Page 32 of Firebird (The Fire That Binds #1)

XXXI

JULIAN

Gaius’s home in Vulsinii stood on a small cliff overlooking a vast lake, which now glistened under the moonlight. This home had been in his family for over a century.

Standing on the terrace with all of our allies, I barely listened as I stared at the marble statue of the first Roman dragons cradled beneath the wing of their adoptive mother, an ancient dragon. It was set in the inverted curve of a wall, a fountain cascading around them, turquoise tiles lining the rim.

History never tells us what happened to the dragons of old, the ones who were only beasts without the gift of transformation. They simply disappeared into obscurity when dragon skin-shifters began to populate and rule the world. I wondered if the first Romans killed them off, not wanting any competition for dominance over the land. It wouldn’t surprise me.

“Yes, it’s a risk we all take. If you did not think there was a possibility that this all might end with your deaths, then why are you even here?” Gaius snapped at Appius, an older, dignified senator of the Sapphirus line. He also happened to be Gaius’s cousin.

“I am well aware of the risk of death,” Appius stated in a deep-barreled voice, the kind I imagined he used on the senate house floor. “I merely want to debate if the risk is worth it. Will we all die for naught? Or do we have a plan put forth that is most likely to succeed?”

A round of bickering hummed through the dozen men gathered on the terrace. Trajan leaned against a gold-painted column with his arms crossed, scowling.

The men gathered were a mixed lot of senators and soldiers. Men we collected into our fold over careful scrutiny and time, and whose quiet but obvious disdain for the emperor and his regime had been personally witnessed by Gaius, Trajan, or myself. They were cautiously amassed. Some of their hatred for Caesar stemmed from his laws stifling their own climb to power and to better fortune. A few joined us out of fear of the violent world Caesar was creating and that it could get worse. And there were a few who also longed for a just, fair, and prosperous Rome without the brutality Caesar embodied.

I stepped forward and raised my hand, knowing all the motivations in the hearts of these men. Almost at once, there was silence. I lowered my hand and paused before I spoke.

“The gods gifted us with our power to transform into a creature who could reign over earth and sky. And what have we done with that gift?”

I stared at each of the very powerful men standing before me .

“We’ve burned and pillaged and conquered. We’ve enslaved and killed and gorged ourselves on the misery of others, of those too helpless to defend themselves against the strength of dragons.”

The silence thickened with the weight of my words.

“With the might of our power, we have become more monster than man. We have glutted ourselves on greed and blood. And the time to change who we have become is now, ” I bellowed, the last word echoing into the night.

“You all may think my uncle cannot delve deeper into depravity or that he cannot sink Rome into a pit as dark as Tartarus itself, but you are mistaken,” I practically whispered, emotion choking my voice. “Igniculus is no god. Nor is he gifted by them. He is cursed . A twisted, malformed creature who drags our people deeper into the hell he has created.”

I felt my own dragon waking and shining behind my eyes.

“Have you not all heard, and some of you here seen with your own eyes, Caesar’s most recent humiliation? That he took Otho’s new bride in front of all the nobles of Rome? Have you not witnessed yourself in recent years, for those who were there, how he raped other Romans’ wives and daughters?”

I held my fingers up one at a time as I named them.

“Clarissa Media Nocte Isthmus. Leta Chrysocolla Evander. Phaedra Amethystus Opius. Sylva Sapphirus Thetis.”

I glanced toward Gaius on the last. She was the daughter of his cousin, now a ghost of the proud woman she was.

“And do not forget that Leta took her own life rather than live with the violation done to her. Now these women, Roman women, must hide themselves in shame and fear that he may choose them again for his sport or his manipulative games to control us.”

I scoffed and looked from man to man, ensuring they were listening. They were.

“Trust me, gentlemen, he’s not simply putting the men in place who have offended them with these tactics. He’s making sure each and every one of you know that he can destroy you by destroying those you love if you do not do exactly what he wants.”

I paused and held Horatius’s hard gaze. He was the only Griseo in the senate, a tribune elected by the people because of his renown in the gladiator arenas. He would’ve heard of but not seen these atrocities. But he’d experienced others.

“And this is how he treats nobles . Let us not forget the barbarity with which he treats the plebeians and the slaves.”

My heart lurched at the thought of Malina, but I kept my focus.

“I have a story to tell you. The other day when I met with Trajan and Gaius in the forum, I noticed a man in half-skin staked to a wall. Dead.” I glanced at Trajan, who frowned, for I hadn’t yet told him of my discovery. “I put my man Koska to work. You may know he helps me on war campaigns, but he’s also a wealth of information and knows how to find it.”

I’d let my voice even out and lower to a calm timbre. Gaius stepped forward, his face etched with concern.

