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CHAPTER 15

LEANDER

The strip of white athletic tape glowed in the dark cutting across the floor tiles.

I lay on my side, staring at the divide. 03:00. The air scrubbers hummed their monotonous bass note, the sound this building made when it pretended to be asleep, but sleep was miles away. My blood still churned with a mixture of confusion and disgust that had kept me awake for hours.

My eyes were closed, but the image from the sideline burned behind my eyelids anyway. Felix Cento. The man who treated the soccer field like his personal kingdom. I had watched him bow his head and hoist a goalkeeper’s luggage like a common servant, in front of the whole Tier 1 squad.

It didn’t make sense. I hated arrogance, but I understood it. Arrogance had a spine and it fought back. What I had watched today was bullshit. He let Anatol own him. He let a jock snap a leash on his collar and walk him like a dog.

“Fucking pathetic,” I whispered to the ceiling.

I rolled over, turning my back on his side of the room. I should have been glad. If the Golden Boy was cracking, the top spot was mine. I should have been sleeping like a baby, my only real competition imploding without me lifting a finger. But I wasn’t.

A sound cut through the hum of the ventilation, an intake of breath, a whimper.

I stiffened. It came again, a frantic muttering that sounded like a plea.

Across the room, Felix was thrashing, fighting a ghost. His sheets had tangled around his legs, trapping him, and his head snapped from side to side on the pillow, platinum hair plastered to his forehead with sweat. The duvet was kicked down to his hips, bunching around the waistband of his low-slung sleep pants. Even in the dim blue light of the standby sensors, he looked devastating.

I couldn’t help dragging my eyes over him. His torso was a landscape of defined muscle. The sharp ridges of his abs flexed as he struggled against the nightmare, and the sweep of his pecs looked like marble carved by a master who was obsessed with perfection. He was beautiful. Obscenely, frustratingly beautiful.

His lips, usually pressed into an arrogant line, were parted, soft and full. He looked ruined.

“No,” he gasped. The word was barely audible. “Reset. Reset. I’m ready.”

His hands clawed at the mattress, fingers digging into the fabric until the knuckles turned white. The cool statue I saw during the day was gone, replaced by something raw and terrified.

“Don’t scrub it,” he moaned. “I’m still good. I’m still good.”

The desperation in his voice grated against my nerves. It sounded too much like the Pit. It sounded like Elian crying about his dead brother.

I kicked my blanket off and walked to the center of the room. My ankle logged the cold of the tiles and filed its usual complaint, a dull pulse under the tape where the gel was still finishing its work. I stood there looking down at the white line.

Cross it, and you bleed.

My rule. My wall, and I had known the night I laid it down whose cage it really was. Crossing it was a jailbreak. I stepped over the line.

Up close, the damage was visible. Sweat tracked down his neck, pooling in the hollow of his throat.

And there it was. The bruise.

Without the high collar to hide it, the mark I had left on him was stark against his skin. It had faded into a sickly mottling of yellow blooming right over his pulse point. It looked angry. It looked like ownership.

Seeing it on him, seeing his pulse hammer beneath the skin I had bitten woke the beast. My cock thickened instantly, hard against my thigh. It pulsed with the sudden rush of blood, aching with a violent need to drag him out of that nightmare and put him on his knees with my cock in his mouth.

“Felix,” I said.

He jerked, his back arching off the mattress, ribs straining against skin. “Don’t flush me. Please.”

The words hit me like a splash of ice water. He was dreaming about being liquidated.

Everyone who came off the trucks knew this, make the roster or make the Front. But that terror was supposed to be ours. It belonged to the Pit, the thing you lay awake with in the long dark of a dormitory that smelled of bleach and fear. Felix Cento was Rank One. The face on the posters. And here he was at three in the morning, begging the dark not to pour him out.

I didn’t want to touch him, but the noise was pathetic. I needed him to shut up. That was the story I told myself.

I grabbed his bare shoulder, his skin covered in sweat. “Wake up.”