The arena detonates in sound. Screams. Chants. His name, his legend, roared from a thousand throats.
Overhead, displays pulse with changing odds. Marcus’s numbers nosedive the moment that pincer wrecks his shoulder, flashing crimson. But as he mounts the Scorpid, riding it like some demented rodeo star, the numbers surge back in his favor. Black ichor sizzles against sand as he carves his masterpiece of violence. Every landed strike sends a new flare of data across the arena monitors, his survival rate climbing as the Scorpid’s armor begins to crack. The crowd leans forward in their seats, their gasps of horror turning to applause as Marcus turns a brutal bucking into an elegant bow.
His ruby spasms with power as he shapes a blade of compressed light. “For my next trick,” he calls, launching off the Scorpid’s back in a blur of gore and glittering steel.
The crowd screams for him. For blood. For death. I lean forward again, caught in the undertow of their frenzy.
The blade tears through armor with a wet, grating rip that rattles my teeth, and the Scorpid shrieks, a sound too guttural and sentient to be mere pain. Acid hisses in arcs. Ichor splashes like black rain, and Marcus moves through it with absurd elegance, soaked and grinning.
“End it!” The crowd’s cry drowns out my thoughts.
Marcus charges in for the kill, and I hold my breathe. “Watch closely, my fans!” he shouts.
The blade punches up through the Scorpid’s soft belly, slicing straight through the exposed flesh. The creature convulses and Marcus’s cackling fills the arena. “Look at us dance! How beautiful we are when we—”
He cuts off.
The dying Scorpid’s body distorts, warping in waves that shimmer against the steel. Its edges ripple, then break, and the entire arena flickers as if reality itself just flinched.
This is wrong. This isverywrong.
“Fuck,” Dom hisses, then his voice rises sharp and commanding. “Clear the Pit! Toxic specimen protocol—now! Desert breeds release their venom at death. Seal the barriers!”
But I can barely hear him over my pounding heart and the crowd’s confused murmuring. Marcus is still down there, whirling through the haze like it’s stage fog, glistening with gore and venom. When his eyes find me, his blood-stained grin sends ice down my spine.
“Is that the lovely Miss Ellis I spy?” He sweeps into an elaborate bow. “Care for a dance, pretty girl? I promise I clean up real nice!”
Dom’s growl vibrates through my spine. “Get him out of there. Now.”
“Aww, come on, Blackwood.” Marcus twirls just out of reach of the advancing handlers. The crowd laughs nervously. “No needto get jealous.”
“Say one more word, Marcus.” Dom’s voice drops to a tense warning. “And you’ll find tomorrow’s match significantly more lethal.”
Marcus throws his head back and laughs. “Threaten me with death? Oh, I’m so scared!” He spreads his arms wide. “I create my own demise every night! The only question is,” his wink twists something in my gut, “how beautiful will it be?”
“Quite a spectacle,” Dom says, steering me toward the exit. The smile he wears never reaches his eyes, and the fingers at my waist twitch with barely contained tension. “Shall we find somewhere more private to celebrate that win?”
I let him lead me away, but my mind catalogs everything I just witnessed.I’ve been gone for two months, and The Inferno I left isn’t the one I’ve walked back into.
Scorpids don’t ripple like that. I know every classified species. I’ve dissected them. Studied their organs, their blood structures, their mana filtration systems. That shimmer was void hound biology.
So the real question isn’t just what I saw down there. It’s what else I’ve missed, and who’s counting on me to stay in the dark.
Dom’s office door slamsshut with enough force to rattle the walls. The space that was once our sanctuary now suffocates, everything pressed too close, the air heavy with unspoken truths. Power radiates from him in oppressive waves, dark and barely leashed. The light crystals sputter under the strain, shadows shuddering across every surface.
He stalks to the antique liquor cabinet, fingers trembling despite his effort at composure. His movements hold a brittle precision, as though every shift risks tearing him open on invisible shards.
“That Scorpid,” I say, my voice steady as I watch him pour with vicious care. “The way it distorted—that’s not natural. I spent years studying magical creatures with my parents, and that kind of reality manipulation is exclusive to void hounds. It’s literally impossible for a desert species to—”
“Stop.” His voice grates with fury.
I don’t need him to answer. The silence says enough. The sidestepped questions, the careful words—it’s all been there. I just refused to see it.
“I won’t ask you to tell me,” I say softly. “But maybe we can . . . get creative. Squeeze my hand once for yes.Twice for—”
The crystal decanter slams down, cracking on impact. Veins of fracture spiral through the expensive glass. “You think I haven’t tried every fucking workaround?” His laugh is hollow. “Signals. Symbols. I even got blackout drunk hoping something might slip through the cracks. But he sealed it all. Contingencies carved into bone.”
My mind races back through Mom’s research notes on binding contracts. The darker versions don’t just prevent speech; they punish the attempt. The thought of Kian using that on his own son makes me sick.
