In His Arena 1: Slave Eternal (23 page)

The slap and grunt of two men fucking rose, loud and lewd. Lucan strained, breathing hard with the effort of fucking Hektor as vigorously as he seemed to want to be fucked. His balls smacked Hektor’s ass as he rode him. Hektor twisted in his chains, fighting, but they held him captive to Lucan’s wild rutting.

The Ebon flared, blossoming on Lucan’s chest, a poisonous flower threatening his pleasure. It grew with every stroke, and yet Lucan could not stop.

He grunted as he plundered Hektor’s sweet, unused ass. Grabbing his man’s hips, fingers digging in, Lucan pounded hard and deep, his cock invading that tight hole. Hektor’s shaft swung heavily, neglected, between his legs, and Lucan captured it, stroking and fondling with sensual roughness. He ran his fingers through the silky fluid at the slit and then rolled it around as Hektor pumped, fucking his hand.

“Take it.” Lucan’s demand was hoarse. “Take my cock, my conquest.”

“Yes,” Hektor hissed. “I’m yours. Do whatever dirty things you want to me.”

And oh, Lucan wanted to. He wanted to do terrible dirty things to Hektor—to take him, to spread him wide in chains and fuck him over and over until they were both raw and sated—and then he wanted to hold and kiss him and smooth his hair afterward. He increased the pace of his thrusts, angling in until he was slamming Hektor’s ass, sliding along his prostate, Hektor grunting with each blow, taking it like a whore.

“Fuck!” Hektor cried out, trembling.

His ass clenched, squeezing Lucan’s prick, and with a shout, Lucan came inside him, hard and pulsing, jetting hot, sweet cum deep inside his lover’s ass even as the Ebon burned him from the inside out. The black glow threatened, and he clapped a hand over it.

Desperate to hide, Lucan pulled out, streams of cum sluicing down Hektor’s thighs, spotting the floor between his feet. Hektor groaned, his rod engorged and slick with precum, his balls drawn up tight.

“Suck me,” he pleaded.

Lucan’s chest burned with the fell brand, and he dug his fingers into the skin, hoping Hektor would not notice. But Hektor’s eyes were closed, his body so taut it seemed he might snap the chains.

Dread coiling in his gut, Lucan knew he should not go before Hektor. He would see. He would
see
. But the sight of Hektor’s rigid cock, the sound of his abject pleading destroyed any sense Lucan might have had.

“Please,” Hektor begged again.

Lucan could not deny him. He sank to his knees before his lover.

Hektor cried out as Lucan grabbed his ass and pulled him in, impaling his own mouth on Hektor’s hard length. Slowly, Hektor began to pump, his control masterful, and Lucan let his throat go slack, anticipating a deeper thrust as the man found his rhythm.

He was used to sucking men off, but Hektor’s girth was impressive, nearly the largest Lucan had ever taken.

“So beautiful.” Hektor glanced down for a brief moment before his eyes hazed over in lust, his attention fully on the sight of Lucan’s willing mouth swallowing him down.

Lucan eased forward, pressing his lips tight to make a wet sheath. Hektor groaned, his thighs quivering. The chains shrieked as he fought for only a moment. He loosed a low growl, and then he was fucking Lucan’s mouth in earnest, choking him with his length, shoving his meat down Lucan’s gullet until Lucan could not help but make awkward noises, cum and saliva dripping from his stretched lips onto his chest.

Hektor pumped him, and their gazes locked. Lucan’s mouth was stuffed full. He could barely accommodate Hektor’s huge rod, and yet he did. He licked and sucked and ran his fingers over the shaft, stroking each time he slid his mouth up, leaving the length slick with saliva. He grasped Hektor’s balls and pulled them away from his body, delaying his climax for a long moment before taking him deep.

Hektor bumped the back of his throat and then slid into the clasp of it. He cried out, bucking, and then he was shooting his load. Spurts of hot cum almost choked Lucan, but he swallowed greedily, taking every drop. He licked and sucked at that twitching shaft, drawing more and more from Hektor, wringing him out.

And then Hektor sagged in his chains. “Let me free.”

HEKTOR SAW THE desire in Lucan’s eyes. The turn of a key, and he had his freedom. His wrists ached with relief, the blood flowing back in, making all the swelling and the scrapes come to searing life.

But he didn’t care.

