Chapter 24
Zazyrus puts Lethe behind him.
The movement is automatic. Instinctive. His arm sweeps back and Lethe is moved from his side to his back in a single fluid motion, tucked behind the wall of his body, shielded by the width of his shoulders and the reach of his arms and every inch of the muscle and bone and fury that stands between the boy and the men in the corridor.
Six armed men. Swords drawn. Crossbows braced. And Demos in front of them, ringed hands at his sides, his small eyes moving between Zazyrus and the space behind him where Lethe is pressed against his back.
Zazyrus catalogs the threat in the time it takes to breathe.
Six men. Two crossbows, four swords. The crossbows are the priority.
The bolts will fire before he can close the distance, which means the crossbowmen die first or Zazyrus dies with iron in his chest. The corridor is narrow, too narrow for six men to fight effectively, which means they will crowd each other and the swords will be a liability in close quarters.
The crossbowmen are in the back, behind the swordsmen, which means Zazyrus needs to get through four men with blades to reach the two who can kill him from a distance.
Demos is in front. Unarmored. Unarmed except for the knife on his belt that he uses for cutting fruit and threatening people who cannot fight back.
Zazyrus looks at him.
The pit lord looks smaller than he does in the cage.
Down in the deep kennels, with the torchlight and the bars and the power of ownership, Demos has a presence that fills a corridor.
Here, in the open, with his men behind him and his beast in front of him and the night air coming through the exit door at his back, he is a man.
Just a man. Short. Soft through the middle.
His cologne competing with the sour note of fear sweat that Zazyrus can smell from fifteen feet away.
He is afraid.
He should be.
"Come back, little lamb," Demos says. He is addressing Lethe, not Zazyrus. His eyes are trying to find Lethe behind the wall of Zazyrus’s body and his voice carries the particular tone he uses when he speaks to things he owns, casual and proprietary and underlaid with the threat of consequence.
"You know what happens when you disobey. "
Lethe goes rigid against Zazyrus’s back.
Zazyrus feels it. The full-body flinch, the involuntary contraction of every muscle, the conditioned response of a body that has been trained over six years to react to that voice with compliance because the cost of defiance has always been pain.
Lethe goes rigid and his hand, pressed against Zazyrus’s lower back, clenches into a fist in the fabric of his waistband.
The fist is not compliance.
The fist is fury.
"I said come here." Demos’s voice sharpens. The casual tone drops away and what’s beneath it is raw and ugly and afraid.
He is losing control. His most valuable fighter is free and his most useful possession is behind the fighter and the armed men at his back are expensive and frightened and the situation is not going the way he planned. "Now, Lethe. Before this gets worse."
"No."
The word comes from behind Zazyrus. Small. Quiet. Certain.
Demos blinks.
"No," Lethe says again. His voice does not break. It has never broken. Six years of unspeakable things done to his body and his spirit and his voice has held through every one of them, steady and clear and implacable, and it holds now. "No. I’m not coming back. I’m not yours. I was never yours."
The silence that follows is dense and absolute.
Demos’s face changes. The fear is still there, but something else rises through it, the fury of a man who has been told no by something he considers property, the particular, vicious rage of an owner whose possession has spoken back. His hand moves to the knife on his belt.
Zazyrus takes a step forward.
One step. The movement is controlled and unhurried and the ground seems to shift beneath it. Every man in the corridor recalibrates. The crossbowmen adjust their aim. The swordsmen tighten their grips. Demos’s hand freezes on the knife.
Zazyrus does not speak.
He does not need to. His body is the statement.
Six-foot-four and blood-soaked and radiating the calm, focused, absolute intent of a creature that has been planning this moment for weeks and has arrived at it with the full, undivided force of everything he is.
The broken chains on his wrist. The extended claws.
The tail, rigid and motionless behind him, the stillness of it more threatening than the lashing.
He looks at Demos and the look is a death sentence.
***
The fight is short.
Zazyrus moves and the corridor collapses into violence.
The first crossbow fires and the bolt passes through the space where his head was a quarter second ago because Zazyrus is already lower, already inside the reach of the first swordsman, and the swordsman’s blade comes down and meets empty air and Zazyrus’s hand meets his throat.
One.
The second swordsman swings. Zazyrus catches the blade with his palm, the edge biting into the calloused skin, blood welling, and he wrenches the sword from the man’s grip and drives him into the wall.
Two.
The corridor is narrow. The remaining swordsmen cannot spread out, cannot flank, cannot use their numbers.
They are packed together in a space too small for their weapons and Zazyrus is inside their guard, too close for blades, and at close range there is nothing in this pit or any pit that can match him.
Three. Four.
The second crossbowman fires. The bolt takes Zazyrus in the shoulder, punching through muscle, and the pain is bright and immediate and irrelevant. He tears the crossbow from the man’s hands. The man runs.
Five.
The corridor is silent except for the groaning of the fallen and the sound of Zazyrus breathing.
He stands amid the wreckage of Demos’s last line of defense, blood running from his palm and his shoulder and the wounds from the arena, and the bolt in his shoulder throbs with each heartbeat, and he does not care because Demos is still standing.
The pit lord has not moved.
He stands in the center of the corridor with his men down around him and his knife in his hand, the small, ornamental blade that he uses for fruit, and his hand is shaking and his face is white and the cologne and the wine and the ringed fingers and the proprietary voice and the six years of ownership and cruelty have come down to this: a man with a fruit knife standing in front of a beast who has just dismantled his entire world.
