Her father’s swarthy complexion paled, as though she had struck a mortal blow to his heart. Antonia stared, appalled. There was no need for him to confirm or deny. The stricken look in his eyes told her everything.
“No.” His voice was hoarse and he gave her a small shake. “You’re my daughter, Antonia. You have always been my daughter.”
She pulled free of his grasp. Panic writhed deep in her gut, a malevolent serpent seething with poison, corroding everything she had ever believed of her life. My father is a Druid.
It made a distorted sense. She’d often wondered if her mother would have married a merchant if she had not been pregnant. Now she knew the truth beyond any doubt.
“What did my mother’s esteemed family give you for taking her off their hands?” Her voice was bitter and she scarcely acknowledged how Elpis gripped her hand. How foolish she had been to imagine her parents had been so blindly, completely in love that it had crossed all social boundaries.
“Antonia.” Was it her imagination or did her father sound shocked? Why did he sound shocked? Should she remain ignorant of her roots, now they’d been wrenched from the false bed she had lain in for the last twenty-five years?
“Why? Why did you marry her?”
“Because I loved her.” Her father let out a pained breath and Antonia’s heart ached at the look of desolation on his face. “I loved her. She was intelligent, beautiful and always had time to speak to me whenever our paths crossed. I always knew I never stood a chance with her.”
“Until she disgraced her father’s name.”
The look of desolation vanished and her father’s eyes gleamed with rage. “She disgraced no one, Antonia. The filthy dog raped her. I was honored to be chosen for her husband. Cassia deserved a life in Rome as befit her noble birth, but instead she was destined to die in Gallia. Because of the barbarism of a Druid.”
Antonia reeled at the foul accusation. I’m the spawn of rape? Denial pounded through her mind, but before words could form the sound of the door shutting behind her caused her to swing around.
The praetor stood there, his face as hard as marble. “Lower your voice.” It was a command. “I could hear you from outside the room.”
Her father stiffened. “What did you hear?”
The praetor glared at her father. “Enough.”
“Antonia has the blood of one of the premier houses of Rome in her veins.” Her father took a step toward the praetor. “She is innocent of the darkness surrounding her conception.”
“Of course she is.” The praetor kept his gaze fixed on her father. “And as my wife she will enjoy the status into which she should have been born.”
“You’ll never hold this against her?” Skepticism threaded through her father’s words but Antonia also heard a trace of fear. Fear that the praetor might turn on her because of her tainted blood.
The wild urge to laugh bubbled deep in her chest. All her life she had lived with the knowledge that in the eyes of her mother’s family she was not quite good enough because of her father’s plebeian blood.
But it wasn’t plebeian blood that soiled her veins. It was the blood of Druids. And that heritage was enough to crucify her.
“I give you my word on the names of my forefathers that I will never harm Antonia by word or deed.”
Her father drew in a deep breath. “Perhaps, after all, you are worthy of my beloved daughter, Praetor.”
The urge to laugh faded and instead a strange, ethereal sense of calm descended. She freed her hand from Elpis and stepped toward the two men who were discussing her fate as though it had nothing to do with her.
An eerie familiarity rippled along her spine. She had been here before. Her future hung in the balance, suspended between the might of two powerful men and the fragile will of a mere woman.
Embrace your destiny. The feminine whisper in her mind was in a language she didn’t know. Yet she understood the words.
They were the words spoken in the visions she had when Juno visited.
Juno? Or Hera?
Or another goddess altogether? A goddess from her unknown father’s pantheon?
“I am not the product of rape.” Her words shocked her almost as much as they shocked the two men, judging by the looks on their faces as they turned toward her. She looked into the eyes of the man she had always thought of as her father. The man she would always love as her father, because he was the only father she had ever known. “My mother loved him. You’ve always known this, Father.”
It was the reason he loathed Druids. The reason he’d never allowed her to discuss them. It wasn’t because of their emperor’s prejudice and extermination decree. It was because a Druid had stolen the heart of the woman he loved.
“Cassia was too young to know her own mind.” His voice was harsh but the undercurrent of despair tore through Antonia’s heart. Not only for her father. But for the mother she had never had the chance to know.
How terrified she must have been. A young girl pregnant by her illicit lover. How easy it would have been to coerce her into marrying another man. A man who would never be suitable under normal circumstances, but one who was immeasurably preferable to a despised Druid.
Slowly she turned to the praetor. She didn’t have the excuse of being a young, inexperienced girl, and yet she had allowed this man to coerce her all the same.
“How could you take me as your wife now, Seneca?” Her voice was quiet but didn’t tremble with the aftermath of the recent revelations. The strange serenity still cocooned her and there was an odd sense of detachment. As though she was watching this tableau unfold, yet was not quite a part of it. “You have pledged to rid the civilized world of all who bear my heritage.”
The praetor swallowed. “You’re not the sum of your heritage, Antonia.” He sounded as though the words choked him and he gripped her hand. “When you marry me, my heritage is yours.”
