“He’s not just clean,” I whisper. “He’s connected. Directly. This whole thing? It’s a blood economy. They make the fights look brutal, but they engineer the accidents. They put rookies against killers. Push hardware to failure points. And they harvest what’s left.”
Valtron turns slowly to me. There’s blood on his knuckles from earlier. It catches the light as he clenches his fists.
“I’m their favorite show pony.”
“You’re their distraction.”
Silence swells in the room, thick and sour.
“We can’t go to NovaCast,” I murmur. “Or the Arena Council. They’re too deep in Varn’s pockets. Hell, some of them probably are his pockets.”
“I know.”
I sit, my legs suddenly too heavy to carry the weight of what we just uncovered.
“They’re using you,” I say. “Using all of you.”
Valtron stands there, rigid and coiled, like the rage is stitching itself into his bones.
Then, slowly, his voice comes—low, gravel-thick.
“Then we tell the others.”
I blink. “What?”
“The gladiators,” he says. “The other fighters. The ones who put their lives on the line every time they step into the pit. If they knew the arena was a front—if they saw what you just showed me—they’d burn this place to the ground.”
I blink. “You think they’ll believe us?”
“They’ll believe me.”
He says it like it’s a fact. Like gravity. Like war.
“Val—”
“They trust me,” he growls. “I’ve bled beside them. Fought with them. Buried friends with them. You show them the truth, and they’ll rise.”
“And then what?” I ask. “We start a riot? A revolution? Turn the arena into a battlefield?”
He looks at me, eyes burning gold.
“We bring the war to the arena floor.”
My breath catches.
The heat of it. The inevitability.
He doesn’t blink.
“This time,” I whisper.
He nods.
And I finish the sentence with him.
“We finish it.”
CHAPTER 23
