Chapter Thirty-One
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Making love to Julia beneath the waterfall was like making love to a naiad.
Alaric lost himself. Pressed her against the rock, his face buried in her neck and one hand tangled in the soaking weight of her hair as the water pounded his back and shoulders. She gave herself to him with intense abandon, her legs locking around his hips, dissolving into a trembling, glorious mess as he drove into her over and over. Every kiss, every caress, every thrust a message. Stay with me. Stay.
These were words he could not speak—not yet—but there were other ways to tell her.
* * *
Later Julia sat in the warming sun. Alaric lay beside her, watching her comb out her hair with her fingers. Julia had insisted on washing her clothes, and now she wore his tunic and nothing else, drowning in it as the daylight turned her unbound hair into shimmering fire.
She had a troubled look in her eyes. He didn’t like it.
Alaric sat up and dropped a kiss on her bare shoulder. “What are you thinking of?”
“Nothing in particular.”
She said it in that light, brittle tone that meant she was thinking of something, and it was eating at her. “I can tell when you’re lying, you know.” He moved her hair aside so he could kiss her neck. “Talk to me.”
“I’m terrified,” she said quietly. “When my brother finds out what we’ve done, he’ll be furious. You managed to stay alive in the face of Stilicho’s assassins, but what happens when he sends an army?” She was actually wringing her hands now, like a mourner at a funeral. “Have you thought about what will happen if he captures you?”
Alaric caught her hands in his to still them. “No. I haven’t thought of it.”
“Well, you ought to. My brother hates you already, but if he finds out you’ve married me—”
A broad grin spread across his face. That was more like it. Baseless worries for his welfare. He gathered her closer, breathing in the sun-warmed scent of her. “Let me worry about the Empire. Marrying you isn’t the worst thing I’ve done, and it isn’t the worst thing I will do.”
“Yes, but I’ve lived with them. I’ve seen what they do to people.” She looked up at him, stricken. “What if my brother does to you what he did to Cornelius? What then ?”
“Let him try. I’ve survived the arena before.”
He thought she knew that story. Everyone knew that story. Even so, blue-green eyes narrowed. “Tell me from the beginning.”
Alaric sighed. That stubborn set to her jaw told him she would not let this go. He couldn’t tell her about the Huns, about the camps by the river Danube. About being sold into slavery or the horrors of that time. The only place to start was in the arena.
“My parents had sold me into slavery,” he said matter-of-factly. “I killed my master and tried to run, but I didn’t get very far. I was fourteen.” He used her own trick, kept his voice light, as if it didn’t matter at all. “They threw me into the arena to be devoured by a beast for the amusement of a Roman crowd. It was no grand celebration, only a small execution of petty criminals and escaped slaves.”
He felt her breath catch beneath his hands. “What beast?”
“A bear.”
Julia flinched. “You should be dead.”
“You’re right. I was never supposed to walk out of there.” And he hadn’t, not really. It was still all too real to him. The heat of that sand. The sun hammering down like a punishment from the gods.
The bear had been skinny and starved. But still, he recognized it. Bears like that once roamed the thick pine woods on the island of his childhood. The god of his tribe had been a bear god. There had been a story of a legendary hunter meeting his fate at the claws of such a bear, a story his own father once thrilled him and his siblings with around the fire.
Fires all gone to ashes. Family all up in smoke with the sacred groves. Only the bear still lived, kept in a cage beneath the arena and starved.
“I was never supposed to kill it. The Romans expected me to die. And my people would have called that courageous.”
That bear was still sharp in his mind. The way it blinked in the sunlight, as if it had been in the dark a long time, hungry and blind, wanting only to eat and stretch its limbs in the light for a while, free of its cage.
In the beginning, Alaric had not known how to tell her this story. But once he started, he couldn’t stop. Beneath the crowd’s murmur, he heard the slaughtered gods of his people. The voices of his dead family. Let the bear have you , they whispered. It is an honorable death. A right death. Go bravely toward it and join us here where you belong.
Thorismund would have let the bear have him rather than harm it. But he’d been only fourteen, and he didn’t know how to die.
And so he’d chosen the coward’s way. His foot bumped something long and heavy under the sand and he’d picked it up. He’d lifted the spear and killed the bear so that he might live.
The story ended and Alaric felt as if he’d just fought some battle. Meanwhile, Julia had gone still in his arms. She was weeping openly, and a rush of tenderness filled him. “Ah, Julia,” he whispered, moved beyond measure. “You mustn’t fear. I am harder to kill than your Cornelius.”
Julia hugged him fiercely. “I know. But I’d go back to Honorius a hundred times rather than give him the chance to hurt you.”
She cared for him. Suddenly Alaric couldn’t breathe around the elation rising in his chest.
He held her close. He understood this fear, the fierce, unending worry that someone would take her from him. If that was how she felt about him as well—“Don’t think you can save me that way,” he said hoarsely. “Stilicho will never stop coming, whether you return to them or not. The things I’ve done demand an answer. But I chose this. I made my choice in Ravenna.”
Her answering smile was the sun coming up. “So did I.”
When he kissed her he could almost believe there was nothing else to life than this—the mountains, the waterfall, and this woman who tasted of sunshine and roses.
“Alaric.” She whispered it against his throat. “What is that?”
Down below, he saw a dust cloud rising up from the valley, high above the trees.