“The man, a dragon of the Amethystus house, who’d been killed for his crime in half-skin, had apparently fallen for the butcher’s daughter. She was a plebeian and not a noble. He decided to defy Caesar’s law that nobles must not marry outside their class and secretly married her anyway. Not only that but he also got his young wife with child. This was reported to his legatus, General Sabinus.”

I stepped closer to them, hands clasped at my back.

“His crimes of marrying the woman he loved from a lower class and getting her with child may have been forgiven if he’d promised to kill the child at birth or send it to the faraway gladiator pits on the other side of the empire and divorce his young bride quietly. But this man did something worse.”

“He planned a coup,” said Appius, his voice rusty with emotion.

I nodded to him. “He did. He confided in his brothers, the soldiers he was closest to in his regiment under General Sabinus. But one of them lost his courage and reported it to Sabinus, and he took no time to tell Caesar, who gave the order to stake the man. All of his soldier brothers were killed too and dumped in the Tiber River, no rites or gods’ blessings for any of them.”

“His name was Vincentus. I would honor him now if only in a silent prayer that his soul finds its way to the underworld.”

Thick silence fell over us all, only the light trickle of the fountain making any sound. As for me, I did send a prayer to the gods for Vincentus and his wife. It was Horatius who spoke up first.

“What happened to his pregnant wife?”

I turned to him. “She took her own life with her husband’s gladius.”

Someone cursed and another hissed at the pity of it.

“Hear me now, gentlemen. This is only one instance, and I haven’t even mentioned his increasing taxes he’s enforced on nobles and merchants alike. If you believe his orgies and his carnivorous rites are all he is capable of, you are wrong. If you believe the laws he’s enacted with his puppets, the consuls, have put Rome in a sad state, I promise you now they are only a prelude of what is to come. Stories like those of Vincentus will be commonplace by the time my uncle is done. But I for one would rather go the way of Vincentus than to watch us continue to be crushed and choked in the tyrant’s fist.”

For a solid minute, no one spoke as they let my decree sink in. Because I knew with all my heart that my uncle was just getting started. Debauchery and violence and degradation were what made him happiest. He wouldn’t stop until he was crammed fat with it all. And Rome would be a hell on earth.

Appius was the first to speak. “Then we will be the liberators of Rome.” He turned to look at his fellow senators, his deep voice resonating across the terrace. “We will take the risk and sacrifice our lives if necessary. ”

“Hear, hear!” called Horatius. Though a senator, he was built tall and strong, and I was glad to have him on our side.

Others joined in, nodding and agreeing with “hear, hear.”

Gaius beamed at me with pride, and I was struck for a moment with a memory of my father when he would look at me that way. A maudlin thread tightened around my gut with my realization that I had no family left. Except Malina.

Malina. My heart ached and cracked at the thought of her now.

Gods, protect her.

Gaius raised his hand for quiet. “Then we are agreed. When Legatus Drussus returns from his campaign, we will strike immediately.”

That caught my attention. “But Drussus could be gone for weeks .”

“Our intelligence has told us he is near an end,” added Gaius. “Two weeks at the most. Possibly three.”

“Three… weeks ?” My voice had dropped deeper with the dragon.

Trajan stepped forward from where he’d been reclining. “Julian, you know that Drussus is the emperor’s strongest general other than you, and possibly Sabinus, and with his blood of the Ignis line, he would certainly believe he has rights to the throne if we assassinate Igniculus while he’s away. We can’t allow him to live, and the assassinations must all be done at once, so no one can flee and hide and then return with an army.”

All of this I knew. I wasn’t a fool. But my dragon and my heart and my soul rebelled at the idea of Malina being in danger for three more weeks.

“Then Ciprian must fall to some untimely, accidental death,” I added. “Immediately.”

Ciprian was one of many on our targeted list who would all die in the same night. But I couldn’t wait for Drussus to return before taking him out.

“The emperor will know it’s you, Julian,” said Trajan .

“Then we must devise a way that it couldn’t possibly have been me who is responsible.”

“I don’t understand,” said Horatius. “Why must Ciprian die now?”

Everyone here had heard, or most likely had witnessed, when the emperor handed over Malina into Ciprian’s possession at the Colosseum. But none of them except Trajan understood her importance to me. And I wasn’t going to bury or hide my love for Malina like a shame.

“Because Ciprian holds my dragon’s mate in his home. My mate.”

They froze and stared in shock, for it was rare a dragon would choose a human as a mate. Maybe it was my father’s blood coursing through me. His dragon had also chosen a human as his god-given mate. Or perhaps it was simply the gods righting the wrongs, giving me a powerful, magnificent female to be my partner against the demons of this world. I didn’t know. And I didn’t care. All I knew was that it was right and true.

“Are you sure?” asked Gaius, unease etched into his brow.

