Chapter 2
RAYEK
The basalt cliffs sweat in the dark, their black stone weeping salt and moisture under the pressure of Akura’s evening heat. I strip my jacket off and sling it across the hook nailed crooked above the doorway, where the heavy iron hatch leads down.
No guards or sensors. Just a retinal scanner buried behind a rusted panel and the stench of blood-soaked sand waiting below.
The fight club’s not officially sanctioned, of course. Chamberland would never admit something like this seethes beneath its borders. But everything festers when it’s sealed too tight. I need it. The noise. The hurt. The release.
I press my palm to the scanner. It clicks. The door hisses open with a sigh like a dying animal.
The stairs spiral into shadow, thick with heat and the musk of too many bodies and too little air. Somewhere below, a crowd roars. It sounds like wolves ripping something apart.
I wish they’d rip me.
At the bottom, the hall opens wide and dim, lit by flickering strips that strobe like damaged stars.
The walls are metal, scorched and dented, every surface sweat-slick.
The stench hits harder here—blood, oil, burnt ozone from malfunctioning shields.
And something else. The copper tang of anticipation.
“Rayek,” someone grunts. One of the attendants, a tall, grim human with a face like cracked stone. “Didn’t think we’d see you again so soon.”
I say nothing. Just nod once and strip the rest of the way down. Combat trunks. Wrists wrapped in nanoweave.
The ring’s not really a ring. It’s more of a pit, sunken and circular, surrounded by roaring bodies stacked up to the ceiling. No rules. No time limit. No mercy. First man down loses consciousness—or their will to keep breathing.
Tonight, I don’t plan to lose.
Not because I want to win.
Because I don’t want to feel.
The announcer’s voice blares overhead, static-filled and frantic. “In this corner, hailing from the Odexen jungles of Gratha Four—Thraag! Nine and oh, four-time skull breaker, three-time crowd favorite!”
The pit shakes as the Odex lumbers out, tall even for his kind—eight feet of bristling muscle, purple-skinned and tusked. Spikes on his knuckles. Something wet and sticky drips from his mouth.
He grins when he sees me. Probably thinks I’m the warm-up act.
I drop down into the pit, feet sinking slightly into the blood-soaked grit. The door seals shut behind me.
“And in this corner,” the announcer says, voice dipping like he’s trying to sell a myth, “The Nightmare of Akura… the Reaper’s Bane… Rayek.”
The crowd erupts. I don’t hear it.
All I hear is her laugh. The way her lips curved when she teased me about losing. The sparkle behind her lashes when she said his name like it was just another chess piece she’d moved across the board.
Kaspian’s coming.
The Odex lunges.
I move faster.
He swings low—I duck and pivot, letting his claws scrape air. My fist slams into his gut, and I feel something shift inside him. Cartilage, maybe. Something important.
He grunts. Stumbles.
Comes back twice as hard.
I let him.
I let his fist glance off my jaw, let the pain wake up the parts of me that have gone numb. I taste blood. It’s warm and real and mine. Good.
He overcommits. Big mistake.
I slam my elbow into his throat. He chokes. I twist, grab his arm, yank it the wrong way until something pops. He howls. The crowd is a blur of limbs and mouths and noise I still can’t register.
I slam my knee into his side.
Again.
Her voice, her face—it won’t leave me. Her green eyes flickering when she leaned over the board. The smell of citrus and fire-wine in her hair. The curve of her mouth when she said it, like it meant nothing.
Like she wasn’t carving out my lungs with every syllable.
The Odex swings wide, desperate. I catch his wrist midair, twist it until he drops. My foot crashes into his ribs. He drops harder.
I climb on top of him, my fists like hammers.
One hit. Two.
He tries to block. I don’t let him.
Three. Four. Blood. Screaming. I think someone’s yelling my name.
I don’t stop.
I want to break him.
Not because he’s my enemy.
Because I can’t break her.
She’s choosing him.
She wants this.
She must.
Right?
My claws are out now. Somewhere in the haze I hear the referee screaming, trying to call it, to wave me off.
I don’t care.
Five. Six. More blood. It’s on my hands, my chest, in my mouth.
Seven.
“Rayek!” someone bellows. “Stop!”
I freeze.
Not because of the voice.
Because of the image that flashes behind my eyes—Star, on her wedding day, eyes downcast, lips pressed into a smile that doesn’t reach her soul.
I shove off the Odex like he’s made of ash. He twitches. Coughs. Still alive. Good.
Barely.
The crowd goes silent. Then the roar crests again like a tidal wave. They love it. Love the carnage. They don’t know I’m already dead inside.
I stagger out of the ring, chest heaving, blood soaking through the wraps on my knuckles. I don’t hear what the announcer says. Don’t care.
The silence in my mind now is worse than the noise.
She’s not mine.
She never was.
I don’t hear him yield.
Don’t feel the crowd pressing in, don’t register the buzzing of the emergency klaxon that usually signals someone’s about to be murdered live.
I’m still on him.
Still pounding.
Still trying to break something that isn’t the Odex’s face.
“ENOUGH!” a voice cracks through the air. It might be real. I can’t tell anymore.
My fists are slick. Blood runs down my forearms in warm, pulsing lines. The bastard’s barely conscious now, mouth bubbling with something dark and thick, but I’m not done.
Can’t stop.
Not until the ache in my chest dies, not until her name doesn’t burn when it echoes between my ears.
She’s going to marry him. Kaspian fucking Feldspar.
A boot slams into my side—not from the Odex, but someone else. One of the ring officials. Another pulls at my shoulder. My claws lash out instinctively, tearing a groove across someone’s vest.
Three more pile on me. One jams a shock-staff against my ribs and lets it scream.
