Chapter 13
The cheers thundered around her as Ellaryn pushed through the crowd, slipping into her usual position beside the King. Her heart hammered against her ribs.
His grey eyes flicked towards her.
Only for a moment.
Disdain hardened his features.
“You’re late,” he drawled, not even bothering to look at her again.
Ellaryn swallowed.
Before she could answer, the sickening crack of breaking bone echoed through the chamber, swallowed almost immediately by a roar of cheers.
The Ring of Darkness.
Cinder’s very own fight club.
“I know.” Ellaryn inclined her head, keeping her voice steady despite the knot tightening in her stomach. “Forgive me, Your Darkness. I overslept.”
The words didn’t touch him. Not even a flicker of acknowledgement swept over his eyes. He just stood, hands behind his back, head inclined at the carnage below.
Ellaryn steadied her eyes and watched the fight, despite the pit that formed in her stomach and the panic that latched onto her chest.
The Ring of Darkness was staged in the sparring house in the heart of the city, a pit of stone and smoke where blood soaked into the floor faster than it could ever be washed away.
It was one of the few reasons the King bothered to leave the castle at all.
He liked this—liked watching the dwellers tear at one another under the guise of sport.
Liked choosing fighters at random, dangling survival in front of them like a reward.
These fighters weren’t random, though. They were regulars. Adrenaline junkies who signed their names again and again, chasing the thrill, the cheers, the fleeting favour of a man who would never care whether they lived or died.
Ellaryn stood rigid in the viewing box beside the King, some of the chosen council and Chancellors, their position high above the ring, perfectly positioned to watch every blow land. Every crunch of bone. Every scream swallowed by the roar of the crowd.
Pain served as entertainment.
She kept her face carefully blank, hands still, posture obedient—while beneath them, the fight dragged on, and the King smiled like this was art.
The King clapped slowly, deliberately, his black gums and teeth bared in a grin as Raph raised his arms in victory. Teo was dragged from the ring, blood oozing from his ear, his face already swelling beneath a bloom of bruises. One eye was sealed shut.
Cheers broke out—sharp and hungry—while others fell quiet, shoulders slumping as lost coin changed hands.
“Next fighter,” the King demanded, peering over the edge.
No one moved.
This was the moment Ellaryn hated most. When the air thickened and the crowd remembered where they were.
The dwellers shifted on their feet, eyes dropping, bodies angling away from the King’s gaze as if that alone might save them.
This happened every time, she thought bitterly. And every time they still came. Hunger made courage out of desperation; coin was worth more than bones in a city like this.
The King’s eyes drifted purposefully towards hers, and Ellaryn’s stomach dropped.
“How about Cinders’ very own Ruin?”
His words were daggers.
She knew exactly why he had chosen her. Her punishment for being late had only just begun.
She inclined her head, forcing a smile onto her lips.
“Very well.”
There was no room to refuse. Not here. Not in front of everyone. Refusal would bring a punishment far worse than anything waiting for her in the Ring.
The crowd fell silent.
It was as though every person in the chamber had collectively held their breath.
“Excellent,” the King drawled as Ellaryn turned away before her expression could betray her.
She hastily removed her cloak, folding it over one arm before unsheathing her sword and handing it to the King. Her face remained impassive—calm, composed… Ruin.
Inside, her pulse hammered.
She descended the spiral steps into the Ring, and the moment her boots touched the floor, the crowd parted. Not a single person dared stand in her way. They knew what she was. Or, at least, they thought they did.
Ellaryn kept her chin high, and her shoulders squared as she stepped into the centre of the Ring, every eye following her.
Above, the King watched. Waiting.
Before her, the dweller cracked his knuckles, stretching his neck and jumping in place, shaking his already bruised hands out.
“Oh, I’m going to enjoy this,” He sneered as the shadow of his large frame stretched over her.
Ellaryn cocked a brow, a smirk tugging at her lips. “Likewise.”
But the words were only a performance. They were not her truth.