“I am certain Malina has been anointed as mine by the gods. On Jupiter’s stone, I swear it.”

A cool breeze wafted over the terrace from the water. It should’ve calmed me, given me some relief on this hot and oppressive night. But nothing would ease me or my mind until I had Malina safely back in my arms.

“It’s too risky,” said Appius. “It could alarm Caesar.”

“He’s right,” Gaius said to me. “How can we possibly do this when we’re so close to success?”

Holding my temper while my dragon growled in my belly, I said, “I understand if none of you want part in this. But there is no way in this fucking world that I’m leaving her in Ciprian’s home for three more weeks. My dragon won’t stand for it. If you’ve had a mate, then you understand what I’m telling you. ”

Gaius flinched, for he had a long marriage with his true god-given mate and he understood. They all understood that when the dragon takes hold, there is no stopping him.

“My house is on the same street as his,” said Horatius. “My slave girl goes to market with one of his every week. Perhaps we can slip him a poison.”

“A poison would be too obvious,” I said. “It needs to be something else.”

“I could help,” said Agrippa, a distinguished senator from the Media Nocte line. He was a somber dragon who wore a close-cropped beard and a scowl most of the time. “I hold no love for my cousin Ciprian. My son is his new prefect and might be able to get him where we need him for an untimely accident.”

To my great relief, the conversation fell into the many accidents Ciprian might encounter in the city—a loaded cart of grain crushes him when a wheel breaks, an angry vendor shifts into half-skin as he passes by and accidentally claws his throat, or a street fight runs amok where he’s caught in the mayhem and stabbed through the heart. The last was my favorite.

While the senators argued over what was best, I pulled Trajan to the side.

“I need one of your farthest homes to hide Malina once Ciprian is dead.”

He nodded. “And you shall have it.”

“Thank you, brother. When Ciprian is dead, I’ll fly her there, then return to Rome.”

“You can’t both be missing when word reaches Igniculus that Ciprian is dead. He’ll suspect you first.”

“I know. Which is why when we do the deed, we’ll have to keep Ciprian’s death a secret for at least a day.”

“I know plebs in the city who are loyal to me, one in particular,” added Trajan thoughtfully. “We can have the ‘accident’ take place near her shop and hide the body there until the next day.” Trajan eyed me. “You won’t have time to linger with her. You’ll have to return immediately.”

I smiled for the first time since she’d been taken from my home. “Don’t worry.” I squeezed him on the shoulder. “If I can get her safely out of Rome, I will happily return to kill my uncle.”

The night droned on with a little wine and food and more debate. We finally decided on the street fight run amok to do Ciprian in. Horatius said his two sons would gladly do the deed, while Agrippa’s would be sure to get him at the right place at the right time. Horatio’s sons would dress like plebs and blend into the crowd and take care of it quickly.

We knew Ciprian’s route to the training yards every day, so we’d find the most secluded spot along the way. As long as Agrippa’s son got him there when we needed him, it would work. And we’d do it in three days’ time.

“Thank you,” I said to them all before we began to break apart and ready ourselves to return to Rome.

“I’ll return to the city tomorrow,” Trajan told me on the terrace before I left. “Grandfather wants me to help solidify the details.”

“Of course. I’ll see you back in Rome.”

I bid farewell to my fellow allies before I shifted on the lower terrace, then flew home. All of us planned to leave at staggered times to make it back to the city of Rome under the cover of night separately.

It wasn’t uncommon for a dragon to fly out of his home at night in defiance of Igniculus’s laws that no one but military men could shift inside the city. Sometimes, a dragon merely wanted out of the man, to soar the night skies. One would be overlooked. But a dozen of us flying back at the same time would certainly be noticed. As it was, we’d all planned ahead and would land and shift outside the city and make our way back on foot or horse.

My flight wasn’t a relief as it usually was. Flying was often a soot hing balm to my senses and my troubled spirit, but not tonight. By the time I landed in the field, found Volkan tied to the tree where I’d left him in the shadows, and returned home, I was more restless than ever.

My mind wouldn’t stop repeating the horrific things that might be taking place back in Ciprian’s home. But I promised Malina I would trust her, that she could take care of herself. It was only that I knew him for the true monster he was. He also wasn’t an idiot. I worried that he might catch on to her.

When I trotted into the stable yard, Ivo was there and took Volkan for me.

“Thank you, Ivo.”

I stalked through the quiet house and made my way to my bedroom. Without washing the dirt off my skin, I fell into my bed and groaned with deep grief. Her scent. It was everywhere from the night before.

The memory tortured me into a fitful sleep. Her silken skin, her soft mouth, her drugging scent, and sweet affection drowned me in agonizing ecstasy as I cried out her name over and over again. But she never answered.