Chapter 21
EMBERLINE
Stone scraped my knees as I fought my captors, my braid snagged in someone’s fist. They carried me out of my cell with the same casual cruelty they’d tossed me in here.
During the day, the scorched air of the Fossa was thick enough to chew, and up ahead of me, the roar of the crowd rose and fell like a wave—a hungry, desperate, feral tide.
I let them think I was weak.
Exhausted. Frightened.
Fear gave weaker males confidence, made them blind to the truth.
My body hung slack when they hauled me through the gate and into the ring; the Overseer was there, watching, and his smile told me he liked breakable things.
He would use this fight to sap my strength, and then, once he had me somewhere in the bowels of this hideous place, chained and helpless, the real games would begin.
But I’d been around males like him my entire life.
Perhaps not as soulless, but every bit as manipulative.
The guards dropped me, and I landed on all fours, breathing grit through my nose, counting my heartbeats like a steadying metronome.
One.
Two.
Three.
I’d trained for this. Practiced day and night for most of my life for a moment like this one. The size of my opponent didn’t matter. Big or small, bodies were the same. They all had their weak points, and I’d learned how to exploit soft tissue and joints to my best advantage.
I lifted my head.
The ring was a bowl of carved stone and shadow, walls slick with the two hundred-plus sweating, reeking bodies crammed in here. From down here, I couldn’t see Nico or Gabriel, but they were here somewhere.
That pale-eyed bastard would never let them miss this.
Backed by his masked guards, the Overseer stood at the center of a raised wood platform, his armor immaculate, as if the filth couldn’t touch him.
He leaned down, murmuring something to my husband.
The next moment, Dante moved, yanking all four soldiers forward, slamming his head into the Overseer’s.
The pompous bastard reeled back, and even from here, I saw the fresh gash across his forehead, dark blood seeping from his bruised temple.
I smiled, a flicker of good fucking riddance sweeping through me.
Then my chest tightened violently as I took in my husband. In the daylight, he looked like a skeleton, covered in dirt, dried blood, and seeping wounds. His broken leg didn’t look much better, still turned sideways, though the swelling on his face had gone down.
All except for the matching gash on his forehead.
But… I scanned the roaring crowd again until I found them.
Gabriel, his beaten face almost unrecognizable, and there, on the opposite side of the ring, Nico, his eyes as sharp as razors. He looked unharmed, but it was hard to tell with the press of half-naked, writhing bodies.
Still, relief hit me hard.
So far, we were all still breathing, so that was something.
With a squeal loud enough to wake the dead, the twin iron doors opened, and a monster stepped through. He was a wreck of a thing, skin held together with old scars and malice, yellowed fangs almost touching his chin.
In some ways, worse than I’d hoped.
In other ways… not as bad as I’d expected.
I took off my jacket and tossed it aside, stuffed my long braid down the back of my shirt. In retrospect, had I known I’d end up in a fight ring, I would have shaved my hair to my skull, but twenty-twenty hindsight and all of that.
Me and Mr. Monster sized each other up, and apparently, we were both happy with what we found. The Overseer made a predictably self-aggrandizing speech about the grisly future I faced. I tuned out his bullshit.
He was finished; he just didn’t know it yet.
Dante’s gaze snagged on mine. For one flicker of a second, his expression cracked—fear, horror—his lips moving with words I couldn’t hear over the crowd, and I drew a breath, wishing I could tell him everything would be okay.
I’d come here to save my husband, and I wasn’t about to fail.
The crowd’s chanting dulled into the low, pulsing hum of background noise. My senses narrowed until there was only the distance between me and my opponent and the incessant drag of the sand around my ankles, the entirety of my existence narrowing down to surviving these next five minutes.
“Look at you,” the monster drawled, voice as rough as gravel. His Italian was older than what I was used to, heavy with a dialect that gave every word teeth. “He doesn’t want me to touch your face, but the rest of you…” He ran those leering eyes up and down my body. “The rest of you is fair game.”
He lunged, and I stumbled. A fawn to his wolf, barely capable of staying away from his teeth.
He licked his lips. “You’ll scream when I pull you apart, eh?”
Then he moved. Fast, but I’d expected that, a massive wall of muscle bearing down on me with all the subtlety of a charging bull.
