The arena went silent. I wanted to die. I wanted to charge the pit myself, tear at Dominic with my nails, my teeth, my useless, fragile body. But my knees buckled, and I hung there, draped over the rail, watching the end approach.
Dominic prowled the length of the pit, savoring it. He barked once, a sound of pure triumph. He padded to where Menace lay and nudged him with a paw. Menace didn’t move. Not even a flinch.
Dominic circled, jaw open in a wolf’s grin, waiting for applause. He turned his back to the body and raised his head to the gallery, inviting them all to see the victor.
That was his mistake.
Menace didn’t get up. He lunged straight from the ground, legs splaying out behind him as he rocketed forward and up, catching Dominic’s back leg in his jaws and yanking with everything left in his ruined body. The crowd erupted. Dominic went down hard, Menace following, jaws locked on the hock. He twisted. I heard the snap from fifty feet away.
The black wolf howled, and Menace didn’t let go. He climbed up the body with his teeth, inch by inch, working through muscle and tendon, until he was at Dominic’s throat. This time, he didn’t miss.
He bit down. The bite was obscene, an arterial spray that painted both of them red. Dominic thrashed once, then twice, but Menace hung on. I screamed, everyone screamed, and the blue flames in the torches went wild, shooting high into the air.
When it was done, Menace let go and staggered backward. He limped, dragging the dead leg, and the whole left side of his face was an unrecognizable mask. Dominic’s wolf twitched, then went limp. Blood puddled beneath him, soaking into the sand.
The crowd was dead silent, except for the sound of Menace’s breathing, which was ragged and shallow and desperate.
I screamed again, this time wordless, the sound echoing off the pit walls. Menace swayed, then collapsed, his body stretched out next to Dominic’s corpse. He didn’t move.
I stood there, not breathing, not moving, waiting for him to get up.
He didn’t.
Ittook eight seconds after the final kill for anyone to move. In that time, I counted every place Menace had bled, every place the sand was stippled with something vital and unrecoverable. I counted my heartbeats too, but they didn’t line up right, skipping and doubling in a pattern that felt more like malfunction than rhythm.
Menace’s wolf lay stretched out in the dirt, a white pelt ruined to pink, the left eye swollen shut, and the right still faintly open. I watched for the breath, the twitch, the twitch that meant he hadn’t died at the finish line. It came eventually—a convulsive jerk, as if the spirit inside him had to be cajoled back by the world’s most belligerent paramedic.
He shifted slowly, agonizingly, as if every cell had to be dragged one by one from the animal to the man. There was no drama to it, no shuddering glamour, just a blur of pain and an anti-climax of bone and skin. He came out raw and naked, his body mapped in bruises and bites, a fresh set of claw tracks scored down his chest. He made it to all fours, then one knee, and then finally to his feet. The crowd was still silent, but the white noise of horror was starting to leak in around the edges.
Bronc was the first to break protocol, jumping from the box seat to the edge of the pit. He vaulted the rail and was at Menace’s side in seconds, draping a Council-branded robe over his bare shoulders and half-carrying him toward the stairs. Juliet was there too, her arms outstretched, her face a mask of incredulity and bone-deep relief. They flanked him, bracing him, the three of them a battered tangle limping toward the arena’s exit.
I found my legs then, and I ran. The moment I hit the stairs. I got to Menace as they reached the top, and for a second I didn’t know what to do. Hug him? Collapse at his feet? Just stare? In the end, I did all three. I wrapped my arms around his ribs, felt the wet heat of his blood soak the front of my clothes, and then slid boneless to the ground, clutching him and sobbing into the meat of his thighs as we stood at the edge of the arena.
He grunted, the sound closer to a laugh than a scream, and ran a hand through my hair. “Red,” he rasped, “you’re getting me all sentimental in front of the fucking Council.”
Juliet pulled me up, set me on my feet, and looked into my face like she needed confirmation the world was real. “He did it,” she whispered, shaking her head. “He actually fucking did it.”
I nodded, not trusting my voice, and pressed my face into Menace’s neck. I felt his pulse, erratic but alive, and tasted salt and iron where I bit him by accident.
The crowd was finding its voice now. There were cheers, yes, but also gasps and the low, ugly rumble of the Council’s own guard, who lined the perimeter and bristled at the sight of their champion’s death. There was a second, deeper layer to the noise, too—a kind of animal yelp, sharp and panicked, as the scent of fresh blood reached the balconies. If you’d never heard a room of supernaturals scent a kill, you don’t know what fear is.
We barely made it two steps before a klaxon sounded and the whole arena went pitch dark. Spotlights slammed on, blinding everyone, and the big screens above the pit flickered to life, showing a blurry security feed. For a second, I thought they were going to replay the fight. Instead, the camera zoomed in on my father, Declan, standing in a cold stone room with a witch beside him.
The sound cut in, echoing around the chamber: “You promised he would win,” Declan hissed at the witch, voice shaking with more than just rage. “You said the mutt would never survive him.”
The witch’s face stayed calm. “I promised a temporary advantage, Your Grace. I made it clear to Callum—your son, as he explained so forcefully—that the magic would wear off with time. I cannot control your daughter’s betrothed’s incompetence.”
A gasp ran through the gallery. They were broadcasting the evidence of cheating, and not even the most loyal bastard in the room could deny it.
The video cut to another feed—Callum, my brother, in a hallway with the same witch, handing her a fistful of gold and a vial of what looked like my own blood. “It’s hers,” he hissed, “straight from the source. Use it.”
The video cut again. Declan, pacing, ranting: “If the Council discovers this, you are dead. We all are. Is that clear?”
The screens went dark. The house lights snapped back on.
All hell broke loose. Council members shot to their feet, some shouting, others turning on each other, a few openly laughing. The East’s seats emptied in a slow-motion exodus, the faces in those rows tight and ashen. At the head of the dais, the Councilwoman banged her gavel, the sound useless against the chaos.
Amid all this, I was still holding Menace, half-sobbing, half-laughing. We’d won. We’d actually fucking won.
