hard edge of his speech. If he kills me tomorrow, that’s two losses in as many days. The two people closest to him. And after that, he has no choice but to fight on, for Esme.
She’s down at the pond, splashing with Maria, perfectly ignorant of our entwined fate.
Robin couldn’t stand to tell her. His eyes settle on her now, as if he’s thinking all the same thoughts I am.
“Marco,” he says softly.
I let my fingers glide across his cheek, savoring the last touch of him. But the emotion quickly becomes too much, the knowledge it’s the end, so I dig my hand into the grass instead. “What is it?”
“I need to ask you something.”
The ensuing silence is a long lead-in for a simple question. So it’s not simple, then. I say nothing, wait for him.
He takes his time, perhaps trying to stop the break in his voice that comes with the words regardless. “You know I love you.”
Tears cloud my vision, and I blink hard, look away, try to get rid of them. “I love you,” I tell him softly.
He rolls over, away, not looking at me, head on my outstretched legs and eyes on the pond. His fingers draw small circles on my skin. “What’s happened to us is…” He trails off.
I soothe him as best I can, running my fingers through his soft hair, folds and folds of wheaten silk.
“Tomorrow,” he says quietly, “after the game, you’ll be a free man.”
The words grab me at the throat. “I can’t talk about this. I don’t want to imagine it. Robin, I can’t think of walking out of there…”
His hand tightens on my leg, fingertips sinking into flesh. “You’re going to have to. Because you’re all the chance at safety she’ll ever get.”
My gaze shifts to Esme, smiling, sparkling drops of water clinging to her hair, just the way they cling to Robin’s in the bath. “You’re going home to her. You have to believe that. So you can fight.”
“No. Marco, listen…” He falls quiet again, then in slow and measured speech, “I don’t want you to have to kill me.”
I almost laugh at how ridiculous the comment is, considering what’s about to happen. “I don’t want that either. Robin, why are you saying this?”
“Because it’s not… It’s not killing me, or… it’s not murder… if… if I want you to do it.”
My hand stills in his hair, all the softness suddenly like so many grains of sand slipping through my fingers. “No.”
He presses a palm to the earth, pushes himself up, and swivels around to face me. His eyes are clear, no reflection of the hazy mess mine must be. “It’s Deathball.”
Before I know it, I’ve shoved him away, made for the house, searching through the corridors of the villa for some cool, or some peace, or something…
Some place that isn’t there with him, under the open sky, watching us, watching Atrea, or here in this city, these walls forever pressing down and down on us, always and again and never, ever, one breath of fresh air.
He catches my wrist, pulls me around, and I don’t even have the strength to fight. I let him. I let him take my cheek in his hand, hold me by the hip, and look deep into my eyes. “One of us has to die. You know that. Two men enter, only one leaves.”
“You can’t ask me to do that.”
“I can. I can, because Marco, I love you. I love you, and you’re the only man I have ever loved, or will ever love. You’re the only man I would trust to do this.”
“To kill you in cold blood? Like a rabid dog?” I shout at him.
But his voice stays calm. Soft. “To take Esme home. Please. I need you to get her out of this city. I need her to have a chance at life. One I never got.”
My words come sharp through gritted teeth. “If you want to take her home, then fight me.”
But he comes back brutally gentle. “I know it’s different for you. I know that in your head, you’d give me a good death. A warrior’s death. You’d call it fair because I attacked you. Because I would have killed you if I could.”
His hand falls on my chest so softly the first tear breaks free, rolls down my cheek, and lands on his fingertips. “If I injure you too badly tomorrow, before I die, what happens next? What if you’re like Cas, and a week from now, you’re gone too? What happens to her? What happens to Maria?”
I snatch his hand up, enfold it against my heart. “Then you fight, and you take them home yourself.”
“Marco, my love.” He watches our two hands, his eyelashes wet. “If I kill you, they will send me back to the dungeon. And you will be gone. And they will sell her again.”
I turn my head away because I know he’s right. But I protest, “Not if you were captain—”
“If I were captain, I think I would do all the things you have done and more to keep her safe.” There’s a dark earnestness in his eyes when he looks up.
A black sadness that winds its way around my heart.
That absolves me, angers me, makes me twice as protective of him.
And I think, just for a moment, maybe it’s better this way.
Maybe I would rather murder him with my own two hands than know that every day he lives with that.
“There is no guarantee I’d be captain, even if I survived. What if it’s Max?”
“He wouldn’t hurt her. He’s an asshole, but he wouldn’t hurt her.”
“Marco, what if it’s Jason? What if he’s got my sister? And I’m in the dungeon? Marco, I…” He breaks off, a tremor running through his fingers. “You’re free. Tomorrow, after the game, if you win, you’re free. You can take her out of here.”
“Not at that cost.”
“Yes, at that cost. And it’s a small one. Marco, you’ve fought for this. You’ve killed for years. You’ve built a bridge out of here with the blood and bones of every man you had to murder. And now it’s yours. Now you get to go home.”
I shake my head, tears running down my cheeks. Tears that Robin smooths away with the pad of his thumb. “It’s just one more,” he says softly. “I’m the final stepping stone.”
I can’t respond to him. Can’t find the breath to make a sound.
So he says, “Think of your family. Think of them waiting for you. They need you to fight. You need to go home. Please do this for me.”