Zazyrus hits him once.
Open-handed. Controlled. Enough force to send Demos into the wall, the crack of his body against stone audible in the silence, and the knife clatters from his grip and skitters across the floor.
Demos slides down the wall and lands in a heap, his fine clothes twisted, his rings scraping stone, his face a mask of pain and terror.
Zazyrus stands over him.
His entire body vibrates with the need to kill.
Every nerve, every instinct, every month of banked fury and careful patience and the memory of bruises on Lethe’s skin and the sound of the quiet room not holding and the split lip and the swollen eye and the six years of three sharp knocks at the late bell.
It is all here. It is all present. It is screaming at him to finish this, to put his claws through the throat of the man who hurt the person he loves, to end it in blood and bone and the satisfaction of a debt paid in full.
He wants it.
He wants it with a purity that is almost beautiful, a need so clean and so complete that there is no ambiguity in it. Kill him. End him. Make sure he never touches another person. Make sure the three sharp knocks never come again.
His claws extend. His hand rises.
A hand touches his arm.
Lethe’s hand.
Light. Warm. Resting on Zazyrus’s forearm, just below the elbow, the fingers curling against the blood-slicked skin with the gentle, certain pressure that Zazyrus has felt a hundred times in a cage, on his wounds, on his face, in his hands. Not pulling. Not restraining. Grounding.
Zazyrus stops.
He looks at Lethe.
The boy is standing beside him. His bag is on his shoulder and the knife is at his belt and his face is pale and his jaw is set and his eyes are clear.
He is looking at Demos on the floor and his expression is complicated and controlled, the careful management of something enormous, and his hand is on Zazyrus’s arm and his touch is steady.
He looks up at Zazyrus.
"He’s not worth our freedom," Lethe says. Quiet. Certain. The voice that does not break. "Let’s go."
Zazyrus looks at Lethe. Looks at Demos.
On the floor, the pit lord stares up at him with wide, wet eyes.
His lip is split from the impact with the wall.
There is blood in his teeth. He is shaking.
He is small and broken and pathetic and he is the man who hurt Lethe for six years and the want to kill him is a living thing in Zazyrus’s chest, enormous and justified and ravenous.
Lethe’s hand presses against his arm. The pressure says: I know. I know what you want. I know what he deserves. Choose me instead.
Zazyrus chooses Lethe.
He lowers his hand. The killing intent recedes, not extinguished, not forgotten, but set aside, banked, filed in the place where Zazyrus keeps the things he will return to if he must. He steps back from Demos. He steps toward Lethe.
Demos makes a sound. Something between a sob and a word, muffled and wretched, and Zazyrus does not look at him. He is finished looking at Demos. He has spent his last moment of attention on the pit lord and the pit lord does not deserve another.
Lethe does not look at him either.
He turns from the man who owned him for six years with a finality that is more devastating than violence.
He turns away and he does not look back and the turning is a severance, clean and complete, the last tie cut.
Whatever power Demos held over the boy who walked into his chambers at three sharp knocks, whatever hold the pit lord had on the person called Lamb, it ends here. In this corridor. With this turning.
Lethe takes Zazyrus’s hand.
The blood between their palms has dried to a tacky warmth. Lethe’s fingers thread through Zazyrus’s and grip and the grip is fierce and sure.
They step over the fallen men. Past Demos, crumpled against the wall, bleeding into his fine clothes. Through the exit corridor. Through the door.
Night.
Cool. Dark. Enormous. The sky opens above them, vast and black and scattered with stars, and the air is cold and clean and tastes of salt from the harbor and smoke from the city and nothing, nothing at all, of blood and sand and stone.
Lethe’s breath catches.
The sound is small and involuntary and it contains everything.
Six years of ceiling. Six years of stone and lantern light and the closed, compressed underground world where the sky was a memory.
The sound is the breaking point between captivity and freedom, the moment where the body understands what the mind has been planning, and Lethe’s breath catches and his hand tightens in Zazyrus’s and his knees do not buckle because Lethe’s knees do not buckle.
Zazyrus’s arm wraps around him anyway.
They run.
Through empty streets. Past darkened buildings and shuttered windows and the sleeping city that has no idea what happened beneath its feet tonight. They run until the pit is behind them and the noise is gone and the harbor district opens up around them and the sea is a dark line on the horizon.
They stop at the docks. Breathing hard. The salt air thick around them. The stars bright above.
Zazyrus looks at Lethe.
The boy’s face is turned up to the sky. His eyes are open and wet and his mouth is parted and the starlight catches on his face and he is beautiful and free and shaking and alive.
Zazyrus pulls him close. Both arms. His chest against Lethe’s back, his chin on the boy’s head, his arms locked around the narrow shoulders.
The bolt in his shoulder throbs and the cut on his palm bleeds and he does not care.
He holds the boy and the boy holds his arms and they stand on the docks and look at the sea and above them the sky is open and endless and theirs.
"We did it," Lethe whispers. The words are small and wondering and cracked at the edges. "We’re out."
Zazyrus presses his mouth to Lethe’s hair.
They turn from the harbor. They walk into the dark. Together.
Behind them, the pit. Ahead of them, everything else.