Champion in Love (bxb)

CHAPTER 32. Going for the Jugular

I was marched through the Imperial palace to the Empress' apartments. Her private reception room was full of women in familiar gray veils, so many of them, that Victor was almost lost in their midst. He was naked and wrapped in far too many chains to restrain him. Maybe this was an orgy after all? Then his head rolled to the right, and I saw an indigo mess of smashed flesh and blood covering half his face, my mangled nose and mouth. My short-lived hope evaporated.

This was exactly what I had feared I would find at that palace: a botched assassination attempt.

I even guessed how Victor might have failed. Alas, I couldn't ask him to confirm my deductions, because Messalina Augusta emerged from the adjacent bedroom, glaring daggers at me. The second flock of veiled women glided in her wake.

"He knows nothing. I swear!" Victor lied as clearly as his split lip and broken teeth permitted.

"Silence!" Messalina Augusta ordered.

Everyone obeyed so well, I could hear her ragged breathing from a few feet away, where I was made to kneel. It wasn't enough. One of the bodyguards pressed her sword to my throat for a good measure, cold tip pricking my skin.

"Your protégé had tried to kill me, Maximus." Messalina Augusta cocked her head to one shoulder. "Do you know why?"

I licked my lips, gathering my thoughts.

"Where is Rufius Fulgentius?" I asked to buy some time. Was he too pathetic to be accused of treason? For the first time in my life, I hoped the worm appeared to others as he did to me.

"You're not the one asking questions here," she snapped.

Victor, naturally, interrupted. "He doesn't know who I am! He knew nothing."

One of the gray bodyguards yanked the chain across his neck to stifle his words, nearly garroting him. For months, it had pissed me whenever he repeated himself, but now I choked down a growl. Nobody noticed it, because Victor thrashed against his restraints so hard, every woman in the room had to grab the chains' ends to keep him in the corner, away from their Empress.

His eyes popped out of their orbits but implored me to abandon him to his fate and get it over with. Mithras' bull, he believed I would do such a thing when he could be crucified, hanged from the hooks off the wall, broken on the wheel. When Messalina Augusta could invent something extra-tortuous to end his life, because she was an ingenious woman with a love for pain and sport.

I whipped my head to her, letting the bodyguard's sword scratch my skin. A hot drop of blood trickled down my neck, and she licked her lips at the sight of it. "Have you put him up to killing me, your Empress? I could hardly expect a barbarian to conceive something so... Fidelis."

"Killing you?" I gasped. "Never. But I dreamt of killing him after you had chosen him over me."

With the chain choking him, the most Victor could produce was a gurgle. He made even that sound like a protest, which raised my ire to the max. If he only listened to me, accepted me as his lover, abandoned his pride, we wouldn't be here! Honestly, my purported desire to kill him wasn't that far from what I was feeling.

"Is that so?" Messalina Augusta walked over to me and lifted my chin with a dagger she removed from a secret sheath. I had a sword to my throat and a dagger under my chin. Add a spearpoint aimed at my heart—and I would die if I heaved too deep of a sigh.

"You chose someone else over me in the past, as I recall," she said, tilting her head to one shoulder, green sparkling under the veil of her golden eyelashes. "You gave into your sexual affliction."

Messalina Augusta treated the women in the room like they were furniture, so I followed her suit. If it helped Victor, I would fight a dozen lovers' quarrels in public, I'd lie through my teeth, and abase myself. Next to the high treason I'd already committed for his sake, it was nothing. I softened my voice to a low, bedroom cadence. "It was long ago, and I paid for my mistake, Alina. When you chose Victor over me... no pain had ever hurt worse."