Desire of the Gladiator (Affairs of the Arena Book 3) Read online

  Desire of the Gladiator

  Affairs of the Arena, Volume 3

  Lydia Pax

  Published by Princeps Publishing, 2015.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  DESIRE OF THE GLADIATOR

  First edition. October 15, 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 Lydia Pax.

  Written by Lydia Pax.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Get in touch!

  Also available in the Affairs of the Arena series

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Epilogue

  Thank you!

  Bibliography

  Further Reading: Heart of the Gladiator

  About the Author

  Get in touch!

  Lydia Pax Website

  Lydia Pax on Facebook

  Lydia Pax on Twitter

  Lydia Pax on Goodreads

  Also available in the Affairs of the Arena series

  Heart of the Gladiator

  Love of the Gladiator

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  Chapter 1

  “What do you think?” asked the beast man. “Will I win today?”

  Leda carefully made little acknowledgment of the words. The less this one knew about how much she could speak, the better.

  She was a princess, even if she was held in slavery. There could be no trafficking with a low sort like a gladiator, no matter how terribly he may have made her heart race.

  He walked near her in a short wagon train toward the city of Puteoli. They traveled from the ludus of House Varinius to the arena, where there were to be a great series of games that day.

  Today was warm—it was summer, and so far it had been a dry summer. The road was paved over with stones—Romans did love their roads, if nothing else—and a great many carefully arranged trees and bushes grew alongside the path. The plants were not largely brown and twisted; the last precipitation had been sometime in the late spring, when a series of storms had landed on the peninsula.

  The “beast man” who spoke to her was named Conall, though she found it difficult to think of him as a true man. Or most any gladiator, to be honest. They were a brutal, mean lot, more concerned with the best ways to kill. None would ever imagine that life without a sword in their hands was more worth living than their own feckless pursuit toward glory and honor before the mob.

  The wagon train held all the gladiators from the Varinius ludus, as well as a great many slaves and attendants to ensure their health and well-being. Most prominent of these were the handful of doctores, among them the head doctore, Murus—a thick-set man who had been training gladiators for House Varinius for years. There was also a rather large contingent of armed guards to ensure that the gladiators did not attempt escape.

  A gladiator like Conall, who had been a loyal veteran for more than two years, was given some leeway to walk the short distance to the town without his hands in manacles—unlike the less-initiated gladiators.

  Leda had arrived at the ludus a little less than a year before. In her own country, there were not gladiator games, and so being the property of a gladiator school—where men were taught how to kill and make a show of killing for the frenzied crowds of the arena—was strange and frightening, to say the least.

  And, if she were completely honest, the cause for some terribly distracting thoughts from time to time. The gladiators were dangerous, cocky, and trained their bodies to the pinnacles of masculine perfection.

  Conall may have been a beast of a man, but he was still a man—and a well-formed one at that. Every muscle was carved from stone, and every feature ruggedly handsome.

  His was the sort of body and build that a woman could use in her imagination when she wanted to forget her problems, when she wanted to fantasize about a wild man arriving in her bedchamber and insisting that their lovemaking be passionate and last for hours.

  While she had zero intention of ever returning his attentions, Leda was still flesh and blood. That she was attracted to Conall was undeniable. All the allure of his body—and that dash of extra spice from the natural danger he presented as a trained killer. Sometimes, in moments of weakness, her mind got away from her.

  The trouble was that when Conall was present, those moments of weakness regularly presented themselves.

  But she knew, with iron-clad conviction, that all of that was ultimately immaterial. Her attraction made him no less of a beast, and no more worthy of her time.

  She was from the Kingdom of Armenia, far away from the Italian Peninsula. It was an area used—much to its chagrin—as a buffer state between the militant Roman Empire and the perpetually tumultuous Parthians in the East. As such, as a princess in the court of her father the king, languages were a top priority since early childhood. Her understanding and pronunciation of the Latin tongue was precise, controlled, and fluent.

  However, in the cosmopolitan empire of Rome, inhabitants rarely made assumptions about what a person could speak. With her deep brown skin and jet black hair, many Romans simply assumed she was from some “uncivilized” Eastern country with no understanding of Latin at all.

  “I think I will win,” said the beast man. “How about I dedicate the win to you?”

