Chapter 16 The Pit Arena #2
Dom’s hand tightens possessively on my waist, steering me past Xavier’s knowing smirk.
These viewing boxes are reserved for Kian’s favored inner circle, men and women who’ve bought their way in with obscene wealth, dangerous favors, or secrets too valuable to waste.
A few, Xavier among them, secured membership by providing services the Blackwoods prize most: fresh bodies for the Pit, untraceable drug exports, and discreet medical care when the fights go wrong.
Membership doesn’t come with a badge but a binding. Magic woven into the contract that seals the tongue, twisting any attempt to speak of this place into static and blood.
I never needed an invitation or a contract.
Being Dom’s . . . whatever I am . . . grants me automatic entry into this world of controlled depravity.
Sometimes I wonder what these elite bastards, with their perfect public faces, would say if they knew an Ellis watched them indulge their darker appetites.
But that’s The Inferno’s true spell. In here, everyone sheds their masks, and no one beyond these walls will ever hear a word.
Dom doesn’t judge my fascination, he never has. Maybe that’s why I’m still here. In this altar of violence and pleasure, he lets me be the monster I’m becoming, and I let him be his.
“Betting closes in three minutes!” booms the announcer as we reach Dom’s private box. “Chen versus the Scorpid—place your wagers now!”
I lean against the railing, my heart slamming against my ribs as the wards flare to life.
The Rotvein Scorpid bursts into the arena, containment seals hissing as its chamber slides open.
I gasp. It’s breathtaking in the way a massacre is beautiful before the blood hits the ground.
Translucent veins pulse beneath its armored carapace, tail arched high, and dripping acid that hisses when it meets sand.
The crowd swells forward, feeding on the predator’s promise.
“Ladies and gentlemen of The Inferno, welcome to the Pit Arena!” The voice reverberates through my bones. “Tonight’s main event! Twenty-seven victories, sixteen by death. The terror of the Lower Rings, the man who turned desperation into legend . . . Marcus Blood-Breaker Chen!”
My fingers curl against the rail as Marcus steps into the arena. His ruby is massive now—gods, how many deathmatches did it take to earn a stone that size? His body is a map of brutality. Every scar tells a story of transformation, of a man who chose violence as his salvation.
“Looking good, Blood-Breaker!” Xavier calls, smug as a godling. “Remember our deal—take the tail first, make it suffer, and that Rift District apartment is yours.”
I hate him, loathe him even. The way he offers freedom like a prize, all while molding boys into weapons for show.
Dom’s hand slides back to my waist as Marcus stretches and cracks his scarred knuckles.
Power hums off him, thick and heady, and the crowd drinks it in like intoxication, worshiping his transformation.
His grin splits the night open, revealing the euphoria that only comes from learning to savor the taste of your own blood.
The Scorpid shrieks from the pen, demanding my attention. Even the handlers, with faces drawn tight from strain, look minuscule beside it. Acid falls in hissing arcs, scarring the sand, and I find myself counting the seconds until release.
Marcus approaches the barrier, fingers trailing along the surface until the magic ripples under his touch. His lips move in words too quiet to catch—prayer or curse, I can’t tell—but the hunger in his eyes makes it clear this isn’t a match to him. It’s a reckoning.
“Last chance to back out, Blood-Breaker!” Xavier calls down, his voice laced with mock concern. But Marcus’s smile splits his face, all teeth and promise, and Dom’s fingers clamp tighter around my hip as the barrier parts with a hiss of arcane seals.
The magic crackles across Marcus’s skin as he steps into the Pit.
The crowd’s roar builds into a low, guttural thunder.
I lean back against Dom’s chest without meaning to, caught in the pull of it.
When the Scorpid’s chains drop, the sound reverberates through the floor, and I realize I’m grinning too.
A voice that sounds too much like Rowe curls in my mind about the beauty of these creatures in their natural habitats, and how we corrupt everything we touch.
He would weep for this arena. But here, in The Inferno’s electric darkness, even that corruption has its own terrible allure.
The line between preservation and destruction blurs until I can’t tell which side I’m supposed to be on anymore.
This is why I never told my parents. Why Luna can never know.
Some appetites are too monstrous to confess.
The Scorpid lunges, chitin cracking with each snap of its frame, venom dripping thick across its fangs. Its pincers slam together in a rhythm that dares anything to come closer. The stinger arches overhead, a halo of poison that drips acid onto the sand, each drop hissing where it lands.
The crowd shoves toward the barriers but I hardly register them. Something’s wrong. As the Scorpid shifts, its body wavers at the edges, blurring in a shimmer of distortion. I blink, and the fracture is gone.
“Did you see that?” I whisper to Dom. “That shimmer around its core?”
His fingers dig into my hip in response. No reply, just silent confirmation. He wanted me to see this.
The creature strikes, its tail cleaving through the air, but Marcus is already in motion.