Vaguely, I heard Dante screaming instructions, but I was already twisting out of his path, feet barely skimming over the sand. All that momentum kept him hurtling past me, our eyes meeting for a fleeting second, head turned to just the right angle for me to strike.
My fist sank into the bottom of his jaw, a few inches too high, and there was more bone than I’d expected, but I hit him hard enough to send him reeling across the ring. He skidded to a stop.
The roaring crowd filled the space, shouts ringing off the stone, the Overseer looking like someone pissed in his beer.
Mr. Monster charged, heels digging into the sand, an unstoppable force I would be a fool to get in the way of. I stood my ground, practically offering up one hand, wincing when his fist closed around it with such crushing force. I used that leverage against him.
This time, my blow landed perfectly where it was supposed to, knuckles crushing cartilage, all my power behind the strike, his larynx splintering beneath my fist.
He staggered away, clawing at his throat, making the most delicious gasping sounds as he tried to breathe through his collapsed airway.
“Won’t work,” I murmured, circling him again, studying those calves as big as boulders. “And while you’ll eventually heal, cartilage takes longer to mend than flesh, so by the time you can breathe again, I’m afraid you’ll be dead.”
I’d been trained by a monster. Had lived among them my entire life.
I’d even married one.
Monsters didn’t scare me half as much as they should, and perhaps that would be my undoing one day, but not today. I knocked my right boot against my left ankle as I took my next step, a seamless move nobody would notice because they were too focused on the wheezing creature three times my size.
The scarred bastard curled one big hand into a fist.
The Overseer’s voice carried down from the platform, smug and bright. “Don’t bore us, little bird. Give us a show, I’m sure you can do better than dance around.”
That fucker. My mouth went dry for a second. Not because I was insulted, but because Dante heard it, and I could just imagine the depraved things that bastard had whispered to my husband today. Foul enough to earn himself that goose egg on his forehead.
I let the space shrink between us, watching muscles tense, tendons strain as my opponent came at me, still gasping for air, driven by ego and pride.
And then, when his weight shifted forward, when his stride lengthened, when he believed he had me… I moved.
A pivot backward, rolling to the side, my shoulders dropping low as his arm swept overhead in a crushing arc.
Then he was mine for the taking. As he surged past, I kicked out my right foot, cleaving apart that tendon running down the back of his leg. The point of the knife sticking out of the front of my boot gleamed red before I stepped back into the sand, and my opponent’s face changed.
Confusion first.
Then, pain, as his leg buckled as if someone had cut his feet out from under him. He went down hard, the sound of his body hitting the sand eclipsed as the crowd erupted.
Behind me, there was cursing—one of the guards.
Hopefully, the Overseer.
From the platform, all he would have seen was my opponent going down. Not how I’d done it. I stepped toward my downed foe, knocking my right boot into my left ankle once more, retracting the blade.
Funny, how these assholes only searched for the most obvious of weapons, when it was the smallest that caused the most damage.
Mr. Monster grabbed at his leg, roaring, trying to push himself up, but his leg was all but worthless. His wild gaze snapped to me, the first hint of fear flashing in his eyes as he tried to wheeze out a question. Or a plea.
Didn’t much matter.
“Gods, I’m glad I don’t have to listen to your whining. Now, you heard your boss. Let’s put on a good show. Come on, I’m sure you’re not finished. Let’s see what a big, bad male like yourself is capable of.”
He lunged from his knees, swiping at my ankles.
I stepped back. Calm. Patient. Careful.
Wounded animals did the stupidest things.
He tried to rise again, forcing all of his weight onto his good leg, using his arms to push himself upright. The wheezing was slowing, his windpipe healing, so I had better move fast.
He wasn’t quite balanced, but couldn’t stop himself from lunging, arms spread wide, intending to scoop me up and crush me against his chest. That’s when I made my second pass.
I moved in close, close enough to smell him—gods, did he reek—and with one quick tap, my other foot snapped out, same angle, other calf.
The second tendon ripped in half.
His scream tore through the ring.
The beast collapsed, both legs failing, all that muscle and might suddenly as worthless as his rage. He clawed at the sand, pulling himself toward me with just his arms, dragging the dead weight of his lower half behind him.
The prisoners were screaming now—gods, how this hideous place loved spectacle.
Because it wasn’t them on the sand.
It wasn’t them dying today.