From a young age, she had been taught to compartmentalise—to separate her mind from her body, her fear from her actions. Fear could exist, but never where anyone could see it. It was tucked away somewhere deep, somewhere it could not make her hands tremble or her eyes widen.
And when pain came, she had learned to do the same.
Bury it. Grit her teeth. Keep moving—no matter how badly it hurt.
The man looked at her with a wolfish smile, copper teeth glinting beneath the torchlight, his bald head shining almost as brightly.
He was a bruiser—a regular in the Ring. Lean but heavily muscled despite Cinders’ meagre food rations. He won most fights he entered, not because he was particularly skilled, but because he was angry.
Angry at the world.
Angry at the King.
Angry at Ruin.
The only way he knew how to express that pain was to inflict it on someone else. His fury was like a balloon, swelling tighter and tighter until it finally burst inside the Ring in a spray of blood. And now, the King had handed him Ellaryn on a silver platter.
She didn’t blame him for being angry; Ellaryn was angry too. Perhaps that was what they had in common—two people carrying wounds they had never been allowed to heal, each finding different ways to make the pain someone else’s.
And maybe, just maybe, it was time for her own anger to erupt.
To spill out in a sea of red.
Ellaryn knew she could beat him. She had watched him fight before. Studied him, even. She knew the way he shifted his weight before a strike, the slight hitch in his shoulder before he swung, the way his temper always got the better of his technique.
He was strong—but he was predictable.
And predictability was weakness. Something Ellaryn could take hold of and bend to her advantage.
The bell sounded, sharp and deafening against the stone walls, and almost immediately the bruiser came for her, charging across the Ring with a roar that seemed to rise from somewhere deeper than his lungs, his heavy boots striking the ground with enough force to send a dull tremor through the soles of her own.
Ellaryn didn’t move. Not yet.
She watched him come, shoulders squared and hands raised, every instinct in her body screaming at her to prepare for the impact, but she forced herself to remain still, because she had seen this before; she had watched him fight from the shadows of the Ring, had studied the way his temper always overtook his judgement, the way anger made him faster but careless, stronger but predictable.
Three steps.
Two.
One.
At the last possible moment, Ellaryn shifted sideways.
His fist tore through the space where her face had been a heartbeat earlier, and before he could recover, she drove her elbow sharply into his ribs, feeling the solid resistance of muscle beneath her sleeve as the impact forced a grunt from him.
The crowd hissed. Ellaryn barely acknowledged them.
She turned to face him, rolling one shoulder as he stumbled past her, and allowed herself the smallest smile.
“Still enjoying yourself?” She taunted, her voice light despite the ache spreading through her ribs.
The dweller bared his teeth, his expression twisting into something feral as rage overtook whatever reason he had left.
This time, she saw the punch before it came, recognising the slight dip of his shoulder that always preceded his right hook, and she ducked beneath it, feeling the rush of air as his fist passed over her head before driving her knee into his stomach with enough force to fold him forward.
The breath left him in a harsh, guttural sound.
Ellaryn caught the back of his neck before he could regain his balance, using his own momentum against him as she hurled and sent him sprawling across the stone.
The crowd went silent.
For a moment, she stood over him, chest rising and falling, the weight of the King’s expectations pressing against her skin while somewhere above her she could feel his gaze fixed upon her.
She didn’t look up—she wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
The bruiser rolled onto his side and pushed himself upright, coughing as blood gathered at the corner of his mouth, and when he wiped it away with the back of his hand, Ellaryn noticed the smile that followed.
It wasn’t a smile of amusement… It was something uglier. Something unrestrained.
She barely had time to brace herself before his shoulder slammed into her chest, the force of the impact driving the air from her lungs as her feet left the ground and she was thrown backwards, her back striking the stone with a crack that sent pain exploding through her ribs.
For a brief, gruelling second, everything disappeared.
The crowd became nothing more than a distant chatter, the embers blurred into streaks of orange, and her lungs seemed incapable of remembering how to draw breath.
