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I wiped my mouth, and my hand came away with a smear of blood from where I had bitten my lip on the way down.

Helier was still gyrating for the crowd, treating the field like his personal breeding ground. He thought I was weak. He thought he could touch me, break me, and leave me in the dirt, and the fear in my chest condensed as I stared at my bloody hand, hardening into something usable.

“Reset,” I whispered, repeating the word like a mantra.

I walked toward the center circle with the spine of a King who had just decided that executions were necessary.

“Form up!” I screamed at the terrified Tier 1s. “Stop looking at them! Look at me!”

I stepped onto the center spot and put my foot on the ball. The drone referee hovered overhead, its red eye flashing, waiting to restart the slaughter.

Helier jogged back to his side, pulling his shirt on, and saw me waiting. He grinned and winked a gray eye.

“Ready for round two, Pretty Boy?” he called out. “I’m not done playing with you yet.”

I stared through him. Years of learning exactly what a camera could take from my face, and this one took nothing.

The drone emitted a piercing electronic shriek.

Game on.

“Leander,” I said, my voice cutting through the noise.

Leander looked at me. He saw the blood on my lip. He saw the ice in my eyes. This time I was looking exactly where he had told me to look.

“Kill him,” I said.

Leander smiled, a dangerous expression that matched the wolf on his hip.

“With pleasure.”

CHAPTER 27

LEANDER

The command hung in the air between us, absolute.

Kill him.

Felix turned and walked away toward the center circle with a lazy stride, adjusting his captain’s armband as if he hadn’t just ordered an execution. I watched him go with hunger. With pleasure, I had told him, and I had meant it more than anything else I had said on this field all night.

The Reserve captain was jogging backward, laughing at something one of his defenders had said, loose and limber and twitching with manic energy. He thought he had broken us. He thought the goal was the nail in the coffin, because he had learned the game in a place where a lead was a wound.

I rolled my neck and my shoulders, feeling the high-grade fabric of the Tier 1 uniform stretch across my back. I had earned the number on my chest, and I was not letting a washed-out ghost take either of them from me.

The drone shrieked. Play resumed.

Helier took a pass from his midfielder and trapped it with a flourish, spinning the ball on his toe, looking up to find Felix, wanting to taunt him again.

He found me instead, and I was already at top speed.

The Reserve midfield collapsed around me. These were not the soft Tier 2 recruits I had bullied in practice; these were veterans who knew how to use their weight. A defender stepped into my path and dropped his center of gravity to brace for the impact, a wall of matte black armor and scarred muscle. I spun, riding my own momentum through the pivot, driving my elbow back into his solar plexus, and the breath left him in a wet gasp as he stumbled just enough for me to slip the gap.

I was on Helier. I dropped my shoulder and drove through him, and the impact was like hitting a concrete pylon. Helier absorbed it, grunting, digging his cleats into the turf, stronger than he looked, his wiry frame packed with dense corded muscle, and he grabbed my jersey, twisted the fabric in his fist, and used my own momentum to swing me around.

I slammed into the boards with a metallic rattle I felt in my teeth. Pain flared across my ribs. The ball rolled free, and the crowd roared, basking in the violence.

The drone referee hovered, its red eye scanning the collision.