I couldn’t help but smirk at her blunt admission. “No one does, honey,” I replied, a faint trace of humor coloring my tired voice.
Melissa turned to face me, her brow furrowing with genuine concern. “You are a tenured professor at one of the most prestigious schools on the East Coast. Why do you associate with Crispin Sinclair?”
A heavy sigh escaped me as I spoke the truth I often tried to bury. “Because he saved me,” I admitted softly. “I think in some way I feel obligated—that I owe him.”
Melissa’s curiosity deepened. “How so?”
“Because he rescued me from the Trick Pony,” I explained, my thoughts drifting back to that pivotal day. “All of us owe him, I guess. Of all the people he took with him that day, he picked me. Why is still a mystery, but a small part of me would like to think he did it because he cared.”
Melissa’s eyes searched mine. “Does he care?”
A groan rumbled in my chest. “Hell no,” I confessed, honesty laced with resignation. “The man cares only about himself.”
Melissa hesitated, her tone gentle but insistent. “Then why stay with him?”
“I owe him my life.” My words hung in the air, heavy and inescapable, as I remembered the night my life changed forever. “It happened a few years ago in Chicago...”
The crowd was pumped, ready for the fight they’d all come to see. The air in the pit was thick, a cloying miasma of stale sweat, spilled blood, and something else, something electric like the air before a storm. Not the clean, sharp scent of a lazy spring storm, but the heavy version that clung to the earth long after the last lightning strike. Above, the flickering lights cast dancing shadows that warped the cavernous space into something primal, a forgotten amphitheater built by some long-dead, bloodthirsty god.
My breath rasped in my throat, a dry, ragged sound that felt alien in the roaring silence of the crowd. Each exhalation was a victory, a testament to my body that was slowly, inexorably failing. The man before me, Kael, was a brute, a slab of muscle and scar tissue, his movements fueled by a blind, unthinking rage. We were past the point of strategy, past the point of pain. We were just two animals, cornered and fighting for the dwindling sliver of air that kept us alive.
Every blow I landed was a protest against the encroaching darkness. My knuckles were raw, splintered. My ribs screamed with every intake of breath. Yet, I hit him. Again. And again. A dull thud, a grunt of pain that was more his than mine. The blood that streaked his face, and mine, was a testament to our endurance. It blurred my vision, making the already surreal reality of the pit shimmer and warp.
Then it happened. A shift in his stance, a flicker of cunning in his eyes that had been absent before. He was fading too; I could see it, but he still had a reserve of something dark and desperate. He feigned a lunge, and as I instinctively braced,he brought his elbow up, landing a wicked, vicious jab to my temple.
It wasn’t a clean blow.
It was cheap, born of that primal fear of defeat that gnawed at us both.
A white-hot lance of pain exploded behind my eyes. My world tilted; the roaring of the crowd became a tidal wave of incoherent sound. But beneath the agony, something else ignited. It wasn’t the calculated fury of a fighter; it was something older, something elemental. It was the raw, untamed anger of a cornered creature finally unleashing its last desperate charge.
“Rowen, NO!”
My arm moved with a speed I didn’t know I possessed, a desperate, primal swing born of pure instinct. I felt the give, the sickening, yielding resistance as my fist connected with his jaw. For a fraction of a second, it was just a sound, a clean, sharp crack that cut through the cacophony like a blade as his head twisted at an odd angle.
And then, the silence.
The sudden, absolute void of sound where the roar had been.
My breath hitched, a silent gasp. Kael’s eyes, which had been locked on mine in a primal dance of aggression, went wide, then vacant. His body, which had been a solid wall of defiance, simply... deflated. He didn’t fall. He dissolved into a heap of flesh and bone, collapsing onto the blood-soaked mat as if some invisible force had simply erased his structure.
I stood there, unable to move as my gaze, still blurred by sweat and tears that were not entirely my own, remained fixed on his crumpled form. The reality of what I had just done, the irreversible finality of that single, devastating blow, seeped into my consciousness. The air, which had been thick withanticipation and aggression, now felt thin, suffocating. It was the silence of the tomb, and I stood amidst its chilling embrace and felt the weight of a life extinguished, a fragile spark snuffed out by my own desperate hand.
The cheers of the crowd, when they eventually returned, were a hollow echo, a cruel mockery of the profound stillness that had fallen upon me.
I had won. Yet, I had lost something far more precious than any life I could have taken.
I had lost a piece of myself in the darkness of the pit.
“When the crowd realized what had happened, they scattered like rats in the night. It didn’t take long for the police to swarm the place. Someone had to have called them. Still, I stood there, unable to move. If it hadn’t been for Sinclair getting me out of there when he did, I would have been arrested for murder. Over the next few days, Sinclair kept me hidden while he made my mistake go away. I don’t know how he did it, or what it cost him, but I found out a few days later that it was reported that Kael was struck and killed by a car.” Sighing, I rubbed my hands down my face before I continued, “He saved my life twice. Once when I was a teen and the second... he saved me from myself.”
When I woke the following morning, the first thing I noticed was Melissa’s absence. My bed felt emptier without her, and for a moment, I wondered where she had gone. I stretched, feeling the lingering aches from the night before, and made my way to the bathroom. The hot shower helped wash away the remnants of sleep and soothed my nerves. Once dressed, I walked downstairs, the quiet of the house accompanied only by the faint sounds coming from the kitchen. There at the table, Ifound Melissa seated beside Sinclair. The sight of her dressed, eating, and trying, put a smile on my face.
Sinclair cleared his throat, looking at me as I took the seat beside Melissa. Mr. Conway approached and set a generous plate of food in front of me. “Melissa has requested to visit Danika and Dante,” Sinclair said, his tone measured. “I offered to take her myself, but she requested you accompany her.”
I smiled faintly. “I wouldn’t mind seeing my niece.”
Sinclair continued, “While you are there, I would like you to talk to Dante about making Manhattan his home. I highly doubt there is anything keeping him or Daniel in Nebraska.”
