Chapter 10
TEN
Francesca stared balefully at the ring and realized it was going to be a very long night.
She’d never been to any sort of martial arts match before, mostly because she had absolutely zero interest. Understandably, she was fairly invested in that night’s events, but that didn’t mean she liked it.
The massive basement of the rented mansion had been turned into a lavish arena, including stadium-style seats and the VIP area that’d been built to house — and display — her.
She was sandwiched between Maxine and the white-painted priest who’d blessed the Games.
Easton was somewhere down by the ropes, schmoozing and doing whatever it was the organizer of this sort of thing was supposed to.
There were a lot more people than she’d been led to believe would show up.
“How many contestants are there?” she whispered into Maxine’s ear. Her eyes scanned the crowd, searching for a dark head of hair with a single stripe of white.
“Only eight,” her friend explained, pointing to the far end of the room. A cluster of huge, shirtless men and their suit-wearing handlers gathered there. “But the actual contestants won’t be fighting. They choose a proxy to do it for them.”
Francesca made a face. “Why? I thought the whole point was to prove how tough you were? Someone else doing the fighting for you seems to defeat the purpose a bit.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn about vampire society,” Maxine informed her.
From someone else that might’ve come off as mean, but with Maxine, it was simply the truth as she saw it.
“Nothing matters more than prestige, and nothing is more prestigious than being able to pay someone to fight your battles for you. Kings have been doing it for thousands of years.”
“I don’t see any kings,” she wryly noted.
“And you shouldn’t, no matter what any of them say or what they try to do to prove that they’re important.
” Maxine pointed a silk-covered finger at the group of fighters.
“This is the syndicate, Frankie. It’s full of hotheads, hotshots, and hot pieces of shit.
If you keep that in mind and you look after yourself, you’ll be okay. ”
Beginning to doubt that more and more, Francesca chose to change the subject. Nodding to the crowd beginning to take their seats, she asked, “Do Games normally bring in this many spectators? I thought this was sort of a hush-hush thing.”
“It is, but nothing stays a secret for long in this city. A small portion of people come to watch it for sport, while the rest are here to make money.”
Floundering a little, she wracked her mind trying to figure out how that would be possible. “Gambling?”
“Mostly.” A bell rang through the speakers in the ceiling, briefly interrupting Maxine’s explanation.
When it died away and everyone began to settle into their seats, she continued, “People bet on who’ll win, obviously, but also other things.
Who’ll cheat. Who’ll take a dive. Who’ll be murdered before they get to the ring.
Other people are here to make valuable connections.
It’s not often that you’ll get so much of the syndicate elite in one place, so it’s worth showing up even if you don’t have any skin in the game. ”
Who’ll be murdered before they get to the ring? A sick feeling swirled in her stomach.
She was startled when the priest laid one cold, dry hand over hers. Looking up into his veiled, painted face with its red circles, she found him staring avidly into the crowd, as if he couldn’t wait for the violence to start.
“They know the risks,” he glibly informed her. “Grim blessed the Games, and that means she might choose to take her share when the time comes. Don’t let it twist your panties.”
She gave the priest a strange look. “Death shouldn’t trouble me?”
He patted her hand. A wide smile split his made-up mask, showing off teeth not quite as white as his makeup. “Not when she’s got as fine a pair of breasts as our fair goddess.”
Francesca extracted her hand from beneath his. “I can see why you were picked for this.”
“Round one: Tiana Hoffman versus Dan Singh,” a smooth voice called out over the speaker system. “Contestants and spectators, please take your places.”
Happy to have something to distract her from the priest, she shifted a bit toward Maxine in her seat and looked toward the ring. A part of her was relieved to see that it wasn’t Luis up there, proxy or not, and another part of her grew more tense in anticipation.
What if he loses? What if he wins?
She still had no idea what she dreaded more.
Even learning a bit more about the dangerous man she’d rejected, she flinched at the idea of him being hurt.
He’d always been kind to her. Gentle, even.
