Chapter 12
When consciousness returns, it comes in pieces.
First, sensation: a dull throb across my back.
I'm lying on my stomach on something soft.
A mattress, perhaps. Fabric brushes against my cheek—clean linen.
Then smell: herbs, leather, metal polish.
Then noise: something like grinding metal, and a distant, guttural rumbling that sounds like it emanates from some primal beast.
I push myself upright in a cold sweat—or at least I try to.
Pain sears across my back at the abrupt movement, like something pulling at healing flesh.
The events that passed before I lost consciousness rush back to me in a terrifying, unwanted flood, then settle on me like a dead weight.
None of it was a nightmare. It was all real, and I am still a prisoner of the Ironhold, now locked in the room of a gladiator who owns my life.
I peel back the sheet which still covers part of my body with trembling hands, taking stock of myself. My tunic is completely gone. In its place are bandages wrapped around my torso. Who took off my top? Who bound me in these?
I feel sick and try to move again, more slowly this time, shifting my legs off the single bed and feeling the touch of cold stone beneath my bare feet.
I push myself up to stand and feel the sheer weakness of my limbs.
I don't trust my legs to hold my weight.
For how long have I been unconscious? My parched mouth makes itself known and I scan the chamber desperately for a pitcher of water.
One stands on a small service table on the opposite side of the chamber.
I cautiously leave the safety of the bed frame and stagger over to it, quickly catching the support of the nearby wall with one hand.
That's when I notice it: something peculiar about the wall. Something I realize now how much I’ve missed. A window, just a small, narrow thing, but a window nonetheless and a glimpse into the world beyond these walls.
Judging by the muted light, it’s either early morning or evening, and this room must be high up, because the view stretches for miles.
I see the dry scrublands that we crossed in our convoy here, and beyond that, a haze of dark gray and the occasional flickering of orange.
The Lower Wards, which naturally circle the empire’s gleaming capital like a puddle of mud, where all the dirt and dust scrubbed from the glamorous Crown City flows to and accumulates—until it is time to purge it.
A convenient location for the empire’s game fuel, even if it isn't pretty to the eye.
The lock clicks, and I twist as the door swings open.
Zeriel fills the threshold a heartbeat later, a brown-wrapped bundle in one hand, a ring of keys in the other.
His dark brown eyes catch on me across the room, momentary surprise flashing before his face hardens.
His clothes are stained with blood, his skin damp as though from the training yards. Perhaps it is evening, then.
“What are you doing?” His voice cuts, low and sharp, as he slams the door shut behind him.
I bristle at his accusatory tone, achingly aware of how fragile I am before him now.
“What does it look like?” The words scrape from my throat in a hoarse croak.
He drops the bundle onto the table with a heavy thud. “Sit,” he says.
“I’m not used to taking orders from strangers,” I shoot back. My legs tremble with exhaustion, but I refuse to give him the satisfaction of seeing me collapse.
His gaze flicks over me incredulously. “Do you want to undo everything the healer just did for you?”
That catches me off guard. A healer. Someone has been here, tending my wounds. They must have been the one who stripped my shirt. My eyes dart toward the bed, wavering for a moment, but then my thirst wins out. I lunge toward the water jug instead.
Mistake.
Pain flares white-hot through my back as my knees buckle. I brace for stone, but it never comes. A fighter always anticipates movement. Zeriel’s hands clamp around my arms, strong as forged steel, arresting my fall. The jolt still rips a groan from me.
“Stop fighting me,” he mutters, hauling me bodily across the room and forcing me down onto the bed. He strides back, pours water into a cup, and returns. He presses it to my lips, his eyes daring me to defy him. Pride falters against thirst. I drink greedily, cool liquid spilling down my chin.
“Slow,” he warns, voice edged with command. “Or you’ll make yourself sick.”
When I finish, he sets the cup aside and unwraps the brown bundle, producing a metal container.
The lid hisses faintly as he opens it, steam curling into the air.
He pours the contents—thin soup—into another cup and presses that toward me.
I swallow a few mouthfuls of the salty broth before grimacing and pulling back. “What is that?”
“Food,” he snaps. “Be grateful you’re getting any.”
“How long have I been unconscious?”
“Two days.” He rummages through a cupboard. “You developed a fever. The wounds were infected.”
I draw a breath, steadying the rasp in my throat. “Why did you claim me?”
His shoulders tense, just slightly—a tightening only someone watching closely would notice. For a moment, silence stretches, taut as wire.
Then, at last, he turns.
His gaze locks on mine—sharp, assessing. Somehow, the silence is worse than any reply.
“Well?” I press, my voice brittle.
He exhales, as though my question is beneath him. As though I’m beneath him for asking. “Because, despite how utterly unimpressive you seemed, Four-Three-Seven… I suspect you might be marginally less useless than the rest.”
The retort dies on my lips as he turns away. In one fluid movement, he strips off his shirt, tossing it aside.
Broad shoulders taper into a powerful back, every muscle defined, moving with the effortless grace of someone who knows exactly how dangerous his body is.
The lines of him are sculpted in lethal symmetry—bronzed skin stretched over corded strength, scars crisscrossing like runes of survival.
He looks like a figure carved from old stone, too perfect, too mercilessly honed.
But then I see them.
Twin ridges of scar tissue curve from his shoulder blades downward—symmetrical, raised, ugly against the beauty of the rest of him. Not the chaos of battle wounds. Not the randomness of an accident. These scars are deliberate, surgical. A punishment.
Wings.
He once had wings. What kind, I can’t tell.
Storm fae, dusk fae, one of the aerial courts that ruled the skies?
I picture them unfurled—great and terrible, shadowing the ground like stormclouds.
Now gone, severed clean. Not taken by combat, but, if I had to bet, by decree.
