Chapter Forty-One
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Julia huddled on the floor of her cell and listened to the battle raging outside. By now the sounds should be familiar—the screams and shouts of men. The clash of weapons and the whirring hiss of arrows. But she was still not used to it. Sometimes it seemed as if the battle might be going on right outside her door. Julia did not dare look out the windows.
The guards outside were Lucretia’s. The way they’d looked at her when they’d shoved her into the cell—the disgusting things they’d said—Julia shuddered to think what they’d do to her if Lucretia won this battle. Somehow Julia doubted the other woman would stop them from acting on their worst impulses.
But if Alaric won, perhaps her fate would be worse.
Julia pressed her hands to her eyes. She had never seen him look at her with such menace—such scorching contempt. He’s been angry with me before , she told herself. Surely he’ll see that I was only trying to save his life.
The light stretched long and red across the flagstone floor.
* * *
Somehow she slept, her back to the cold stone wall.
She woke to a massive crash outside her cell. Metal clashing against metal. Something hit the door with a thud that seemed to shake the building. Then—a muffled groan. A red pool spread beneath the door.
Julia scrambled to her feet just as the door banged open. A dark figure stood framed in the low light, his sword held low and bare, blood dripping from its tip. Blue eyes blazing out of the dark.
“Hello, wife.”
* * *
Alaric stepped over the still-warm corpses of the guards and halted on the threshold, shoving his sword back into its scabbard. Julia stood in the center of the room, red hair loose down her back, her nightdress slipping off one pale, silken shoulder.
The hole in his chest still burned.
Even now, knowing how she’d betrayed him, she still held that supernatural pull over him. He ached to hold her, to protect her. To lose himself in her. The air tasted of ash and murder. A distance away, by the gate, he could hear the sounds of battle. He didn’t give a damn. The whole citadel could go up in flames around him and he would let it burn.
“Alaric. You’re hurt.” Her eyes traveled, with a credible impression of horror, from his battered face to the rest of him, and now she was rushing toward him, the consummate actress, her hands flat on his stomach. Burning their own shape into his skin. “Let me—”
He curled a hand around her throat and backed her up against the wall.
“Give me one good reason to let you live.”
A defiant half smile lifted her lips and suddenly the pretense of concern was gone. “You think I haven’t been ready to die? Whatever you do to me, it would be a mercy compared to what my brother would do.”
“Don’t be so sure.” His hand tightened convulsively around her neck, his eyes fixed on her mouth, on the racing butterfly pulse at the base of her throat. He wanted to crush her tight in his arms and howl like an animal. To send her so far from him that not even the stars could find her. He’d lost his bleeding mind .
“I never turned on you. Do you not see that? I was trying to save your life .”
“Did you let the Romans into the city to save my life as well?” His thumb traced the outline of her red lips; he felt her pulse accelerate under his hands. “Lie to me, Julia.”
“ I’m not lying. I let Lucretia in to help with the aqueduct. I did it for you , Alaric—”
He leaned in, close enough to smell roses and sweat and beneath it the riot of her fear. Already he’d had enough of her lies. “I changed my mind,” he muttered. “Shut up.”
Then he took her mouth. The force of his kiss drove her against the wall. He felt her grunt, felt the shock of her collision with the hard stone at her back. He kissed her savagely, plundering her mouth like he’d plunder a city, his other hand clenched hard in the wealth of her hair.
Julia met him in his rage. This was not love; it was war . She ripped at his shirt, unmindful of his wounds, tearing at his skin in her rush to get it off him. When she bit down on his lip, lust and rage ripped through him, made his vision go black with it. He needed her fast. Needed her now , up against this wall. His control rode on a knife edge, but if he let her go, he’d drown.
She was cursing him now. In Latin and Hunnic and Gothic, everything she’d learned on the road, her nails digging into his scalp. He laughed darkly and pulled down the neck of her dress; took her breasts until she was arching up into his mouth, her head thrown back and gasping his name. When he rose to his full height and lifted her up against the wall, her thighs in his hard grip, she was wet as a river.