It was impossible to square that man with the one who’d be fighting in that ring for a chance to drink her blood.
Two large men slid under the ropes and faced each other in the center of the ring. Their feet were bare, and they had neither gloves nor wraps on their knuckles. There was no safety equipment to be seen at all, actually.
Leaning close to her friend, she asked, “What are the rules?”
“First to draw blood wins,” Maxine answered, her voice rising above the gathering roar of the crowd in the tight space. “No fangs. Everything else is on the table.”
The fighters, whose broad backs were painted with the initials of their patrons in white, tapped knuckles before they stepped back a few paces. Wincing despite the fact that a punch hadn’t even been thrown yet, Francesca asked, “Don’t vampires have claws?”
Maxine rested her head on her hand. Smoky eyelids falling low like she was already bored of the spectacle, she answered, “We sure do.”
A whistle shrieked through the speakers. Francesca jumped, her nails digging into the arms of her chair, and swung her head back around to watch the ring. The crowd boiled with movement and jeers as the vampires danced around each other, testing their reach.
They didn’t hold themselves quite like she expected them to. Their arms were loose, their fingers half-curled, and their heads lowered as they prowled the ring. The first hit wasn’t what she thought it’d be, either.
The large man with the initials TH on his back swiped at his opponent’s face. It was too far of a reach, though. His claws would never make contact. That, she realized, hadn’t been his aim.
When his opponent dodged, one long leg snapped out to hook his foot around the back of the other man’s knee. DS lost his balance and tumbled backward. The crowd surged as TH lunged for him, only to see him narrowly roll out from under the man.
It was, she realized, a very scary game of dodge.
There was some appeal in the anticipation of the dance. Every time one of the men took an opening, she held her breath, fully believing that this would be the one to end the bout — and every time the other managed to dip or dance out of harm’s way.
She even found herself enjoying the athleticism of it, right up until she didn’t.
DS had the advantage, having gotten his opponent into a corner, and both men were beginning to show the strain of the fight.
It had to be over soon, with DS appearing to be the likely winner.
What she learned, however, was that putting oneself in the position to win also put one in a position to lose — badly.
Just as DS went for the win, his claws extended toward TH’s face, the other man ducked, shot out an arm, and raked his claws down his vulnerable belly.
Francesca didn’t gasp. She didn’t even blink. She froze as the crowd jumped from their seats, their roar of approval shaking the walls as a man’s bowels spilled out like earthworms onto the floor.
They wriggled as he collapsed onto one knee, then listed to the side to smash into the mat. Blood pooled around the pink tubes stretched out from what’d once been a perfectly normal stomach, now split like TH had simply pulled a zipper.
Bile rushed up the back of her throat, scalding it, as the announcer excitedly called out, “A win for Tiana Hoffman! Next match: Raphael Bray and Anthony Hood.”
A small fleet of staff rushed into the ring to pile Dan Singh’s proxy — and his entrails — onto a stretcher.
He was carried away in what felt like the blink of an eye, leaving more staff to quickly clean the mat of his blood.
Tiana’s proxy didn’t stick around to watch.
He ducked out from under the ropes and strolled back to where the contestants waited.
Francesca tried to trace the wounded proxy’s path through the crowd, but it was nearly impossible in the crowded space. Her voice trembled when she asked, “Is he going to die?”
“It’s possible,” Maxine answered in a tired voice.
She turned her head woodenly to look at her friend, half expecting to see a horrifying boredom in her expression. But Maxine didn’t look bored. She was watching Francesca, her expression blank but her eyes full of a knowing kind of sadness.
I tried to warn you, those eyes said.
Francesca looked away. Her shaking hands found their way to her lap and became the object of her focus. Luis is going to participate in this? The thought made her want to hyperventilate.
She’d only taken Easton’s offer because it sounded fairly straightforward.
A few people throw some punches, someone wins, and she gives blood to them for a month.