His ruby ignites as a shield bursts into being just in time.
Acid crashes against it, the sizzling sound making the crowd gasp.
My knuckles whiten around the railing, breath caught somewhere between awe and horror.
“Oh, you want to dance?” Marcus’s voice carries, sharp and manic. Blood sheets down his arms, and he spins through, each movement a performance of insanity.
“Look at him go!” someone shrieks behind me.
The Scorpid charges again, pincers slamming shut where Marcus’s torso had been seconds ago. He cartwheels clear, laughing as a spray of acid sears the air past his cheek. “Too slow!” he crows. “My grandmother hit harder, and she’s been dead a decade!”
I should be repulsed. I should look away.
But I don’t. I can’t.
I can only watch, transfixed, as the fighter I used to admire dissolves into myth and madness.
“Getting tired yet?” Marcus taunts. His tongue dragging across his lower lip, smearing blood. The gash over his brow streaks one side of his face in red, but his smile only widens. “I could do this all night!”
The crowd howls, and I flinch as the Scorpid’s pincer slams into his shoulder. The crack is audible. Blood spatters across the barrier, warm droplets painting my cheek.
I don’t wipe them away.
Marcus just laughs harder, something fractured glinting behind his eyes. “That’s more like it!” He grabs the pincer still embedded in his flesh, using it as leverage to swing himself onto the creature’s back. “Always wanted to try Scorpid-riding,” he shouts. “Cross that off the bucket list!”
The arena detonates in sound. Screams. Chants. His name, his legend, roared from a thousand throats.
Overhead, displays pulse with changing odds.
Marcus’s numbers nosedive the moment that pincer wrecks his shoulder, flashing crimson.
But as he mounts the Scorpid, riding it like some demented rodeo star, the numbers surge back in his favor.
Black ichor sizzles against sand as he carves his masterpiece of violence.
Every landed strike sends a new flare of data across the arena monitors, his survival rate climbing as the Scorpid’s armor begins to crack.
The crowd leans forward in their seats, their gasps of horror turning to applause as Marcus turns a brutal bucking into an elegant bow.
His ruby spasms with power as he shapes a blade of compressed light. “For my next trick,” he calls, launching off the Scorpid’s back in a blur of gore and glittering steel.
The crowd screams for him. For blood. For death. I lean forward again, caught in the undertow of their frenzy.
The blade tears through armor with a wet, grating rip that rattles my teeth, and the Scorpid shrieks, a sound too guttural and sentient to be mere pain. Acid hisses in arcs. Ichor splashes like black rain, and Marcus moves through it with absurd elegance, soaked and grinning.
“End it!” The crowd’s cry drowns out my thoughts.
Marcus charges in for the kill, and I hold my breathe. “Watch closely, my fans!” he shouts.
The blade punches up through the Scorpid’s soft belly, slicing straight through the exposed flesh. The creature convulses and Marcus’s cackling fills the arena. “Look at us dance! How beautiful we are when we—”
He cuts off.
The dying Scorpid’s body distorts, warping in waves that shimmer against the steel. Its edges ripple, then break, and the entire arena flickers as if reality itself just flinched.
This is wrong. This is very wrong.
“Fuck,” Dom hisses, then his voice rises sharp and commanding. “Clear the Pit! Toxic specimen protocol—now! Desert breeds release their venom at death. Seal the barriers!”
But I can barely hear him over my pounding heart and the crowd’s confused murmuring. Marcus is still down there, whirling through the haze like it’s stage fog, glistening with gore and venom. When his eyes find me, his blood-stained grin sends ice down my spine.
“Is that the lovely Miss Ellis I spy?” He sweeps into an elaborate bow. “Care for a dance, pretty girl? I promise I clean up real nice!”
Dom’s growl vibrates through my spine. “Get him out of there. Now.”
“Aww, come on, Blackwood.” Marcus twirls just out of reach of the advancing handlers. The crowd laughs nervously. “No need to get jealous.”
“Say one more word, Marcus.” Dom’s voice drops to a tense warning. “And you’ll find tomorrow’s match significantly more lethal.”
Marcus throws his head back and laughs. “Threaten me with death? Oh, I’m so scared!” He spreads his arms wide. “I create my own demise every night! The only question is,” his wink twists something in my gut, “how beautiful will it be?”
“Quite a spectacle,” Dom says, steering me toward the exit. The smile he wears never reaches his eyes, and the fingers at my waist twitch with barely contained tension. “Shall we find somewhere more private to celebrate that win?”
I let him lead me away, but my mind catalogs everything I just witnessed. I’ve been gone for two months, and The Inferno I left isn’t the one I’ve walked back into.
Scorpids don’t ripple like that. I know every classified species. I’ve dissected them. Studied their organs, their blood structures, their mana filtration systems. That shimmer was void hound biology.
So the real question isn’t just what I saw down there. It’s what else I’ve missed, and who’s counting on me to stay in the dark.