“Magnificent.” The voice shattered her thoughts, bringing the maddening hum of the room back into full volume.
“I’ve never been so close to someone about to die.” The woman moved to the front of the platform, gazing between Adel and Felix with wide brown eyes.
The hand slipped higher up her thigh. She tensed.
“Nor have I.” Felix jolted beside her, hunching slightly. The hand froze. “That’s quite enough,” he growled.
Adel’s eyes slammed shut. Her stomach dropped as she looked down and saw the man’s wrist locked in Felix’s white-knuckled grip. “Felix, let him go.” She grabbed Felix’s hand and forced him to release the guest. “This is not the time to make enemies,” she hissed under her breath. Felix’s jaw twitched with tension, his eyes blazing into hers with words he—thankfully—didn’t speak aloud.
So this was how he would die. Defending her at the game master’s feast. Fear snaked through her at the thought.God, protect him.Theprayers seemed to be coming more easily now that her illusion of control had shattered. Why had it taken so long?
The man looked between them and laughed. “Brilliant. Jovan?” He turned away with a shout and clapped as if to summon their lanista. “I love it! I can’t believe you kept this from me.”
Jovan emerged from the crowd, flanked by several other men dressed in robes and tunics equally as resplendent as those of the man Felix had just accosted. If one of them was not the game master himself, they were surely his assistants.
“A pair of lovers!” The man in red clapped again, like a child overjoyed with a new toy.
“Lovers?” Jovan’s eyes lifted to Felix, then shifted to Adel.
She smoothed her features, then let one eyebrow twitch as if to say the man was insane. Jovan saw it too, didn’t he?
“Do you have more, or just this set?” The man’s words tumbled faster. “We have to use them. The crowds will go wild! Where is Giulio?”
“It’s too late for the game master to change anything, surely...” Jovan’s poor attempt to protest was drowned out by the man calling over several others and voicing his idea.
“We haven’t had a pair of lovers in the arena in years!”
Another man stared through them, chewing a knuckle, his painted eyebrows drawn in thought. “They could be Odysseus and Penelope—”
“Too old and... nearly monogamous.” A young man in apple green silk circled the platform, then spun as an idea struck. “But what about Pyramus and Thisbe. They can make love in the sand and then we can send in lions for them to fight!”
Adel’s pulse pounded. Fear and anger swelled in her chest until she could hardly breathe. Why hadn’t Felix kept his hands to himself? Stayed silent? All they’d worked for, all they’d planned, was crumbling at their feet.
Beside her, Felix drew in a ragged breath.
She turned her wrist, gripping his hand in warning.Do not react. Say nothing.
“They are not bestiarii,” Jovan argued. “And forcing a love scene failed for Adronicus, if you recall. That was his last year as game master.”
“But that was the story of the Sabine women,” the green-silked man whined. “Ancient history—everyone finds that boring. This is racy young love and tragedy. A crowd favorite every time. We can send them out during the scene change for the battle. It’ll be the perfect transition piece. Where is Giulio when you need him? Giulio!” He disappeared into the crowd to find the game master and the others followed, all talking over one another.
“How can you endure this evil?” Felix’s rough whisper emerged from between his teeth. “Claim to love it?”
“It was endure it or die.” She released his hand and swallowed back the burn of tears. “At least if I pretended... the misery was less suffocating.”
“I have never wanted to tear a man apart like I do just now. It’s...” He let out a breath, the chain clinking around his ankle as he shifted. “Terrifying.”
They fell silent as another group of Rome’s elite circled them to gawk and prod, discussing them as if they were nothing more than inanimate statues, not living, breathing humans.
“I could endure the humiliation if it meant sparing you from it.” Felix stared straight ahead. “I never meant to inflict more upon you.”
“Well.” She let out a breath, her mouth drying at the thought of what this new humiliation would entail if the game master agreed to it. “If we needed one last distraction for the liberators before the battle reenactment, we have it now.”
Rubbing her fingers over her aching scalp, covered in a crown of tight braids, Adel sank to her knees in her cell, grateful the night was over anddreading the morning all at once. The sky had paled as they wrestled over their predicament, as if it too was in shock at the shift in their fate. The game master and his minions would waste no time setting their novel idea into motion, and she and Felix could not afford to sleep either. Not that she could have slept, even if she had the softest bed in Rome.
Across from her, Felix ran his hands over his chest as if he could hardly believe he was fully clothed at last and might never take a tunic for granted again. His dark eyes met hers through the lattice of bars and he swallowed.
“I’ve ruined everything,” he whispered, regret thick in his throat.
