Thawed Gladiator: Sulla (Awakened From the Ice #9)

Prologue

Two thousand years ago, fourteen men, gladiators and crew, were on a journey from Rome to Britannia. During roiling seas and endless storms, the ship sank, and the men were entombed in ice beneath the Norwegian Sea. They were meant to be forgotten—gladiators silenced by centuries.

But fate had other plans.

When archaeologist Laura Turner uncovered the lost ship Fortuna, she found more than a Roman vessel and the rumored chests of gold.

She found men—gladiators preserved in ice, still whole, still waiting.

With modern science and what the men quietly believe was a nudge from the Goddess Fortuna herself, those men woke again in a world they couldn’t begin to recognize.

Before their voyage, at the docks of Ostia, a priestess from the Temple of Fortuna performed a blessing.

She gave each man a ritual drink meant to “bind their fates to the wheel.” They believe—every one of them—that this is why they survived under the ice for two thousand years.

Fortuna isn’t a metaphor to them. She is part of their story.

Among those men was Sulla, their ludus master. Not the owner of the school where slave gladiators were trained to fight in the arenas, but the man who controlled it—who decided who trained, how they trained, who fought, who was punished… and how.

He was on that ship. He woke with the others.

Laura Turner gave the gladiators refuge—Sulla included. She created Second Chance Sanctuary in Missouri, a place where they could learn language, technology, and the fragile art of trust. A place where freedom was not a rumor, but a daily reality.

She did not know what Sulla had done.

The men waking beside him did.

They remembered the punishments. The fear. The control. The cruelty.

The others woke into second chances.

Sulla woke into consequence.