Then she heard him coming: boots against stone. One after another.
Slow.
Heavy.
Deliberate.
She revelled in it—the pain.
The way her heart seemed to lurch inside her chest before pounding harder, each beat reverberating through her ribs. The sensation thrummed beneath her skin, as though every cell in her body had been jolted awake.
She deserved this.
Pain, at a dweller’s hands, felt almost like penance.
She had grown accustomed to the strange calm that followed a blow—the fleeting stillness when the body was too busy trying to understand what had happened to do anything else. For those few seconds, there were no memories, no orders, no faces staring back at her from the past.
Only pain.
She saw him coming.
She could have moved.
She knew exactly where the blow would land, knew how to turn her body and avoid it, but she willed herself to remain still.
To take it.
To let the pain wash over her and drown out everything else.
Just one more hit.
Her muscles tensed as he closed the distance.
Just one more.
She wanted to feel something.
Anything.
The bruiser reached her before she could stand.
His hand closed around her arm, fingers digging into her flesh as he hauled her upright, and his fist came towards her face. Her head snapped sideways as his knuckles caught her cheek, stars bursting across her vision as the taste of metal flooded her mouth.
The crowd screamed with delight.
She staggered.
He followed.
“You’re not so frightening now, are you?”
Ellaryn smeared the blood from her lip with the back of her hand and studied the red staining her fingers.
He thought he had her now.
Thought the blow had been enough to end the fight, that pain had finally made her vulnerable.
He was wrong.
Ellaryn took the pain and bathed in it, letting it spread through her until there was nothing else she could hear, nothing else she could think about.
The sight of crimson staining her fingers should have unsettled her, but instead it brought a strange sense of calm. This was a feeling she knew intimately.
Pain knew her address.
It had always found its way back to her, no matter how carefully she tried to outrun it. In some twisted way, it had become a friend—familiar, dependable, almost comforting in its certainty.
Her heart had been pushed beyond its limits more times than she cared to remember, and her body had endured injuries far worse than a bruiser’s fist could ever hope to inflict.
This pain was nothing new.
It was simply another reminder that she could still feel.
But now, sadly for her opponent, the fun was over.
Ellaryn drew in a slow breath and narrowed her eyes on his with almost surgical precision, studying the minute shift of his shoulders, the tightening of his jaw, the way his weight settled onto his back foot.
There.
She knew what was coming before he even moved.
He swung.
Ellaryn ducked beneath the blow, catching his wrist as his fist passed overhead. She twisted sharply, using his own momentum to wrench him off balance before driving her shoulder into his chest with enough force to send him staggering backwards.
He stumbled.
She swept his leg from beneath him.
The bruiser crashed onto his back, the impact reverberating through the stone as the crowd erupted around them.
Before he could recover, Ellaryn was on him, one knee pressed firmly into his chest and her forearm braced against his throat, pinning him to the stone as he struggled beneath her.
The crowd fell strangely quiet.
She could hear his breathing. Could hear her own. Could hear the distant crackle of the fires surrounding the Ring.
The bruiser bucked beneath her as Ellaryn tightened her hold.
“Stay down.”
He did.
His face paled, his eyes fluttering shut as consciousness slipped from him, leaving him unresponsive to the world beyond the Ring.
Ellaryn rose, breathing heavily, and looked down at him for only a moment before turning away.
Then came the next fighter.
And the next.
One after another, they entered the Ring, and one after another, she put them down. By the time the final body had been dragged from the stone, her knuckles were split and swollen, her muscles trembling beneath the strain, and every breath scraped against the bruises blooming beneath her ribs.
There was nothing left to do but bind her hands in bloodied cloth and to rehydrate while the last of the crowd began to file out.
Ellaryn’s eyes drifted towards the dais, but didn’t meet the cold eyes of her owner. The King’s chair stood empty. Sometime between the first fight and the last, he had left.
She wasn’t sure whether the realisation brought relief or dread.
No… dread. It was definitely dread.