Pain lashes through me in white-hot bolts, but it’s almost welcome. My vision swims. I snarl, deep and guttural, like I’ve reverted to something half-feral.
“Back! BACK!” someone’s yelling. “He’s lost it—don’t let him up!”
Another shock. My knees finally buckle.
The bloodied heap under me groans once. Then goes limp.
I breathe, or try to. My lungs fight me. My heartbeat is a war drum in my skull.
They drag me off like a wild animal—two humans and a Khuraxian, all grunting under the effort. My limbs spasm, muscles twitching in resistance even as I collapse under the weight of adrenaline and fury.
When the haze lifts, I’m in the locker corridor, slammed up against a wall like a misbehaving slave-pit dog.
A security guard with a data-pad glares up at me like I’ve just pissed on his ancestors. “You’re done,” he spits. “Indefinite ban. No fights. No re-entry. You’re lucky we’re not reporting you to the local enforcers.”
“Report me,” I mutter through a split lip. “Maybe they’ll kill me.”
“Don’t tempt me,” he snarls, jabbing a finger at my chest. “You’re a danger in the pit. We don’t need another casualty. One more step through that hatch and we shoot first, question later. Got it?”
I nod once. Just enough to make him back off.
They toss my jacket at my feet. My boots. My nameplate—burnt and cracked.
I don’t pick it up.
By the time I make it back to the surface, the cliffs are drowned in night. No moon. Just the shimmer of Akura’s rings far above, casting ghost-light on the rocks.
The wind is warm. The silence is colder.
I walk. Barely feel the weight of each step. My body’s wrecked—ribs aching, knuckles raw, shoulder seared from the shock rod. There’s a deep gash under my eye that leaks slowly, trailing down to my jaw like a tear.
But I don’t feel any of it the way I should.
It’s not enough.
It’s not her.
The barracks are still. The kind of still that makes silence feel like a living thing, draped across my chest, too heavy to shove off.
I lie on my back, staring up at the metal slats of the ceiling like they might part and offer answers.
They don’t. They never do. There’s just the hum of the base’s generators buried somewhere in the rock beneath Chamberland, the low buzz of artificial light pulsing behind my eyelids every time I blink, and the sour taste of blood I haven’t bothered to clean off my tongue.
I should be asleep. I should be healing.
But my body refuses. My ribs ache with each breath, and the cracked skin on my knuckles throbs like the echo of a forgotten war drum.
Still, that pain feels almost sacred. It’s the only thing reminding me I’m still alive.
The rest of me feels buried. Left behind in that ring.
Or maybe in the courtyard before that, when she said it like she didn’t even realize she was saying it.
Kaspian’s coming.
I don’t even know what I expected. She's royalty. I’m her guard.
It was never a question of if—only when.
But it still landed like a blade to the gut.
I didn’t see it coming, and worse, I didn’t even react.
I just let the words sit there. Let them take root.
Let them choke me quietly while she smiled like the sun didn’t just go out.
My hand slides across the nightstand, finds the shape I know better than my own scars.
The bishop. Not even a piece that gets much attention.
Not a queen or a knight. But when she gave it to me, she said it reminded her of me—straight-laced, quiet, stubborn, always a few moves behind because I was “too noble to cheat.” I told her she was full of shit and took it anyway. I've kept it ever since.
I close my fingers around it, let the sharp wooden ridges dig into my palm. It’s just a joke. A gift. Something meaningless.
But it’s her. It smells faintly of the oils she uses—something with ginger and Akuran blossom. The scent clings to it, no matter how long I’ve had it. I don’t know if that’s memory or madness.
I squeeze harder. My claws press out, threatening to crack the wood, but I hold. Just barely.
She belongs to someone else. She always has.
I’ve known that since the day they brought me here and told me to keep her safe.
She was barely eleven then, a spark of wildfire in riding boots, demanding I let her climb the stable walls just to see if she could.
I’ve been her shadow ever since, watching her grow, watching her turn from girl to woman, watching the lines between duty and desire get blurred so badly I can't remember where they used to be.
I am not supposed to want her.
Not her laugh or her clever mouth. Not her ridiculous temper or the way she smirks when she thinks she’s two steps ahead on the board. I’m supposed to guard her, nothing more. She’s meant to be his.
But the part of me that still dreams—traitorous and aching—can’t let it go. Not anymore.
I sit up slowly, every muscle in my back complaining, and lean forward until my elbows dig into my thighs.
The room is cold, but I welcome it. It keeps me grounded.
My breath fogs slightly in the air. I press the chess piece against my forehead and stay like that, breathing through the tightness in my chest.
Honor is what’s kept me alive. It’s what’s made me useful. It's why they didn’t put me down when I went feral after the war. But I’m starting to wonder if it’s not just a virtue—it might be a cage. One I’ve built myself. One I’ve locked from the inside.
I could have stopped fighting. Could have walked away from tonight before the officials had to drag me off. But I didn’t. Because I wanted something to hurt more than this. Because I wanted to lose myself so completely that the sound of her voice would finally stop echoing in my skull.
Instead, I made things worse. Got myself banned. Stripped of the only place I could breathe without her in the room.
Now all I have is this. These walls. These ghosts. This one stupid chess piece in my hand.
And the sick, slow realization that no matter how hard I fight, I can't protect her from the life she's walking into. I can kill Reapers. I can rip an Odex in half. But I can’t stop a wedding. I can’t make her choose me.
I lie back down again, still gripping the bishop, and stare up at the ceiling until my eyes blur. The light above flickers once. Then holds.
I close my eyes, and try not to dream of red hair and green eyes and a smile that doesn’t belong to me.