Beasts of the Eternal City

Previously

…As they moved away from the arena's grisly spectacle, the roars of the crowd fading behind them, Archius carried the echoes of the arena with him. He carried the terror of the condemned, the savage hunger of the beasts, and the cold, calculating cruelty of the Emperor Valerius. He was a soldier, trained for war, but this was a different kind of battlefield, a war of survival in a city of nightmares. And he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that his escape would be a bloody, desperate fight. The Eternal City had shown him its teeth, and he was determined to bite back.