Thawed Gladiator: Sulla

A soldier with one last shot…
Former Army Major Reid Blackwood has survived combat deployments and a career-ending betrayal by the commanding officer who set her up to fail. What she can’t survive is watching her father lose the medical care that’s keeping him alive.

Winning the TV show Elite Crucible—thirty days of survival challenges in the brutal Scottish Highlands—is the only option she has left.

Win the money. Get home. Resist him.

…a gladiator who woke from the ice with everything left to prove…

Ever since Sulla was thawed after two thousand years in the frozen sea, he has fought to become something other than the cruel bastard he was in ancient Rome.

The men he once treated without mercy remain skeptical. Forgiveness isn’t something they’re ready to grant.

So Sulla treats redemption like training: daily, deliberate, and without excuses.

In the Highlands, he meets the one woman who makes every punishing mile matter—enough to race across a collapsing bridge rather than watch her fall.

…and a partnership built one act of trust at a time.

Rope bridges over ravines. Freezing river crossings. Forty-eight hours of pursuit in darkness. Cameras everywhere.

Somewhere between brutal challenges and sharing body heat through freezing Highland nights, Reid stops being Sulla’s partner and becomes more important to him than any prize.

For a man who believes he ruins everything he touches, letting himself love her feels like the cruelest risk of all.

Thawed Gladiator: Sulla is a high-heat, forced proximity, survival challenge, redemption romance in the Awakened from the Ice series by USA TODAY Bestselling author Alana Khan.