  He stepped forward, clearly hoping to catch a look into her eyes. He had spoken many times of the radiance of her eyes burning in his heart. Something Leda had noticed was that, when a man didn’t think you were listening, he was likely to get ever more poetic in his compliments.

  She carefully saw a bird in a nearby tree, focusing her attention on it and removing his opportunity to look into her face.

  It would have been sweet, perhaps, except for two reasons. The first was that she took any comments on her “beauty” with heavy doses of salt. Mines of the stuff, in fact, occupied by slaves of her memories growing up in court, when she always had too much heft for the latest dresses and her family regularly chastised her for not being as pretty as her sisters, Gaiane and Endza—as if her appearance were a suit she were wear
ing, perhaps, that she could change at any time.

  Any comments on her looks—any at all, even if they were kind in intention—only brought up a heavy dose of a childhood of inferiority to overcome. Then she had to deal with that, and so every compliment was an obligation in disguise.

  The other reason she did not find his comments sweet was that Conall was utterly beneath her. To indulge him in the slightest would be to admit that their positions held some measure of equality, which was incomprehensible to her.

  Leda wasn’t quite the princess her sisters were. Sold into slavery now, she might never be. But there was enough of it there to know that consorting with some barbarian madman from the Germanic countries was the lowest, roughest sort of relation she might ever have.

  And not only was he mad and a barbarian, but he was a gladiator to boot—the grimy bottom of the foundation of the blood-obsessed mess that was Roman society.

  It was bad enough just that she had to listen to him. She called him a beast man because he looked the part—his hair was wild and long, stretching in a reddish-brown mass past his shoulders. His beard was similarly long and thick, hiding his neck entirely and flaring out wildly as he exerted himself during training and fights.

  Though he had the archetypal sturdy, chiseled build of the gladiators, he was short—almost as short as Leda, who herself was quite short for a woman. He was too short to even be a gladiator, except that he fought like a demon in the arena and won so many of his fights.

  It had been clear since the moment he started talking to her, some seven months before, that he was absolutely smitten with her. He had never once overstepped his bounds, never touching her nor trying to corner her. Always, he had been friendly and helpful when she was deep in her tasks for the day and he happened across her.

  But none of that mattered. He was a beast man, and she was a princess; whatever fantasies were in his mind were just that—fantasies.

  They entered the gate of Puteoli, the heavily armed legionaries at the gates standing aside to let the wagon train through.

  “I think,” Conall said, “once you properly learn the tongue here, I’d like to know what you were thinking while I was talking with you. We’ll talk about it and laugh over my winnings today. How’s that?” She was silent, of course. He chuckled briefly and clapped his hands. “Good. Great. I’m glad that’s settled.”

  Leda stifled her laugh, disguising it with a series of coughs. He did have a sense of humor.

  But Leda was a princess, and one day this whole mess about her slavery would be sorted out, and she would return to court. There could be no stains upon her honor in the meantime—and certainly none so large as consorting with a lowborn beast of a gladiator.

  Chapter 2

  Another brutal blow landed from the secutor’s ax, and Conall lost his footing. Fumbling through the sand, he barely managed to roll out of the way of the follow up blow. It would have crushed his skull. Instead, it set off a small eruption of sand, spraying over the secutor and covering—momentarily—Conall’s retreat.

  The crowd all around him was noise and foam, shouting and spittle, urging only for more action.

  His face was bloodied already from the initial minutes of the match. He dove in too quick, abandoning all reason as he always did, and hoped that his instinct would guide him as it had in the past.

  Instead, his instinct guided him to a face full of a heavy secutor’s shield and a probably broken nose. It was hard to breath, and the blood running from his face and forehead made him woozier by the minute.

  Back up on his feet, Conall tried to regroup and rethink. He held a sword in either hand in the characteristic dimachaerus style. His armor was light—a heavy cloth manica around his right arm, leather greaves over his knees and calves, and a thick, tall leather belt just above his loin cloth. His face—his head—was uncovered entirely. As he moved, his hair and his beard would fly around him, creating waves of motion that delighted the crowd.

  Normally, a gladiator fighting without a helmet had to be handsome. Conall didn’t know if he was handsome by Roman standards or not, but he knew with his beard and his hair, the crowd wanted to see him in the arena.

  They cheered his name now—or his fighting name, anyway. “Pertinax! Pertinax! Pertinax!”