It hardly seemed as dramatic and dangerous as Maxine and Luis had implied, and even if she’d taken their warnings seriously, she didn’t think she could’ve imagined it would be like that.
She just needed money to help her parents and find her sister. Doing something a little shady didn’t seem so bad when her motivation was pure.
But this wasn’t shady. This was bloody.
A mixture of shame, humiliation at her naivety, and familiar guilt curdled her blood.
She hunched in her seat as prickles spread across her skin.
Clammy and fighting to keep the small amount she’d eaten down, she barely registered the gloved fingers squeezing her wrist. “There are healers on staff,” Maxine promised over the sounds of the crowd settling. “If anyone can help him, it’s them.”
Francesca nodded, but she didn’t look up again. Her eyes stayed firmly on her knotted fingers as the next fight commenced.
When the crowd whipped themselves into a frenzy, she squeezed her eyes shut and counted to ten. And when the announcer called out the next match, she was unaccountably relieved to hear it wasn’t Luis.
He won’t be fighting, anyway, she tried to reassure herself. He’ll have a proxy. He’ll be safe.
But that didn’t make her feel that much better. A life was a life, and to lose it for some stupid game and an even stupider blood type made her want to vomit.
She didn’t look up again until, inevitably, his name was called.
“Next match: Luis Amauri versus Theresa Barton!”
Despite her best efforts to pretend like she wasn’t there and none of this was happening, Francesca’s eyes flew open. She hadn’t been able to find him before and she quickly realized why that was. He hadn’t come down to the basement with the rest of the contestants.
There was a moment of confusion when Theresa Barton’s proxy entered the ring alone. A buzz went through the crowd. Speculation no doubt ran rampant through the gamblers as everyone searched for the Amauri.
In hindsight, she should’ve expected him to make an entrance. And she never should’ve expected him to play by the rules.
The crowd went quiet as the doors behind the other contestants opened.
A man who looked almost identical to Luis save for his lack of beard stepped out first, completely dressed, and was followed by a darker skinned man in a pin-stripe suit.
His appearance sent the crowd into a flurry, but he meant nothing to her.
And then there was Luis.
He emerged from the darkness with a wild grin, his tuxedo jacket, shirt, and shoes missing. The other contestants parted for him, their faces a mix of surprise and annoyance as the spectators lost their minds.
Her ears rang as she watched him duck under the ropes.
No, no, no.
He wasn’t supposed to fight. He was supposed to have a proxy. Those were the rules.
She’d sat on a couch and laughed with that man. She’d listened to him talk about building his baby cousins a “mansion in a tree”. She’d daydreamed about him and kissed him and cried over him even though it was ridiculous.
The thought that he might die because of a choice she’d made was utterly intolerable.
Francesca lurched from her seat, driven by instinct to stop this nightmare before it could begin.
Maxine snatched her arm and held her back from charging toward the ring.
Still, she refused to sit back down. Her eyes remained locked on his shirtless back and the bloody tattoo that wound its way up from his right forearm, across his shoulders, and down the opposite side of his neck.
Luis spun on his heel to find her. Standing before his opponent, he lifted his chin and pressed his fingertips to his lips for a kiss.
The whistle blew.
There was no sound for her. Everything but Luis was blotted out. She didn’t notice Maxine’s grip or the roar of the frothing crowd or even her own discomfort as every muscle in her body strained with tension.
Luis moved not with grace but with palpable electricity. His body snapped from one place to another like lightning strikes. Even when his hits didn’t land, they made a different kind of impact. His opponent balked every time Luis drew near, often over-correcting until he nearly stumbled.
Even when his opponent nearly managed to get a hit in, Luis was so quick that he could effortlessly dodge at the last possible second. Francesca was certain that for the crowd, it was an absolutely thrilling match to behold.
For her, it was a nightmare that didn’t end until the arc of blood sprayed the ring. It dripped down his chest and arms when he turned back to find her again. His dark eyes fixed on hers.
Lifting his bloody claws into the air, he mouthed, “Two to go.”