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  “I am going to kill you.” Ray slams his palms against the bars, and they shake, but there’s no give. The bullpen is old—I think it was a prison built for and by the original colonists on Rhodon—but still rock solid. He’s not getting in. “Then I’m going to beat the shit out of her until she begs me to fuck her.”

  “You’re not making much sense, Ray.” I’m not sure how beating a woman would make her want to sleep with him, but he’s really bleeding now, and he’s probably feeling lightheaded. “You better go lock yourself in before the sharks scent blood in the water.”

  Ray puts one hand to his wound, and it comes away bloody. “Fuck!” Then he darts into the cell across the aisle and slams the door shut.

  A heartbeat later, the mob arrives. They crowd around my cell, peering through the wall of bars at the woman behind me. Fighting each other for a position at the front. And suddenly I realize I haven’t even gotten a good look at her face.

  “Who is she?”

  “How the hell did she get here?”

  “Anderson, strip her and give us a look.”

  “Push her toward the bars. I just want to smell her.”

  They’re shouting over one another, ravenous gazes almost as invasive as the arms reaching into my cell. I back out of their reach and silently second-guess my own assessment of the cell’s strength.

  What if these bastards all pulled on the bars at once? Would the barrier hold up? Would aging concrete crumble?

  How long does concrete last, anyway? Surely more than a century…

  I turn to find the woman huddled in the corner, but when she sees me looking, her spine straightens. Her chin lifts, and she stares right back at me, refusing to cower, even though her eyes are swimming in pure terror.

  She looks familiar, but I can’t quite place her.

  “I’m Graham Anderson,” I tell her, but she looks unimpressed by the information.

  “Look, whatever you’re planning to do with me, will you at least wait until the spectators get bored and wander off? Please?”

  She thinks I’m going to rape her, yet she has the temerity to ask me to wait for a little privacy. She may be small, but her balls are certainly big enough for the bullpen. “I’m just asking for your name, ma’am.”

  “Let’s not play games, okay?” Her eyes flash at me in the glare from a light strip embedded in the ceiling. “We both know you’re going to get whatever you want. And that I’m going to make you fight for it.”

  Damn, this girl has grit. And while I think that’s fucking hot, most of the men in here will be lining up to beat that spark right out of her.

  “Well, if you’re going to fight, you may need this.” I toss the bloody pen to her, underhanded, and her hand flies up to catch it with reflexes so quick they can only be instinct. Either natural, or muscle memory.

  Either way, it’s a stupid instinct. What if I’d just thrown a knife at her?

  She opens her hand and stares down at the pen, wide-eyed. “Where’d you get this?” she asks, ignoring the catcalls and demands for her to take off her shirt, pinch her nipples, and dive wrist-deep into her own honey pot for the onlookers’ amusement.

  “From Ray’s fist. I assume it’s yours.”

  “Hey, Anderson,” a voice calls from beyond the bars. “Hold her still for me, will you?”

  I flip off the entire mob, but no one notices, because all eyes are on the woman. Then an asshole named Craig pulls his dick out and starts stroking it like they’ll let him out of here and give him a house full of beer and pizza, if he can just jerk off fast enough.

  “Um, you’re gonna want to move this way.” I wave the woman toward me, and she starts to refuse, clearly mistrusting of my intentions, even if I did free her from Ray. For all she knows, I was actually claiming her for myself.

  Then she follows my line of sight and sees the sick bastard stroking his cock while he stares at her, his tongue practically hanging out of his mouth. “He’s…um…aiming for your face,” I warn her. “Shouldn’t be long now…”

  “Ugh!” She scrambles across the small cell, past me and onto the bed, which is largely shielded by a concrete section of wall.

  I approach the bars, keeping myself between her and most of the men. “Craig, I swear to god, if you shoot one drop of that in here, I’ll rip your dick off and feed it to you.”

  Craig doesn’t seem to hear me, but when his eyes close and his frame tenses, he turns to the side just before he comes—splattering two much bigger men. Who then descend on him with bared teeth and flying fists.

  I turn to find the woman huddled in one corner of my small bed, trying to ignore the cheers and the repeated thunk of fists into flesh. She flinches when blood arcs between the bars, then she stares down at the thin vinyl-covered mattress pad beneath her.

  “No,” I whisper, sinking onto the bed next to her, and she jumps, startled to find me so close. “You have to watch. If you can’t stomach a beating, they won’t think you can take one or give one. And they’ll never leave you alone.”

  “They’ll never leave me alone anyway,” she whispers through clenched teeth. And she has a point. But so do I.

  “This is life in the bullpen. You need to see the reality. You need to be the reality.” I slide one arm around her, ignoring how incredible she feels against me, as well as the fact that she’s clearly terrified of my touch, as I gently but insistently tug her toward the end of the bed. Into view. “Look,” I whisper. And she does.

  Her eyes flash with a resurgence of that fierceness she displayed before. Beneath her shock and revulsion lies a steel spine. Behind her fear is a ferocious determination to survive.

  She sits straighter, and I get a whiff of her hair as it catches in the stubble on my chin. I want nothing more than to taste her. To devour this woman with a hard, blue-eyed gaze and soft, smooth skin. But I’m not going to take what she’s not offering.

  We may all be murderers, in the bullpen, but we’re not all monsters.

  But damn, I wish she were offering.

  “Stand up,” I whisper, unable to resist the excuse to breathe into her ear. She shivers against me, and my cock stiffens. “Let them see that this doesn’t bother you.”

  I let go of her and back off the bed, and she follows me. Her jaw is clenched, but her gaze is steady. She’s watching.

  The beating continues past the point when any rational man would stop swinging. Past the point at which Craig stops struggling. And breathing.

  Finally, the killers stand, and their gazes immediately find the woman. Everyone’s watching her, either because she’s the first woman they’ve seen in months, or because they’re gauging her reaction. Or both.

  Come on. I silently cheer her on. Show them what they’re dealing with.

  “What the fuck?” she demands, and in a sudden burst of bravado, she throws her hands out at her sides in an exaggerated shrug. “What are you, house cats leaving your kill at my feet? That’s cute, but I have no use for your damn corpse. