4. Kaelor #6
Elbow back the moment she's grabbed, connecting before he can adjust. Already twisting, knee driving up, screaming with everything her lungs have.
She doesn't stop moving for a single second.
All that will and fury poured into a body that was never built for this, against an opponent twice her mass who processes pain differently.
She fights like it might actually work. She fights because stopping isn't in her, because she cannot help but to.
My chest fills so fast and so completely that for a moment the blood and the cold creeping into my hands become entirely secondary.
I have never admired anything the way I admire her right now.
But she cannot win. And she doesn't.
Khaedren drags her back across the platform. Her screaming fills the chamber. I watch it from the ground and I cannot move.
Then Khaedren does something that reorders everything.
He reaches down and offers his hand to Varketh—who must have collapsed after striking me across the head. Varketh takes the hand and stands.
Between them passes something that is not quite a look and not quite a nod but carries the full weight of an arrangement made long before either of them stepped onto this platform.
And everything falls into place.
They planned this. In whatever dark they came from, before the round started, they made a deal. They knew I was the greatest threat to either of them and they decided to team up against me.
The tells had been there, no doubt. But I had missed them because I was watching her instead of watching them.
The guilt of that lands on top of everything else. Heavier than all of it combined.
Varketh staggers over to me and peers down at me. He takes his time with it.
"Don't worry," he says. "We'll take good care of her."
I don't answer. I don't even look at him.
I find Olivia.
Still fighting—less leverage now, running on fury instead of strategy, but still moving, still pulling, still screaming.
And in the middle of all of it she finds me too.
Our eyes lock and everything else falls away.
The noise. The heat. The blood cooling beneath me, the cold climbing through my hands.
The volcano grumbling below. All of it contracts down to that single line of sight between us.
Her face is streaked with tears cutting clean tracks through the ash and grime. Her eyes are bright with the grief of someone who is not ready and is refusing to be.
I make myself smile. I don't know if it reaches my face the way I mean it to. I can feel less than I could a few minutes ago. With my lifeblood draining out of me the way it is. But I hold her eyes, and I mean every word.
"Come back to me," I tell her. “Come back.”
Varketh raises his arms—those enormous fists locked together, all that mass gathered to a single descending point.
I don't look away from her. I keep my eyes on her face, the exact shape of it, the way the firelight catches in her eyes, the way she looks at me like I am something worth the grief she is already carrying.
She screams my name, though I do not hear it.
And the arms come down.
“OLIVIA!”
I come back screaming her name.
There is no countdown. No cold mechanical voice. No hiss of pressurized release. One moment there is nothing—and then I am here, upright in my pod, voice already tearing from my throat before I've even registered where I am or what happened.
The silence that follows is the worst thing I have ever heard.
For a moment I don't move. The pod is dim and quiet, and the stillness presses in from all sides like something solid.
No ash. No magma. No roar of the volcano climbing toward its peak.
Just the pale, humming dark of the terminal chamber, and my own ragged breathing, and the slow, horrible realization that I am still alive .
I actually died. I know it the way I know my own bones—the certainty sits in me like cold stone. I died on that platform. And now I am here.
It should feel like nothing. In the Games, death is a door, not an ending. I've known this. I've been through it before. The body resets. The memory stays. You wake up and you are more or less whole, and the round begins again.
Except I am not whole.
I reach back. My hand moves carefully, finding the place low on my spine where Khaedren's claw went in—where I felt myself come open, felt the warm flood of it, felt my strength start the long slide toward gone.
The skin is intact. There is no blood, no wound, no breach.
But the ache is still there. Layered and deep, a throb that radiates outward from the center like a bruise on the inside of something vital.
Not pain exactly. More like a memory of pain.
Like the tissue healed over but forgot to tell the nerves it was finished.
I press my palm flat against it and breathe.
Then the full weight of it lands.
Olivia.
My Olivia.
I reach for the bond between us… but it’s no longer there. Gone.
The memory of her scream hits me like the blow did—from behind, before I can brace for it, all the force of it going directly into the part of me that has no armor.
I hear it again the way I heard it the first time: her voice breaking across the chamber, breaking across my name, breaking across everything I failed to do.
I can still see her face through the heat and the ash and the dying—the way she looked at me when Khaedren dragged her back. Like I was something worth grieving .
I push myself upright. My legs take my weight but barely, and I brace one hand against the pod wall and stay there a moment, just breathing, just letting the chamber stop tilting around me.
The ache in my back pulses with my heartbeat.
My head still carries the ghost of Varketh's blow—a dull, distant pressure behind my eyes, like a storm that hasn't broken yet.
I look around.
Two of the other pods are occupied.
Syrox first—the Ash Venter, coiled and watchful in the pale glow of his pod, those colorless eyes already tracking me.
He is still, the way he is always still.
Strategic stillness. The kind that is not rest but calculation.
He was dead before the third platform shudder, and the Games brought him back as they bring everyone back—healed well enough to continue, but not wholly.
There is a faint clouding along the membrane of his left eye, and the mottled skin at his throat, where I drove my elbow into his windpipe in the second round, has gone the deep, wrong color of something improperly healed. Scar tissue. He will carry it forward.
He watches me with exactly the expression I expected: not shame, not regret, not grief.
Just analysis. He is already calculating the next round, already measuring what I lost on that platform and how he might use it.
He betrayed his last alliance in under three hours.
I know because I was there when he did it.
Thren is in the next pod. Larger than I remembered, somehow—or perhaps it's the closed space making it worse.
The Meteor Shifter takes up his pod the way a weather system takes up a room, that massive, plated body all contained angles and dense mass.
He paces. Two steps, turn, two steps, turn, the motion repetitive and rhythmic and not entirely sane.
His plates—the dark, overlapping ridges across his shoulders and down his forearms—have cracked in several places, the underlying tissue visible as raw seams, and one of his upper limbs hangs at a fractional degree wrong.
Partially healed fracture, I would guess. He doesn't favor it yet. But he will.
He doesn't look at me with calculation the way Syrox does. He looks at me with something rawer. Something that wants to assign blame and has already decided where to put it. His pale, flat eyes track me through the glass and stay there. His jaw is set hard, and he paces.
I turn away.
I don't care what either of them think.
There is only one thing I care about, and she is down on the platform right now, alone, with Varketh and Khaedren. The thought of it is enough to make my vision go dark around the edges.
I know what happens when there are two males left and one female.
I know because I've watched it happen. Because the Games have no mercy for the slow or the uncertain, and Varketh has never been either. He will not wait. Khaedren will not wait. There is a relic to activate and they will do whatever it takes to activate it, and she?—
She will not consent. I know her well enough to know that.
Every atom of her is made of refusal and resistance and the fury of someone who has decided that nothing will be done to her that she hasn't chosen.
She will fight. She will fight until she has nothing left, because that is who she is. And then…
And then .
Then they will force her to consent. Eventually.
I stop the thought.
I drive my fist into the pod wall.
The glass doesn't crack. It doesn't even vibrate. It absorbs the blow the way it absorbs everything—perfectly, completely, without any indication that it felt anything at all. But I don’t do it to break it. I do it to break a part of myself.
I do it again. Both fists this time, harder, a rhythm of impact that does nothing to the pod and everything to the bones in my hands.
I know it's pointless. I know the architecture of these pods better than I know most things—they are built to contain males exactly like me, exactly at this moment, and no amount of force I can generate will so much as scratch the surface.
But the rage has to go somewhere.
I hammer at it. Fists, then forearms, then the flat of my palm over and over against the glass, and I hear myself making sounds that I don't fully recognize—somewhere between a roar and something broken, something I don't have a word for. I’ve never been this angry, this desperate.
In the other pods, the noise stirs something.
Syrox uncurls slightly, watching with that flat precision.
Thren stops pacing. His low, rattling growl starts somewhere deep in his chest and builds, and then Syrox hisses, and the chamber fills with the sound of three animals in glass boxes, none of whom can do anything, none of whom have any power, none of whom?—
I press my forehead against the pod wall and stop.
Breathe.
The glass is cold against my skin. I close my eyes.
I think about all the ways I failed her.
I think about how I saw Khaedren's eyes flick over my shoulder—that tiny, fractional tell—and how I still wasn't fast enough.
I think about the blow landing, the platform coming up, the trail of blood I left across the stone.
I think about lying on my back looking up at Varketh's face and knowing it was over.
I think about Olivia pressing her hands against my wound with that look on her face, that look she gets when she is trying to hold something together through sheer refusal to let it fall?—
She was trying to save me. While I was dying. She was still trying.
After I had already lost. Already failed her.
The guilt is not clean. Clean guilt would be easier.
This is layered—it has history in it, old scar tissue from a version of me who entered the Games before and didn't bond and told himself that was fine, that survival without attachment was its own kind of winning.
I know better now. I understand now what the Games cost when you don't fight for the right thing.
She will mate with one of them. That is the mechanics of this.
Someone will activate the relic, and consent is required, and they will find a way to get it from her—through exhaustion, through terror, through the cruelty of taking away every option until only one remains.
And she will have to make that choice, not because she wants to but because I wasn't enough.
Because I let myself get flanked. Because I forgot, for half a second, to watch Khaedren.
Half a second.
I drive my fist into the glass again, once, hard, and then I stop.
The rage comes in waves. I let it come. I don't try to contain it or redirect it into something useful because there is nothing useful here—there is only the pod and the chamber and the other males and the long, terrible wait, and somewhere out there the volcano climbing toward its peak. And somewhere out there, Olivia.
I told her to come back to me. To reset before they can take her.
The ache in my back pulses. My hands are marked from the glass. I lean my forehead against the pod again and I close my eyes and listen to the silence. I wait, her scream playing over and over in the space behind my ribs. I can't stop it, and I don't try.
I just breathe.
Come back to me , I’d told her.
I meant it as a request, as a prayer. Maybe it was the only honest thing I've said in the lives I've lived inside these infernal Mating Games walls.
End your life, Olivia. Please. Reset and come back to me.