Tara made a last attempt at escape, but Tiberius simply shifted his weight, and Tara felt, to her horror, something other than a finger between her legs, something larger lingering at her entrance, the sensation being utterly intrusive.
“It’s mine”, Tiberius whispered again.
Then he moved with a grunt, and her world exploded in pain. She screamed, tried to claw at his face, tried to crawl away, but he had her pinned down, and when he moved, every thrust send waves of burning pain, shame, humiliation and regret through both her soul and her body.

It seemed to take forever, and when Tiberius finally finished with a groan and a shudder, Tara was drenched in cold sweat and hoarse from screaming. After sliding down off her at last he grunted in satisfaction but she turned away and curled up into a ball, whishing she could just die. She could hear Tiberius begin to snore, and with a sob, she let herself drop from the bed. She would not lie any longer beside this monster.

The hard ground was cold against her cheek, painful for her mangled body, but all that was meaningless. There seemed to be no end to her tears, and when she finally had cried herself into the sleep of utter exhaustion, images of Vincent, crucified and dying, kept haunting her even then.

x-x-x-x-x-x

“May I enquire as to why you are sleeping on the ground?”
Tara didn’t want to reply, but she knew he’d hit her if she remained silent. He might hit her anyway upon hearing her answer, though, but if she did answer, he wouldn’t have to threaten her with torturing slave girls.
“I do not want to lie beside you.”
Tiberius propped himself up onto one elbow and looked down at Tara’s naked form, curled up on the ground before his bed.
“Well, I’d say it is your loss if you’d rather sleep on the cold, hard ground instead of a soft, warm bed, but my pride feels hurt seeing you like this.”
“Your pride?”
“Come here.”

Tara swallowed a sob and laboriously gathered herself up. Once she had settled onto the bed, as far away as she could from his body, he turned onto his side and looked at her.
“You truly seem like an intelligent, ambitious woman, Tara. Tell me, did the thought truly never cross your mind that the Legion would spy on you?”
Tara swallowed. “It did. I was more or less expecting them to do so. What I wasn’t expecting was that they were able to strike. I though after Hoover Dam, hardly anything would be left. Or that they would take longer to be able to retaliate.”
“Yes well...” Tiberius played with a strand of her hair. “I guess if you had you wouldn’t have wandered off alone like that.”
Tara was too busy biting back her tears to reply to that.
“You know”, Tiberius went on, “...you still have a lot to learn about the Legion and the way our men are trained. Not many may be left of us, but those that are still impersonate every ideal of the Legion: Honour, strength and utter loyalty. Can you imagine that the one spy of whom we had all this vital information was a eunuch? For this duty alone he willingly had himself castrated to be able to perfectly impersonate a slave. No one would ever suspect him, would they? Would your warriors do the same for you?”