It was true. A woman was nothing but the sum of her father’s heritage until she married. And then she was her husband’s. Yet how proudly the man she loved as her father had always instilled in Antonia the noble lineage she inherited from her mother.
But now she was more than the child of a daughter of Rome. Her Druid father’s blood flowed in her veins. If he was half as noble and honorable as Gawain then how could she allow his legacy to fade into obscurity?
“I love you, Father.” She looked at the man who would forever be her father in her heart. He’d concealed the truth from her, but she understood his reasons and couldn’t hate him for it. Then she looked back at the praetor. Both men stood shoulder to shoulder. A barricade of masculine power. If she allowed it, they would bend her to their will, in the misguided belief they were doing it for her. She freed her hand from the praetor’s grip. “But I will always be the daughter of a Druid.”
Their vehement protests flowed over her. She waited until their demands and entreaties finally faded into silence. A silence that clearly grated on both men’s nerves but that sank into Antonia’s soul and enhanced her sense of calm.
If she returned to Rome, she would never learn anything more of her blood father. Her daughter would remain in ignorance of her true heritage. Antonia’s marriage would be a sham and her life a lie.
To save Gawain she would do all that and more. But was this the right path for her to take? Was this truly her destiny, to continue to deny the past and blight the future with yet more fabrications?
Or was her place by Gawain’s side, ensuring the truth prevailed? Not simply the circumstances surrounding her birth. But the deeper truth of the mysterious people—my people—who were the scourge of the empire?
The Druids.
“Would you crucify me, Seneca, for my foreign blood?”
She saw her father press his hand against his heart, but her focus was on the praetor. His jaw tensed, the only outward sign of his thoughts he allowed himself.
Finally, he spoke. “No.”
Antonia took a deep breath. The time for deception by omission was over. “Would you truly crucify the only man I’ve ever loved, because of his foreign blood?”
“What man?” There was a note of fear in her father’s voice, but for once she ignored him. Her eyes never left the praetor’s. When he had given her the ultimatum before she’d blindly believed it, too terrified that Gawain’s life was in danger to question the praetor.
But now she did question. Now, when he was fully aware that Gawain was the man she loved, the man she was prepared to sacrifice her happiness for, she demanded an answer.
She wouldn’t allow him to bask in the delusion that he was saving her from an ill-advised liaison or fanciful infatuation. Such tactics could work on a naïve fourteen-year-old girl. But not on a woman of twenty-five.
The praetor’s nostrils flared. “You would give up everything—to be with him?”
Everything but her daughter. And yet, if she could be with Gawain, she wouldn’t be giving up anything.
But the praetor didn’t need to know everything. “I would.”
Silence reigned. She knew the praetor was doing it deliberately, hoping to unnerve her enough so that she would break the silence by saying something unwary. But the strange sense of peace still cocooned her and she was content to wait for the praetor’s response.
It was her father who eventually broke the deadlock.
“Antonia.” There was a heartbreaking catch in his voice. “Think of Cassia.”
Before she could respond, the praetor drew in a harsh breath and flung her father a look that suggested he had taken great offense to the comment.
“I was charged to come to Camulodunum and hunt down any Druids who had sought sanctuary within the city. I captured the leader, his followers scattered and the threat to the empire has been eliminated.”
Antonia’s heart thudded against her ribs. Was the praetor granting her freedom?
“You are to be congratulated, Praetor.” Her father’s gaze was fixed on the other man. “The emperor will be well pleased by the news.”
“I imagine,” the praetor said, looking at her father, “there will be no need for me to remain in this primitive province much longer.”
He’s setting me free.
“You will be glad to return to civilization, I have no doubt.” Her father refused to look in her direction and appeared eager to usher the praetor from the room. For a fleeting moment, her gaze clashed with the praetor’s. She saw his Roman pride, the arrogance of countless generations. And she also saw a glimpse of desolation for a future that would never be his.
As her father followed the praetor from the room, she took a deep breath. She had to return to Gawain. Explain she was now free to go with him.
To the land of the Picts. Caledonia.
Unease knotted her stomach. Would he be willing to listen to her, after the terrible things she’d said to him?
Her father stepped back into the room and closed the door behind him.
“What man?” His voice was hoarse and once again she heard the fear in his words. “What have you done, Antonia?”
“He is Gawain.” She wanted to tell her father that Gawain was a Druid. But it wasn’t her secret to share. “I love him, and if he will take me back I’ll follow him wherever he leads.”
“No.” Her father gripped her hands. The fear vibrated through his body and she knew that he’d guessed what Gawain truly was. “I forbid it. Do you hear me, Antonia? I forbid it.”
“He’s my destiny,” she whispered, as tears prickled the back of her eyes. Her father had never really had the woman he loved, because of a Druid. And now Antonia knew he feared losing her, because she too had fallen in love with a Druid. “Please give me your blessing, Father. But I have to go to him. I have to tell him how I really feel.”