The burn of his injuries was nothing compared to the burn in his heart, in his body for Lucan. He reached for Lucan and ran his fingers through all that glorious golden hair. He slid his hands down Lucan’s lithe body, and made the boy stand before him.

Lucan struggled a bit, the word
no
forming on his lips, but Hektor thought it artifice, play.

And then he saw.

The Ebon.

Like a dark accusation, it rode high on Lucan’s pectoral—a mark bleeding black and seared into his skin like a brand. That blasted Vulpinius brand. Anger blazed through Hektor, and on the heels of it came the devastating sorrow, bone-deep and crushing he’d felt the first time he saw it on Lucan.

Hektor had struggled to forget, to convince himself he had imagined it in his fear of intimacy, in his fear of loving ever again.

Not again. Please. Not again.

First Leander and now Lucan.

Images of Leander rushed in—Leander with his leonine strength and beauty, lounging amid the pillows; Leander bent over the couch, urging back, his ass opened wide, hips bucking as he strained to take more of Hektor’s invading cock; Leander, his lips around Hektor’s stiff shaft, his throat working as Hektor sank into him again and again; Leander lying there after, toying with Hektor’s hair and kissing his neck, the sweet smell of sunshine about him, the way he laughed as though it would be the last time they shared a mirthful moment.

That morning it had been.

Hektor had mentioned the Grand Melee, and Leander had laughed at that too. He was a free man. He would never be chosen to compete. “You will have to look far up into the arena stands to see my smiling face, love.”

Painfully, Hektor closed his eyes. In the end, the last image he had of Leander’s face was of him covered in blood, his eyes vacant.

The Empress did not suffer to grant the Mercy during the Grand Melee. No, on that day the crowd wanted blood.

“Hektor?” Lucan’s voice ripped him back to the present.

Hektor looked at him, tousled and ruffled, fresh from their fucking. Even now, Hektor’s ass burned pleasantly. It had felt good, right, to have Lucan plow him. The only other he had allowed that had been Leander.

The symmetry was not lost on Hektor. His two loves. House Vulpinius.
The Ebon.

His fingers trembled as he reached toward Lucan’s chest. He could not keep his hand steady as he traced the mark, running over each hot line, digging in with his fingernails until he drew blood, as though he might tear the brand from his lover’s skin. Unfairness struck him low in the gut.

He could not. He would not.

“Hektor?” Pain was evident in Lucan’s voice, in his downcast eyes.

“Lucan.” Hektor raised the boy’s chin, gazed at him—those golden eyes, those kissable lips bruised from sucking him off. Hektor wanted nothing more than to kiss him, to hold him and fuck him. To chain him right now and have his way with him.

But the Grand Melee…

Hektor could not. He would not allow himself to fall in love.

It is too late for that.

Lucan looked down, shame scalding his cheeks. He touched the Ebon, his golden eyes mirroring the pain in Hektor’s heart. “Hektor, I…”

Hektor took a long and yearning look at the man he loved, at the dark spell that bound him to another as a slave. Previously, Hektor had fled. This time, he chose to walk away.

Chapter Thirteen

THREE BEFORE THE END

The Grand Melee

Was a Spectacle known to the world at large

People came from faraway lands to

Witness its splendor and horror

—Marcus Zaerus, House Zaerus, the Rulers

Lucan didn’t understand, and he didn’t want to. Hektor had fled from him.
From us.
He struggled to keep his hand steady on the paintbrush, the paintbrush steady on the animal-hide canvas stretched across the bone easel.

Sklava Lucia of House Lucia did not come cheaply, and her instruction was worth more in silver than most gladiators earned in their entire careers.

Unless I win the Grand Melee.

The brush threatened to slip again, and Lucan cursed Hektor for convincing him he needed a secondary occupation. Gods above, how Lucan had bought that line. Like he’d bought all of Hektor’s other lines. About life. About love.

He paused to wipe the sweat from his brow and to dip the brush back in the pigments.

A hot wind blew through the curtains erected around the Lucia courtyard, and Lucan blinked against the flashes of early morning sunlight that played peek-a-boo through the gaps in the moving fabric. The entirety of Courtyard Lucia was enclosed in the billowing curtains, proof against the worst of the heat and blowing sand. It didn’t keep the paint from drying, however, and every once in a while, Sklava would raise her hand and the scullery boy would add more liquid to the paint.

By the end of the session, the paint would be streaked and running.

