The Defiant (The Valiant #2)(42)

I loosened the sword that hung on my right hip. “Sorcha didn’t give you those coins.”

He shook his head. “No.”

“Who did?”

“She . . . it . . . it was for my silence,” he said in a rush. “She gave me the pouch and told me to keep my mouth shut. Forgive me—”

“Who?” I asked.

“Thalestris.” It came out in a ragged whisper. “I was to keep quiet about the Lanista. Your sister, domina . . . She’s not dead. At least . . . not yet—”

With a snarl, I shoved Leander up against the stone wall of the courtyard, and thrust the tip of my sword up under his chin.

“What do you know?” I asked through teeth clenched tight.

“On the night the ludus was taken,” he said, naked fear in his eyes, “I was asleep in an alcove in the kitchen. I awoke to the sounds of Thalestris dragging the Lanista out through the service gate in chains. She was unconscious, and there was blood on her sleeping shift—but even more blood on the Amazon’s tunic. I think Thalestris was hurt, from the way she moved. And she was in a hurry. Desperate. When she saw that I was awake, she gave me the coins to buy my silence.”

“You treacherous little—”

“I was afraid!” he screeched. “She told me that Pontius Aquila would further reward me—but I know what that means more often than not. It’s why I decided to leave the ludus when you all did.”

I felt the breath heaving in and out of my lungs as if I’d just run a mile. My pulse roared in my ears, and I held Leander pinned to the wall almost as much to keep myself standing as from anger.

Thalestris wasn’t dead.

She was alive and—there was simply no other way to frame it in my mind—in league with Pontius Aquila. And she had my sister. The naked betrayal of it staggered me. But I could barely even think of it beyond that one simple fact.

“My sister isn’t dead . . .”

Leander shook his head.

I felt a touch on my shoulder as Cai stepped up beside me. “What makes you think the Lanista is still alive?” he asked, his fingers tightening, as if he expected I might try to carve answers out of Leander’s flesh in chunks.

“Because Thalestris wants more than just her death,” Leander said. “She wants blood vengeance.”

Why? I wondered. For what? And then, in the next breath I knew.

Even as Leander said it out loud: “Vengeance for the death of her sister.”

I released Leander and stepped back, reeling.

Suddenly it all made sense. Thalestris wasn’t just a pawn in Aquila’s game. She’d been playing her own all along. I remembered the day I’d found the crow nailed to my door and had been convinced Nyx had been behind the evil prank. Even when she’d denied knowing anything about it. But Thalestris had been there, as I’d cleaned the blood from my door, and she’d told me how it was a warning I should heed. For Sorcha’s sake.

“Think on this,” she told me, “it would break the Lanista’s heart if she were to lose her beloved sister. Believe me. I know.”

It had broken Thalestris’s.

In the wake of the fateful battle that claimed her sister Orithyia’s life and secured my sister’s place as Lanista of the Ludus Achillea, Thalestris had donned a mask of forgiveness—of dearest friendship, even—but deep down, she’d harbored an implacable revenge for years.

Nurtured it, fed it and coaxed it to grow . . . and I understood.

I’d spent years of my life thinking my sister was dead. I could still feel the coal of hatred that had burned in my heart for Caesar, the man I’d thought responsible for her death. But how Thalestris had managed to hide her true feelings from Sorcha for so long . . . that was impossible for me to understand. My sister’s primus pilus and closest confidante, she could have killed Sorcha a thousand times in a thousand ways. In a sparring bout, in the dead of night, with a draught of poison . . . but no.

She wanted her broken.

Suddenly, I understood. Sorcha would know, before she died, that Thalestris had killed her dreams too. Her fight for the freedom of the Achillea gladiatrices—a dream that Thalestris had so very maliciously delivered into the grasping hands of Pontius Aquila. Along with Sorcha’s baby sister. Me.

The ultimate act of poetic vengeance.

I turned back to Leander. “How do you know all this?”

“One of the advantages of being a slave, domina.” He grinned bitterly. “No one ever thinks you’re listening.”

“I’m listening now,” I said and lowered my sword.

“When Nyx was sold to Aquila before the Triumphs,” he said, “I packed a cart with her gear while she and Thalestris talked. About you, domina, and about the Lady Achillea. Nyx was furious. She felt betrayed, she said. Thalestris told her not to worry—that Nyx would soon have her revenge on you . . . and that she would have her revenge on the lady.”

In his time at the ludus—sweeping, serving, bending his head, and averting his eyes—Leander must have heard, and seen, a great deal. I remembered then that the night Nyx had led me and Elka and Lydia to that cursed Bacchanale at the Domus Corvinus, it had been Leander who’d procured the key to the door to let us sneak out. And I remembered something else. He’d been whipped for it.