By the empire. Hacked from him like a warning to all who dared defy law.
It feels obscene. Wrong. To take a creature like him—born to command the skies—and pin him to the dirt.
And yet, even mutilated, he is overwhelming.
My gaze drifts along the broad sweep of his back, the ridges of muscle shifting, the lean taper of his waist. My pulse hammers, traitorous, heat rising through me at the sheer maleness of him.
The scars don’t diminish him. Somehow, they make him more dangerous… more compelling.
“What’s your problem?” he mutters, his back still to me. “Never seen a man before?”
His lower garments drop, and his nakedness knocks the breath from me. I’m suddenly, acutely aware of my own vulnerability. Barely dressed, weak, trapped in—
He briskly strides forward, through a doorway I hadn't noticed before, partially concealed behind a hanging tapestry. The sound of running water hits my ears, and the door clicks shut behind him.
I release a shaky breath, staring at the place he stood. No, I haven’t. Not one like that. “At least, not one so full of himself,” I manage aloud.
Still, my heart doesn’t stop racing. His casual indifference feels deliberate, designed to provoke, to remind me of my place.
My gaze flicks around the chamber, searching for something—anything—to anchor me, but every detail only reminds me where I am: the shelves heavy with scrolls, the gleam of blades on the walls, the too-soft bed that doesn’t belong to me.
The hiss of water seeps beneath the door, accompanied by the scent of soap and heated stone.
Steam coils outward, curling through the room like ghostly fingers.
I try to steady my breathing. Think clearly.
But it’s pointless. Even if I had the strength to stagger out, I wouldn’t make it ten steps before collapsing—or being caught and dragged back to Voss.
The water ceases.
The door swings open, and Zeriel steps out as though wreathed in mist. A single towel hangs low around his hips, baring the sharp lines of his lower abdomen, water beading and tracing over the ridges of his chest. His black hair is slicked back, revealing the carved planes of his face—harsh, unyielding, beautiful in a way that makes my stomach knot.
He crosses the room without hesitation, moving to a wardrobe and pulling on a fresh tunic and leathers.
“Better?” he asks at last, not glancing my way, fastening his belt.
“Better than what?”
“Better than wondering if I was going to ravish you where you lay.” His tone is matter-of-fact, almost bored, as though voicing an obvious truth. “Your terror was practically screaming across the room.”
Heat burns up my neck. “I wasn’t—”
“You were.” Now he turns, gaze locking on me. “So let me make something clear, Four-Three-Seven. You’re here because you might be useful. Nothing more. I have no interest in damaged goods.”
The words strike sharper than I want them to. “My name is Veyra,” I snap, forcing my voice past the tightness in my chest.
“Your name is whatever I decide it is.” He tosses the discarded towel over a chair, then draws it closer and sits, facing me directly. “You’re the champion’s ward now. The champion’s property. The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be.”
“The champion’s ‘property’ for what?” The words tear out before I can stop them.
He leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, the lamplight catching the layered browns of his eyes. “You connected with an ashblood,” he says. “One of the most volatile, lethal breeds in the Ironhold. It should’ve torn you apart.”
The chamber feels suddenly smaller. A connection like that isn’t something to admit—it’s something they execute you for. Nothing about it should be useful.
I force my voice steady, though my pulse thrums like a trapped bird. “Yet it didn’t.”
“No.” His eyes narrow slightly. “It responded to you. Which means it saw something in you worth responding to.” He tilts his head, studying me. “That’s troubling… for you. But interesting, for me. And rare. Very rare.”
“Interesting?” I echo, wary. “Elaborate.”
“Dragons don’t hesitate,” he says flatly. “They kill, or they die. That’s the law of the pit. Yet it spared you. You did something no other recruit has managed.”
The memory surges—molten eyes, searing heat, the air crackling between us. My pulse stumbles.
“I just didn’t want to die.”
“Is that why you bowed?” His voice lowers. “Out of fear?”
“As opposed to what? Dying gloriously for the empire’s amusement?”
The corner of his mouth twitches—not a smile, something darker. “You’ve got a mouth on you for someone clinging to life by a thread.”
“Dying tends to make me irritable.”
“Good.” The word comes out a growl. “You’ll need that spirit for what comes next.”
A chill ripples through me. “And what exactly is that?” My eyes narrow. “What possible use am I to a champion?”
He studies me in silence, long enough to make my skin prickle. Then: “The Emperor’s Tournament begins in less than three weeks.”
My chest tightens at the name. Everyone in Thalyris knows it. Not the common games—brutal enough on their own—but the grand spectacle that comes once every five years. Champions from every province. Lethal ordeals across multiple stages. A bloodletting masquerading as glory.
“And?” I press, though I already dread the answer.
“And I intend to win it,” he says simply, as if declaring that night will follow day. “But to win, I need—no, I want—an edge. Something no other champion has.”
He rises from the chair and closes the space between us, until he stands at the edge of the bed.
Understanding hits, cold and bitter. “Me,” I whisper. “Or rather, whatever you think I did with that dragon.”
“Precisely.” His honesty is knife-sharp, unflinching.
I bark a laugh, harsh and painful in my chest. “You’re insane. I didn’t do anything. The dragon was chained, disoriented. It was coincidence.”
“Was it?” He leans closer, shadows from the lamplight cutting across the ridges of his face. I inch back instinctively. His voice drops to a blade’s edge. “Then why did you bow to it? Why offer respect when every instinct should have told you to fight? To run?”
“I trusted myself,” I snap, forcing my gaze to hold his. “Something told me not to fight. That’s all.”
“Something told you,” he echoes, as though testing the weight of the words. His expression darkens into thought, calculating and unnerving. “That’s exactly my point. You have an instinct for dragons few others do. And I want it.”