He drove all the way into her in one single, brutal thrust. Her back arched, her eyelids fluttering, and her hot little mouth kept up its cursing. Gods , he couldn’t get enough of her; he’d never get enough of her even as he knew—some detached, dark part of him knew—that she would destroy him. He didn’t care about that, only about battering down every defense she had until she was gasping and shuddering. “ Harder , you bastard,” she whispered, all smoke and sex, earth and ash and his own ruin. He answered her with everything, all he had entirely until she was trembling around him, her nails digging convulsively into the skin of his shoulders as he drove himself over and over into her hot, shuddering tightness.
When he came in her, it nearly killed him. The pleasure nearly blacked out the world.
When it was over, he stood holding her against the wall for a long moment, their foreheads pressed together, their breaths mingling in the dim light of the siege fire. His trousers were barely undone in his terrible, world-wrecking haste. A ruinous urge filled him to lean in and kiss her long and sweet and soft. To swear his own life for hers.
This woman was poison.
Abruptly he let her down. He turned to arrange himself, and when he turned back, she was watching him with green eyes gleaming like a trapped animal.
“Can we talk?”
“No, woman. I will talk and you will listen,” he said. “In the next few hours, I will have this city back. You are my wife and you will stay my wife. Once I get a child out of you, I’ll put you in the furthest tower I can find and forget you ever existed.”
A calm, cold mask descended over her, sleek as marble. “Suit yourself,” she said, with perfect, chilling indifference. “Better there be no lies about what is between us, don’t you think?”
Of course I acted like I loved him. Did you see how close his men were listening?
Alaric drew a breath. She knew exactly how to play on his emotions. Even now, if he took her again, he’d be lost.
He didn’t have to belong to her. He would make of his heart a walled city. “Yes. Far better.” He stepped over the threshold, over the bodies of the two men he’d killed to get to her, shutting the door behind him. Then he walked into the burning citadel.
Anywhere was safer than in here.
* * *
When the sun rose, Julia knew that Alaric had taken back the citadel.
From the single window she saw the sunrise over the ravaged rooftops, over a new line of bodies high on the outer wall. Ten or so Roman centurions, still wearing their gleaming armor. And the one on the end was Lucretia. She had been hoisted up on a pole with the others, bare feet dangling above stone, staring bent-necked and blind up at the sky. Someone had cut her throat.
There was no question who Noricum belonged to now. The dread barbarian who had paced the battle line outside Milan, outside Verona, catapulting corpses into the Roman cities. The man he had been all along. Alaric of the Goths.
Her legs gave out beneath her and she sank to the cold floor. Lucretia could have been a hostage, used to barter their way out of a siege. Instead Alaric had simply cut her throat and hung her up there, facing the west, the direction Roman reinforcements would come from. A dare, thrown in the Romans’ teeth.
She had a terrible suspicion he would do the same to her when Stilicho came for her.
Julia let her fingertips graze the tender skin of her throat and a dark thrill shot down her spine. Alaric had fucked her hard against the wall, with a violence she’d barely withstood. Her orgasm had come like a world-ending cataclysm. Her calves were still viciously sore from the cramping.
Wine and opium held no grip on her like he did. He was an addiction, a dark thing in her blood she could not root out.
Lucretia had been right. Love ruined her. That was ruin.
Julia let out a low sob. She had thought she could prove herself to him and make him love her, make him trust her. She’d forgotten what he was. A barbarian to the core, as brutal as he’d always been. He’d never loved her, had never thought to love her.
Once I get a child out of you, I’ll put you in the furthest tower I can find and forget you ever existed.
So he had meant those harsh words after all, in his speech on the first day they’d arrived. She was simply a means to an end for him. Her greatest fears had come true—to be shunted to the side, forced to live a stilted, proscribed life, cut off from joy or freedom. Imprisoned. It had been exactly why she hadn’t wanted Olympius. What difference between that life and this one?
I love him. That’s what’s different. Loving Alaric made everything so much worse.
* * *
All day, Julia waited in agony, pacing ruts into the floor of her cell. Alaric didn’t come.
It was night before the door opened. She turned from the window, her stomach flipping convulsively, her knees suddenly weak with longing and fear and need.
But it wasn’t Alaric. Bromios stood in the doorway, dark circles under his eyes. “Julia. Thank the gods you’re still alive. Listen, the city is back under Alaric’s control. They’re celebrating on the parade grounds. The gates are unwatched and refugees are streaming out in droves. If you’re going to go, it must be now .”