  An old Roman emperor, they had told him, son of a freed slave. It was a good name—good for cheering—and Conall liked it.

  He rushed his opponent with a yell, swords clanging off his heavy shield. The secutor pushed him back and slammed him back against the sand again. Immediately, Conall stood up, ready for more.

  Conall had never yielded in a fight.

  He had been beaten, of course. Knocked out. Knocked down so many times he could not even move his arms to show the missus even if he wanted. But even then he had not yielded. He could not.

  The truth of the matter was that the arena was the most honest place he knew. And within its confines, the truth about Conall came out. He did not care if he lived or died.

  He just didn’t.

  And so he fought with abandon, and sometimes he lost. Most of the time, he won.

  And always, always, he had the crowd with him.

  For some reason, as he circled the secutor, Leda arrived on his mind.

  Brown-skinned and dark of hair, she was exotic and lovely. Her body was shapely and full, her every expression loaded with sharp intelligence. He’d wanted her from the very moment he saw her.

  Every swell of want in his chest, every moment of need, every desperate look he’d given Leda—all of that channeled into an energy for this fight that felt boundless and endless.

  There was a truth at the bottom of his chest that fueled every action he took. No matter how he worked, or how he tried, or how he performed, no matter the results of any action, he would always be a gladiator and she always a princess.

  She would never lower herself to being with him and he knew it.

  And it made him mad.

  Not at her—gods, no—but at the entire mess. That what he felt could not stop at simple bodily lust—even though he certainly felt a great deal of that. The agonizing closeness to her presence drove him to distraction. When she breathed, her chest rose and fell, giving movement to a bosom more perfect than any sculptor could hope to imitate. And when she spoke—or tried not to, more often—he could see the vibrations in her pink lips that told him that Elysium had been delivered to him, with her as the window inside.

  In the arena, a man could live according to his rage, and Conall had plenty to go around.

  The secutor approached, a heavy brute apparently made for the specific purpose of killing little men like Conall in the arena.

  That made Conall mad.

  They exchanged a heavy flurry of blows with neither gaining the advantage. Sparks flew as Conall’s swords struck hard against the blade of the secutor’s ax.

  Well over six feet tall, the secutor’s armor barely fit him. He carried an enormous shield, almost impossible to break due to its density and weight, and had heavy armor on his arms and legs. The standard fight between a dimachaerus and a secutor was skill versus strength. But this secutor was fast, too—and brutally armed. He carried, instead of the normal short sword, a securis—an ax with a long, heavy blade.

  The secutor swung with the ax again and Conall parried it aside, sliding one sword forward. The attack hit, but only on the secutor’s armor, sliding off harmlessly. Following up, the secutor rolled his heavy shield over to bash Conall again—a blow that landed. Conall rolled back into the sand and, with a roar, hopped back up again.

  No doubt the secutor thought this some easy fight. Kill the little man. Take him out, make him sorry he ever entered the arena with him.

  No doubt the secutor, heavy and huge, wanted to end the fight early. Secutores often did. Their helmets, closed over the face, made it hard to breath for a long time. And no doubt the secutor thought that he could end the fight early, too.

  They fought in one match before the primus,
which would be the main event of the day. Conall often fought on this level on the card. He had never fought in a primus, not in more than two years of winning fights. He had fought more than sixteen times to earn his place this high on the card. The secutor had fought in six fights.

  And that made Conall mad.

  He roared and leapt back into the fray.

  Chapter 3

  “Beast man,” she muttered to herself. “Insane man.”

  Leda watched from the box seats, containing the honored senators of the day and the lanistas who ran the ludi providing the gladiators. Leda attended Publius, the lanista of House Varinius and her Dominus—the man who owned her.

  Her jobs for him were many and varied. Mostly they fell under the blanket of “whatever he told her.” This meant assisting other slaves with domestic matters, like decoration and serving and cleaning, but as Leda was educated, her duties also extended elsewhere. He knew Leda spoke the Latin tongue; knew her to be intelligent and able. He was willing to keep her secrets so long as she obeyed his orders.

  The secutor beat Conall down to the sand again, and again Conall got up. His face and shoulders were bloody. A wild, terrible grin was on his face. Somehow, he was enjoying himself. The hair of his beard had turned red, making him some demon-like form in the arena.