He waits for the sound of light footsteps in the corridor.
Chapter eleven
Chapter 11
Demos finds him in the healer's alcove.
Lethe is restocking his satchel, counting linen strips, rolling bandages with the focused efficiency of someone preparing for a long night of post-bout work. The cheering from the coliseum has been thunderous all afternoon and is only now beginning to thin, the crowds dispersing, the final bouts concluded. He has supplies laid out across the worktable in order of anticipated need: thread and needles first, salve and clean cloths second, splinting materials third for the fractures that always come after tournament-day cards. His hands are busy. His mind is already in the cages, running through the roster, calculating which fighters took bouts today and which will need the most urgent attention.
"There's my lamb."
His hands still.
Demos is in the doorway, leaning against the frame with the loose, expansive posture of a man who's had a very good day. His face is flushed. His eyes are bright with wine and profit and the particular satisfaction of a man whose investments haveperformed. He's smiling. The smile reaches his eyes this time and that's worse, somehow, than when it doesn't.
"Big day," Demos says. "Very big day. You should be pleased. Your patients did well."
Lethe resumes rolling bandages. "I'm glad to hear it."
"Your beast in particular." Demos steps into the alcove. The space is small and his presence fills it, the cologne and the wine and the sheer, suffocating fact of him, and Lethe's shoulders tighten without his permission. "The one in the deep cages. Zazyrus. He was magnificent. Won the main event. Earned me more tonight than the rest of the card combined."
Lethe says nothing. He rolls a bandage. His fingers are steady.
"I promised the winner of the tournament a reward," Demos says. He's close now. Close enough that Lethe can smell the wine on his breath, sweet and sour, and the cologne underneath, and the particular scent of Demos's skin that makes something in Lethe's stomach curdle. "A night with my best. A night with the little lamb."
Lethe's hands stop.
He processes the words. The sentence, the structure, the meaning. A night with the winner. He thinks, for one disoriented moment, that Demos means he's supposed to tend the creature's wounds. That he's being assigned to post-fight care for the champion, extended hours, an all-night shift to ensure the pit lord's most valuable fighter is in peak condition for the next bout. That's reasonable. That's within the bounds of his role. That makes sense.
Demos puts his hand on Lethe's shoulder.
"Be a good boy," he says. He pats the shoulder twice. Companionable. Proprietary. The pat of a man settling a horse before a show. "And he'll be good to you. Probably. Beasts are unpredictable, but that's part of the fun, isn't it?"
The meaning arrives.
It arrives all at once, not in pieces but whole, a complete and terrible understanding that floods Lethe's body with cold so fast his vision greys at the edges. Part of the fun. Be a good boy. A night with the winner. Not tending. Not healing. Areward.A body, offered. Given. His body, promised to a beast without his knowledge, without his consent, presented as incentive the way you present meat to a dog.
His blood goes cold.
Demos has always kept him for himself. That has been the one constant in six years of horror, the single, ugly thread of consistency: Demos takes and takes and takes but he doesn't share. Lethe is his. His property, his body, his exclusive territory, and the exclusivity is not a mercy, it is possessiveness, but it has been a known quantity. A pattern Lethe can predict and prepare for and survive.
He has never been given to someone else.
"Who," Lethe says. His voice comes out flat. "Who won the main event."
"I told you. Your beast. The one with the horns." Demos is already turning to leave, disinterested now, the transaction concluded. "Deep cage seven. The guards will take you down."
He's gone before Lethe can speak. Before Lethe can move. Before Lethe can do anything except stand at the worktable with a half-rolled bandage in his hands and the understanding settling into him in layers, each one colder than the last.
Zazyrus.
Zazyrus won the tournament, and the prize, the reward Demos dangled in front of him to make him fight harder, is Lethe.
***
The guards come for him twenty minutes later.
Lethe has spent those twenty minutes standing at the worktable. He hasn't moved. He's been inside his own head, cycling through the same sequence of thoughts with a speed and repetition that borders on frantic, trying to find the angle, the escape, the piece of the puzzle that makes this survivable.
