Gilene’s tears had dried, leaving only the remnants of their silvery tracks on her cheeks. She stretched under him, long legs entwining with his. A procession of emotions crossed her features, quick as lightning flashes. Azarion wished he could interpret each one, but they were gone as soon as they appeared.
“You’ve promised to send me home. I know now you are an honorable man, and I believe you. I’d ask one more boon of you.”
“Anything.”
“Invading armies don’t reserve their violence for their main target. The nearby villages and towns suffer it as well, their only offense their proximity to the city the army wants to destroy. If the Savatar succeed in reaching the capital, I ask that you remember Beroe and spare it. For my sake, and if not that, then to satisfy the wishes of anagacin.”
Was that all? he wondered. Nothing for herself or material goods for her family? Azarion brushed a kiss across her forehead. “I should have known you wouldn’t ask for silver or silk.”
“Those won’t do me much good when I stand in the Pit once more.”
The harsh reminder of what awaited her in a few months’ time made Azarion’s stomach twist. He hated the idea of her going through such an ordeal again, but she wasn’t his to keep, and her choice to return was hers alone. He could at least give her this one reassurance.
“I’ll see to it the Savatar leave Beroe in peace.” Her eyes closedin obvious relief. “Is that all, Gilene? Nothing more? I owe you much.” He’d give her all of the Krael Empire if she asked him, if it meant she might live her days among the Savatar.
“One more thing,” she said, and her smile was a sensual beckoning that drew him like a lodestone and set his heart to racing. “Show me what it is to truly be the concubine of Azarion Ataman.”
She drew his head down to hers, and Azarion was lost.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The last time Gilene had lain with a man was during the Rites of Spring the year before Azarion revealed his knowledge of her illusion. Then, it had been a quick rutting against a cell wall. She had counted the number of thrusts—four in total—before the gladiator finished with her and stumbled to his pallet to pass out from exhaustion or drink or both. Gilene spent the remainder of the night sitting in a corner, keeping an eye on the snoring heap.
Her cellmate never woke when the guards retrieved her the next morning. She didn’t remember his face, nor did she care about his fate.
Once more she lay with a Pit gladiator, but this time under the stars of the Stara Dragana instead of in a filthy cell, and she did so of her own free will. This man, once her adversary, would become her lover tonight, not her rapist. His face she’d remember, his fate she’d wonder about long after this interlude faded with time.
She kissed him, savoring the shape and feel of his lips as they slanted across hers. He rested heavy on her body, all lean muscle and wool tunic that tangled with her own garb as they shifted in their efforts to press closer to each other.
Gilene’s hands slid into his loose hair, fingers tightening against his scalp as she swept her tongue over his lower lip in a wordless command that he open to her. With a soft groan, Azarionacquiesced and welcomed her, returning her deep caress with one of his own. He tasted of the berries the servants had passed around after dinner and the imported wine purchased from the trade caravans on the Golden Serpent.
Her blood sizzled through her veins as strong as the fire she sometimes summoned to her fingertips at the feel of his erection pushing against her, the shallow thrusts of his hips matching the deeper penetration of his tongue in her mouth.
They ended the kiss on a mutual gasp, and Gilene smiled at the desire glittering in his eyes; surely a reflection of her own wanting. Her legs parted wider, settling him even harder between her spread thighs. She caressed the outside of his leg with her ankle and calf, bending a knee so that her foot rode the back of his thigh. “Is the Gladius Prime as good at pleasing a woman as he is at fighting a man?”
The wind caught her question and spun it away, but not before Azarion heard. His answering laughter was part chortle, part snort. “That depends on whom you ask,Agacin. The best way to know is to find out for yourself.” He punctuated his remark by nuzzling the underside of her jaw, planting a soft kiss there that made gooseflesh rise along her shoulders and arms.
She tilted her head, exposing more of her neck and the hollow of her throat to his caresses. Her hands busied themselves with shoving aside bits of his clothing, pushing his tunic up to expose his sides and back. His skin was hot beneath her palms, his muscular back flexing at her touch, skin twitching when her fingers glided over a ticklish spot along his ribs.
They exchanged numerous kisses, each one longer, deeper, more intense than the last until Gilene thought her heart would beat out of her chest. She stroked Azarion’s arms, mapping a pathover his back and shoulders, past the stitched wound inflicted by Karsas’s horse, down the dip of his spine to his buttocks. His hips thrust forward in reaction to her grip, and he gasped in her ear.
She echoed the sound when his hand burrowed under her skirts to stroke every expanse of skin he could reach. “Too many clothes,” he muttered.
Gilene heartily agreed and set to untying the laces that held his tunic closed at the neck. Azarion helped her, rising to shrug out of the garment before tossing it to the side. Bared to the waist, he knelt before her, bathed in moonlight. “Your turn,” he said softly.
She sat up and pulled off her own tunic, along with her trousers. Her shoes joined the growing heap of clothing. He had seen her nude before, once as she bathed, another while she changed clothes. The burn scars she wore as souvenirs from her fire summoning weren’t secrets to him. Even if they were, Gilene refused to hide behind her hands or her braids. Those scars were earned through tribulation and testaments to her will to survive, to offer mercy, and, in some small way, to throw the Empire’s cruelty back in its face. She wasn’t proud of the scars so much as she wasn’t ashamed of them. They were simply part of who she was.
Azarion’s eyes gleamed in the shadows, a dichotomy of bright and dark that obscured any emotion revealed there, but she heard it in his voice. “Agna blessed you with more than fire. I’ve never beheld a more beautiful woman.”
The way he looked at her now only validated that assertion, for Gilene of Beroe was neither beautiful nor ugly, only an ordinary woman with an extraordinary power that had been her bane since the day it manifested. Azarion gazed at her as if she were the sun.
If anyone was Agna-blessed with physical beauty, it was him. Even when she thought of him as her enemy and wished down agruesome fate on his head, a small part of her still recognized his allure even if her hatred of him made her immune to it.
She opened her arms. “I’m cold.”
He moved with startling speed, wrapping her in his arms and tumbling them both to the pallet. Gilene laughed and kissed him. In no time he was as naked as she, huddled under the blankets, skin to skin. She touched him everywhere she could reach, stroking every plane and angle, bulge of muscle, and the stiff length of his cock where it pressed the inside of her thigh. He thrust into her hand, her name a drawn-out groan on his lips.
He, in turn, coaxed out gentle gasps and pleas for more of his touch as he caressed her breasts, suckled their tips into his mouth, and tracked a path with his lips that followed his hands from her throat and across her belly, pausing at every sensitive spot that made her shiver in his arms. He lingered at her thighs, and Gilene held her breath, both curious and apprehensive at this unfamiliar manner of lovemaking.
