Total pages in book: 138
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131875 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 659(@200wpm)___ 528(@250wpm)___ 440(@300wpm)
“I am sorry,” Kerrigan confessed as she batted Senovara’s desperate attempts away and felled the mountain of a woman with a few carefully placed swipes.
“I don’t want your pity.” Her eyes blazed. “A Doma has no place here. They have no place anywhere.”
“Fair.” Kerrigan nodded at her. “Do the Gallia have any last rites?”
“Fuck you,” she spat.
Kerrigan drove her sword through the other woman’s chest. Her eyes never left Senovara’s. Despite her bluster, there was a plea in them. For it to finally be over.
Maybe they’d been wrong.
Maybe Senovara hadn’t entered because she was so certain of winning.
Maybe it had just been her only way out.
Kerrigan had been sick all night from the fight.
Constantine couldn’t understand why when she’d won exactly how they’d planned. She thought he might comprehend it if she could put it into words. But she’d just thrown up again at the thought of the mercy kill.
She didn’t want to go to the coliseum the next day to watch the rest of the competitors, but Constantine forced her. Back into the stands. Back to her admirers. Back to the barbaric system that was as likely a place to find victory and fame as it was to escape their captors.
But she watched. She watched Alderic, the Rutslan mountain conqueror, behead a Cendrean woman with disinterest. He was particularly brutal. She was glad that she’d never have to face him.
“You could still compete against him,” Constantine said when she said as much.
She shook her head. “Fordham is unstoppable.”
“You still will have to face him then.”
“That I know.”
Constantine grew grim as Fordham came back out for his fight with the Domaran soldier who fought with twin blades. Fordham was lethal and empty. He didn’t smirk at his opponent and play cat and mouse, as Kerrigan was required to do to survive. The crowd believed him to be a Fae king of Alfheim. They had been on his side from the beginning. And with his wickedness seemingly on full display, with just a touch of his shadows let out onto the arena, likely at Iris’s behest, he was terrifying. He was the monster she had first seen jump into the dragon tournament, demanding entrance as a member of the House of Shadows.
That wasn’t who he was with her, and it was difficult to see him like this. She’d give anything to lock all of that trauma away again and bring out her broody poet beneath. To see him smile and laugh and write and fly. Oh, how she missed flying with him. It was hard to look back and see that year of dragon training as an easy time because it had been anything but. Still, it had been the best year with Fordham. Before they were thrown into the pits of hell.
“By the gods,” Constantine whispered next to her.
Fordham cleanly removed the man’s ability to wield his weapons by cutting both hands off at the elbows, one after the other. The crowd quieted as the disfigured man stared at the stumps of his hands and sobbed. A grown man. It was terrible.
That first racked weeping sent something through the crowd. Made it real.
And Vulsan just smiled from his throne. Waved his hand for Fordham to finish it off. Give the crowd what it had clamored for. He ended the man’s crying a second later. The audience was silent as he stalked off.
Kerrigan trained all weekend. She trained twice as hard as she had the weekend before. She could sense the worry in Constantine and Evander as they worked her through her paces.
This week, she was fighting an Andine man, Morpheos. On some level, she wondered if they wanted him to win. To beat Kerrigan and take the whole thing. To prove that Andine couldn’t be cowed by anyone. She hardly blamed them. If another half-Fae had been in her place back home, she would have wanted them to win too. At least they didn’t skimp on her training. Though she could tell they didn’t think she was ready to take on an accomplished Andine man.
Even fighting Constantine and Evander every day and training on the Andine style, she was still not as good as someone who had been raised with it.
“I don’t have to be,” she argued again as they stepped up to the gate. “He’s never fought anyone like me either.”
“Maybe,” Constantine said. “But watch your paces, use them to your advantage, don’t play around this time.” He scowled at her.
“You want me to be more like Fordham?” she asked.
Constantine blanched. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Really encouraging. Thanks.”
“We’ll deal with the Fae once you finish off this opponent.”
She gritted her teeth. “Fine.”
She’d finish Morpheos even though she didn’t want to and then figure out how not to kill her mate. Fun times.
Constantine breathed heavily through his nose. There was nothing else to say. The gate was opening. Her name was announced. The crowd was screaming their excitement over her. She cut an exaggerated curtsy to Vulsan since it was now her signature move and then immediately faced off with her opponent.