“Rafe’s been gone longer. Years, sometimes,” I told him, trying to reassure him, but we’d both looked in Rafe Creed’s eyes before. He was a void. A dark abyss stitched in skin. He wasn’t a man anymore, and it got worse with every time he was sold.
Kane was on his way to being Rafe’s mirror. We both knew it.
“I think…” Thorne hesitated. “Arden, I think I have to ask Viktor to have me trained.”
“No,” I said. The word cracked out of me. “No.”
He wet his lips. “If I can convince Viktor that Kane and I would make more money as a package deal, then my brother wouldn’t have to be sold off alone. Please, Arden. If it were Leah, what would you do?”
I squeezed my eyes shut, my next words poison. “I’d do the same,” I whispered.
And I know Kane was his brother. I know that. I guess part of me, though, was hurt that he didn’t offer to make the deal with me involved. He’d decided in that moment to leave me in that house, to the Buyers.
“When?” I asked hoarsely.
Thorne shifted against me. His grip tightened against my waist like he knew he was seconds from losing me, losing us—at least, that version of both. “Kane is meant to leave by the end of the month. I’m going to ask Rafe to start training me tomorrow morning.”
“He isn’t going to train you, Thorne,” I said, my heart breaking. “He’s going to put you in that fucking courtyard to fight for your life, andmaybeif you survive long enough, he’ll put a good word in with Viktor. Are you really willing to risk your life for this?”
“This?” Thorne asked. His green eyes were nearly black in the crawlspace. “Kane is all I have.”
I felt so…small. “You can’t think of one more thing?” I asked, breathless, tears burning in the corners of my eyes.
Thorne sighed. “Arden, you know how precious you are to me.” He shook his head. “Fuck, I don’t know that I’d be alive if it weren’t for you. You’re sobright. Like my little burning flame. If I thought I could make you part of this deal, I would.”
My eyes narrowed. “What? You think I can’t hold my own in the courtyard?”
Thorne gave me a serious look. “Even the younger boys have more muscle mass than you, Arden. You’d be killed in a heartbeat.” Then he pushed my curls behind my ear with a frown. “But it’s more than that. The courtyard isn’t just about not dying; it’s aboutkilling. There’s no way forward without taking a life, and that’s one thing that Viktor hasn’t taken from you. I’m not going to be the reason that he finally does.”
“You haven’t killed either,” I argued. “You’d be losing just as much.”
“No, Arden, I wouldn’t be,” he said, his lips pressing into a sad smile. “I don’t have half the light you have.”
Light. He said it like it was some kind of power, like it meant something, but the fact of the matter was itdidn’tmean anything if I lost the very people who gave me a reason to stay bright. Leah had already started to drift away. We were close, but not in the way we used to be. She kept her head down more and more, and I could see it in her eyes—a bit of resentment. I’d been her reason to not escape, and since I proved myself so good at stealing with Thorne, Viktor rarely let her leave the house anymore. I’d taken her chance at escape without meaning to, and the thing is—I think she would've left, even without me, if she was given the chance, and if I could see that in her eyes, Viktor could, too.
I couldn’t lose Thorne. I just couldn’t. You have to understand. I’d had nothing for so long. The barest of kindnesses made me glom onto them. My very being intertwined with anything that gave me an inch of hope. I was a starved animal, really, and people like Leah and Thorne? They weren’t human to me. They were fucking masterpieces—made to come into my life and present me with different ways of breathing. They taught me how to take air into my lungs without panic, and I’d never known that. Can you just imagine that fora moment? Yeah, I was desperate, but wouldn’t you be? I didn’t want to do what I did next, but I fuckingneededto.
The next morning I pulled on jeans, a tank, and my battered converse. Then I made the trek to the courtyard, my rusted switchblade from my tin of treasures trapped in my palm. I passed Leah on the way, but she said nothing to me. She only managed a firm nod when she glanced down and saw the blade. I guessed she’d already seen the boys and Thorne come through. No matter the distance in our friendship, Leah knew I wasn’t going to lose Thorne without a fight.
Sunlight spilled across the courtyard. Kane was already there, stripped to the waist, his body a map of bruises and half-healed cuts. He leaned against the wall like a soldier waiting to be deployed. So far, that was the closest I’d ever been to Thorne’s brother. I’d been only half-right that they had the same eyes.Kane’s were green, but without the black flecks that made Thorne’s so dark, they were unnerving in their intensity. His face was striking despite the damage with high cheekbones, a nose broken more than once but somehow made sharper by it, and a jaw cut clean as glass. His mouth tilted naturally into a cruel but somewhat playful smirk. He looked both ruined and perfect.
Unlike Thorne’s dark hair, Kane’s was blond, nearly white where the sun struck it, sweat-damp at the roots, curling just at the nape. The brightness only made him look sharper, colder—every bruise and scar cut deeper into the marble of his body, as if he’d been carved to endure punishment and still stand beautiful. Stamped across his right bicep, bold as a brand, was the word CREED. No script, no flourish. Just blocky black letters, uncompromising. It wasn’t art. It wasn’t choice. It was a warning, and it left no question who he belonged to.
Then there was Rafe.
He stood in the center of the courtyard, silent as always. He had his back to me, CREED stretched huge across his shoulders. It was carved so large that it erased anything else he might have been, all of his othertattoos fading away as my eyes narrowed on the word. Kane nodded toward me approaching, and Rafe jerked around. I stopped in my tracks, my grip tightening on my switchblade.
It had been almost four months since I’d last seen him. He’d only just returned from one of Viktor’s Buyers, and whatever scraps of him had still looked human when I was fourteen and he was sixteen were long gone. He was bigger, harder, the bulk of his shoulders straining against skin crawling with dark florals, snakes, barbed wire, motifs of guns, some random initials, and what looked to be a fresher set of ink near his right peck of a sparrow. His hair, once long enough to fall into his eyes, had been shorn close, severe, but it was his eyes that made my stomach twist. They’d always been dark, but now they were bottomless, black pits, as if every time he’d been sold, another layer of him had been carved out and discarded.
His gaze narrowed on my switchblade before he jerked his eyes back to mine. God, the look he gave me—I almost walked away. It completely stopped my heart, my throat cinching tight. I expected him to beannoyed, maybe angry, but I never expected grief. Pure fucking sorrow and defeat. He knew exactly what it meant that I was choosing to step into that courtyard.
Thorne was there, too. Shirtless. Blade in his hand. He had a black eye blooming as he glanced over, curious over Rafe’s distraction, and I swallowed when his face contorted. There were so many emotions that passed over Thorne in that one moment, but fear was the one that stuck.
There were other boys there, all of them practicing basic combat until they saw me—not just a girl but aDoll. Besides Leah, Thorne and the few guys on the thieving crew, no one had really seen me in anything other than pristine dresses and a painted face. There wasn’t a ton of overlap between those who worked the theft routes for Viktor and those who were sold in the courtyard. A few did a double-take, their brows pulling together as they tried to make sense of me beingme.
I forced myself to stand a little taller. Then, ignoring everyone else, I strode to Rafe. The other boys had stopped moving, blades and practice pistols lowering. Even Kane had gone still, his grin thinning as his gaze darted between Rafe and me.
I stopped just inside the circle of space that seemed to belong to him, close enough to see the sweat slicking his chest.