Running. Like Hektor.

The ache in Lucan’s chest was more sorrow than dark spell, but he worried at it anyway, as though he might tear out both his feelings and the Ebon brand. He didn’t want to think of any of it, didn’t want to be reminded of the gloriousness of taking Hektor, of fucking his tight ass, coming deep inside him, and then sucking him down, making him come undone with just the clasp of his mouth and throat. He didn’t want to remember the heat, the pressure on his cock, or how Hektor had bucked beneath him, a most beautiful conquest.

And then Hektor had seen the Ebon.

Did he know what it meant? Did he know that Alession had taken Lucan, had used him?
What does that matter?
That had been before Hektor. These days, Lucan loathed the very idea of another man touching him.

Tightness rippled through his shoulder blades, and Lucan tried to shrug it away. Sklava had told him it was not uncommon for novice painters to become stiff during these first sessions. The hard stool beneath him, the rigid need to keep his arm straight, his eyes ahead—surely the awkward posture was the reason for Lucan’s discomfort.

Surely it wasn’t Hektor. Surely it wasn’t the Ebon.

Even now, the dark spell itched through Lucan’s skin, growing hotter as the hours plodded along toward the Grand Melee.
Three days now
… The Ebon rose as if it knew, pushing up from inside like a dark heart seeking freedom from its cage, its black ink pulsing hot and wild and then fading into a dull ache.

Before, it had only awakened with his lust and now, on the eve of the Melee, it seemed to be intensifying.

Could the Empress have something to do with it? Lucan moved to discard that idea. The Empress? Why would she—

The Empress.
Her name hissed in his mind, and fury blazed through him at the sound and shape of her name on his lips. He envisioned her before him—those white robes, that chestnut-brown hair unbound, her jade-green eyes blank and blind on his. How that white throat would feel beneath his crushing grip, how those green eyes would glaze over. The thought brought him a sudden, warm bliss spreading through his gut and radiating outward. To crush her, kill her, to—

No!
Lucan thrust that thought away. He was a gladiator. He fought only those who fought back, who entered the arena by free will or fate. He was not a base killer, not a murderer.

You are.
His mind whispered, and the Ebon pulsed back.

With deceptive calmness, Sklava leaned over and snapped her thick brush over his knuckles.

Lucan cried out, but not at the sting across his hand. He dropped the brush and bent at the waist, taking that as a pretense to feel at his chest through his robes.

He clenched at the pulsing brand, fighting for breath as his fingers dug into his skin with almost enough force to draw blood. Perhaps Hektor had been right to flee. Clearly the Ebon wielded some dark magick over Lucan. Had Hektor feared for his own life?

Did he fear…me?
Lucan found the idea preposterous. He could not vanquish Hektor even on his best day.

“Your brush.” Sklava’s tones were dulcet, the trained voice of an artist with many talents, though there was an edge to her words.

Lucan obeyed instantly. It was in him to be obedient to that tone. He put his pain aside in favor of his instrument, brushed the grit from the bristles, and dipped it once more into the red pigments.

Sklava barely raised her gaze from her own easel. “Continue.”

Once more, Lucan set his brush to the canvas and sighed inwardly. Sklava was no doubt creating a masterpiece next to him, the elegant sweeps and passes of her brush like the movements of a master mage.

Magick. Fell magick. Slavecraft.
Lucan’s mind clouded with superstition and the memory of what Alession had wrought upon him that night—infusing him with the Ebon brand and then trading him to Stratos as though he were a base commodity, a concubine ready for the fucking.

But what for? To get back at Hektor? It seemed too grandiose an effort for a man like Stratos. He was wealthy, powerful. If he wanted Hektor harmed, he’d need only pay someone—another primus palus, the odds-makers, anyone.

Lucan’s thoughts strayed back to the hungry look on Stratos’s face whenever he eyed Hektor, to the look of vengeance those few times the Empress had shown herself. As though he loathed her with all the fires in UnderRealm.

It made no sense, like a puzzle with ill-fitting pieces.

The way Hektor looked at me. The way he
looked.

And the sorrow of that memory eclipsed all other thoughts and emotions. Lucan’s hand trembled, and the straight line he’d been painting wobbled. From the corner of his eye he caught Sklava’s shrewd gaze, her russet-red eyes catching every detail. His work was shoddy today, even for a novice, and he knew it.