It makes Zazyrus want to destroy everything in reach.
He tears his cage apart.
The straw goes first, shredded and scattered. Then the water trough, wrenched from its bolts and hurled against the bars with a crash that echoes through the deep kennels. He tears the manacle rings from the wall, his muscles screaming, stone dust raining down, and the sound of it is enormous, the rending of metal from rock, and the guards come running and stop at the end of the corridor and do not enter.
He refuses food. They push the tray through the slot and he sends it back through the bars hard enough to dent the metal.
He will not fight. They come for him on bout day and he sits against the wall and does not move and six guards with polearms cannot make him stand. They prod and threaten and he bares his teeth and the teeth are a promise and the guards retreat.
The replacement healer refuses to enter the cage. He takes one look at the destruction, at the beast sitting in the wreckage with bloodied knuckles and wild eyes, and he walks away.
Three days. Four. Five. Zazyrus sits in the ruins of his cage and eats nothing and does nothing and the rage burns and burns and burns.
Demos is losing money.
***
On the sixth day, the pit lord comes with Lethe.
Zazyrus hears them before he sees them. The familiar cologne, the wine, and beneath both, under the heavy tread of guards and the click of Demos’s boots, a lighter step. Quick. Uneven. The cadence of someone being pushed faster than they want to move.
The entourage stops at the cage. Demos looks at the wreckage with an expression that is furious and calculating and, beneath both, afraid. He is losing his best fighter. He is losing money. The threats were the wrong lever and the realization is written across his face in the tight set of his jaw and the way his ringed fingers flex at his sides.
"I’ll make this simple," Demos says. He grabs Lethe by the arm and pushes him toward the cage door. "You can have what you want. He’s yours. As long as you win me fights, he’s yours. Understood?"
The lock turns. The door opens. Lethe stumbles through.
The door slams shut. The lock turns. The entourage retreats.
Zazyrus does not look at Lethe.
He sits against the far wall with his knees drawn up and his bloodied hands on his thighs and his eyes fixed on the stone floor. He does not look because looking will tell the boy everything and the boy is here against his will. The boy waspushed through the door. The boy did not choose this and Zazyrus will not add the weight of his wanting to the list of things being forced on the person he cares about most in this pit.
The silence is enormous.
It fills the cage, dense and heavy, and Zazyrus can hear Lethe’s breathing, quick and shallow at first, and then slowing. He can hear the boy’s footsteps, soft on the stone, and they do not retreat toward the door. They come closer.
Zazyrus keeps his eyes on the floor.
The footsteps stop. There is a rustle of fabric. The sound of knees meeting stone.
Lethe kneels in front of him.
Two hands find his face.
The palms are warm. They barely span his jaw, small and steady and sure, and they cup his face with a gentleness that has nothing clinical in it. Lethe’s palms rest against his cheekbones. The pads of his fingers rest at the base of Zazyrus’s horns.
Deliberate.
Knowing.
After what happened last time.
Zazyrus shudders. The tremor runs through his entire body, violent, uncontrolled, starting at the point of contact and spreading outward through his skull and down his spine and into every limb. His eyes fall half-shut. His lips part. A groan catches in his throat, low and guttural and raw, and his hands fly up and grip the edge of the stone behind him because if he grips anything else right now it will be the boy and he does not trust himself.
Lethe holds his gaze.
"I won’t leave you again."'
