Lance
Cassandra lied.
I knew she would. I knew it from the moment I walked out of Leo’s brownstone, from the way Cassandra’s hand settled on my shoulder like she was guiding a dog back to its kennel. She said no more cages. She said I was done fighting. She said I’d sit at the table now, not beneath it.
But it’s five days later, and I’m in a warehouse in Southie with my hands taped and a cage erected in the center of a concrete floor.
“One more,” she said this morning. “A demonstration. To show my associates what they’re investing in.”
“You said I was done.”
“I said you were mine. There’s a difference.”
So here I am. Excalibur, back in the cage. The only question is whether Genevieve and Leo made it out, whether Cassandra kept that part of the deal, and the not knowing is worse than anything they could do to my body.
God, Genevieve.I close my eyes and see her face. The wayshe looked at me in that motel room. The way she said my name like it meant something. The way she chose me, even when choosing me meant losing everything else.
I left her.
I walked away like a coward, letting Cassandra cart me away, my humiliation ritual in full force.
She probably hates me for it, and I deserve it.
But I’d do it again to save her life.
I soothe myself by picturing her a year from now, head chef at Cameliard, herdream, free and happy and smiling. Some guy will inevitably come along and see what I see, that she’s fucking perfect, and sweep her off her feet.
Jealousy rips through my chest, and I let it swallow me whole because it’s better than the alternative—that Cassandra didn’t keep her end of the deal.
The warehouse is industrial. High ceilings, exposed ductwork, the kind of place that gets rented for a night and scrubbed clean by morning. The cage is smaller than the Lye’s. Chain-link bolted to a steel frame, no padding on the floor, just concrete with a drain in the center that tells me everything I need to know about what’s happened here before.
It reminds me of when I first started fighting for them, before Freddy had the Lye infrastructure built and convinced Art to come on board.
There’s a crowd, maybe forty people. Expensive clothes, expensive watches. The same breed of spectator that filled the Lye’s amphitheater, except these faces are unfamiliar. Cassandra’s people, not Brutus’s. A different city, a different network, but the same sickness.
I stretch my shoulders and roll my neck and try not to think about the fact that I don’t know who I’m fighting or what happens after.
Then Art walks in.
He comes through a service entrance at the far end of the warehouse, and my chest seizes. He’s in a dark coat, hands in his pockets, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. Behind him, being guided by two of Cassandra’s men, is Percy.
Everything in me goes cold.
Percy’s eyes are still swollen from his last fight, and his face is pale, and he’s scanning the room the way I taught him to scan rooms, looking for exits, counting threats. When his gaze lands on me through the chain-link, he stops walking.
“No,” he says. “No, no, no. That’s—you can’t—”
One of the men shoves him forward.
“Lance!” Percy’s voice cracks. “What the fuck is this?”
I grip the chain-link with both hands and look at Art.
He won’t meet my eyes.
“Art.”
Nothing.
