Eyes still closed, her hands found Monster standing near the windows. She'd gone right to him. He didn't say anything.
She felt up his shoulders, reaching as high as she could, and then tugged at him until he was bending down. Eyes still closed, she kissed him. Hard. He was the breath to her being and his taste the only water she ever wanted to drink. Opening her mouth, Naya gave him her tongue.
She wanted to crawl up him and into his body where it was hot and safe and amazing.
He kissed her back, a hand in her hair. She heard her name spoken in her head while his mouth was on her.
She gasped and leaned back to look at him.
He smiled at her, a huge grin that changed his face from its normally sharp angles to an expression of mischief.
"You have given me a full bond, Naya. A true bond. Trust it."
Chapter Eighteen
Naya
A grotesque testimony to alpha violence, the fighting pit was housed on the bottom floor of a building originally constructed to hold a peaceful atrium court.
Ringed with balconies, the structure had seven stories of former beauty turned rundown and ugly. Naya recognized the design immediately. It matched her father's scribe's house.
The roof of this building was missing, lost in the Restitution War that had put the Sectors under breed control. There was no garden here, as the original design had intended—just an imposing barbed cage with two grappling breed-men inside.
Flickering light from torches and battery-powered mirror-lamps created moody shadows everywhere.
On the first floor with Monster, Naya could look up at the filled balconies above. The place was packed with drunken, lowlife breeds. They smelled wild and hostile, more untrustworthy males than she had ever seen in her life.
It wasn't just that they were in Sector 2 with its awful reputation. She could smell their taint like a sickness, sour and wrong.
But the most dangerous alpha of them all was at her side.
The fighting men on the center platform were bare-chested and wore the same odd garment the Monster had put on before they came here. Made of leather, it looked like a pleated skirt hanging in eight panels that went to his knees, fastened around his waist with a set of ties.
He called it a kilt, explaining that it was a tradition from the Un. Just a step above naked, it was the way alphas had fought one another in a challenge since the beginning of time.
It fit tight around his thick waist, just hiding the deep V-shaped cut of his lower abdominals. His scars, the rough hair on his chest, and the hills and valleys of his upper body muscles were all on display.
She had not wanted him to leave their chamber wearing that. He’d laughed at her and said there would be no other females at the pits. It was too dangerous for them.
She hadn't even questioned why he would bring her to this terrible place. It hadn’t even occurred to Naya to stay behind while he was fighting for his position as top alpha.
Monster, worried someone might try to get to her while he fought and he’d be too far away to help, had told her she would attend the fight with him. This mate of hers wouldn’t leave her behind or tuck her away in his tower like the princess he teased her about being.
There was only one entrance in and out of the metal structure surrounding the platform below. Ringed by open space, with raucous spectators above, Monster would be at a strategic disadvantage when he was in the cage.
Enemies could incapacitate him, or just lock him in while they attacked her outside the cage. A threat to her could bring him to his knees, and everyone would know it the moment they saw her.
He could protect her better inside the cage with him. Inside the kill zone. It was audacious. Dangerous.
Monster, who had let her walk in on her own two feet, picked her up and swung her into the cradle of his arms, angling her face into his neck where his scent and a sense of renewed safety saturated her senses.
"Better?" he asked.
She nodded, giving the strong column of his neck a kiss. The rumble of his purr vibrated through her entire body. She wished they had been able to finish what they’d started with similar kissing earlier, but the drones had brought food.
Monster had insisted she eat. She'd rather snack on him.
Imagining it in her head as she wrapped her arms around him tight, she blocked out the building full of males. There was only this one man to her.