“I can’t just leave—this is my kingdom.” She sucked in a breath. “Where would I go?”
“Are you really this foolish?” Bromios cursed. “I watched Alaric cut Lucretia’s throat himself. How long do you think it’ll be before it’s you up on that wall?”
He was looking at her with pity. Pity. It was this that broke her.
Briefly Bromios touched her face. She had always known, deep down, what he was; there was no relationship with him that was not transactional. But there was fondness in his eyes now, even affection. “I am sorry that this did not turn out as you hoped.”
She shut her eyes. Behind her lids, she throttled her love until it was dead.
“Me too,” she said quietly. “Thank you. You have been a good friend.”
He thrust a bundle into her arms. Clothes—a man’s tunic and trousers, sturdy boots and—by the gods—Alaric’s old cloak. There was a sack of food and a waterskin, the pouch Julia had carried all this way, with Calthrax’s finger-bone flute in it. Here was even the small knife Horsa had given her, shoved into one of the boots.
“I raided your old bedroom. Change your clothes and hurry,” Bromios said grimly. “I will cause a distraction.”
* * *
Alaric slept badly— badly meaning not at all . There was violence in him when he went to sleep, and he woke at war with himself. The air in his war tent was hot and close; the place had become a torture chamber.
He ached for her.
Alaric rose, pulled on trousers, and thrust aside the hide flap, striding into the airless night. He turned his eye toward the west, the direction where Lucretia had assured him her husband would come, just before he’d cut her throat. He and the Roman settlement had lived in uneasy coexistence for too long. Now the first thing that Roman general saw would be his wife up on that wall. Let there be no pretense of coexistence now.
Alaric knew he should be watching for the dust that would rise from five thousand horses striking hooves to the bare earth. But instead his gaze kept going toward the rooftop of Julia’s manor house. Of course she’d betrayed him. She was Theodosius’s daughter, after all. She had only done what was in her nature to do.
His body was tight with need. Healers had put salve to his burn, but it did nothing to ease the vicious sting of it. And there could be no salve for Julia’s betrayal. No salve to ease a lifetime of sleepless nights, wracked with guilt and hate and reckless want. No salve but her.
He could stand this no longer. He needed her again.
It didn’t have to be more than sex. It wasn’t more than sex, he told himself. He’d get her with child, and then he’d be done with her. It wasn’t love; it was pure utilitarian need.
He needed to know if it was making her mad too.
Of course not , said Calthrax, the dark shadow dogging his steps. She enspelled you.
“I don’t give a fuck if she did.” He hadn’t stopped feeling her nails digging into his skin. Her little white teeth at his throat. He hadn’t stopped feeling her hot clenching passage closing around him, drawing him deeper, even as she cursed him out. In bed there were no walls between them. At least there was that.
His hands clenched into fists. What need had he for a kingdom? He could put her before him on Hannibal’s back and ride out of here now. Before dawn. Go quickly, before anyone knew they were gone. And then he could sate his addiction for her in peace.
He was halfway down the hill before he saw the flames rising from the roof of Julia’s prison.
* * *
By the time he got to the building, flames had swallowed the roof and billowed out of every window. One of the guards ran out of the smoke, his face red from the heat. “We could not get to her,” he said hoarsely. “The fire grew too fast, and—”
Alaric barely heard him. He had locked her in there. He’d shut the door himself.
A roaring sound filled his ears.
His mind was full of Julia. Julia red-haired and laughing, dancing with Berig at Brisca’s fire. Julia standing proud and fierce before his axes. Julia in the mountains, lying flushed beneath him as he begged her never to leave him. Julia with ink smudges on her cheeks and her eyes bright, entrusting him with her grand vision for his city. Their people. His woman. He could not let it end like this. Not when the last words he’d said to her were full of hate.
Ataulf was at his back, pulling him away from his headlong plunge toward the fire. “You fucking idiot. She’s dead already,” he was screaming. “Do you want to die with her?”
Alaric jerked himself out of Ataulf’s grip and ran forward into all that heat and light, his seax drawn as if he could beat back death with it.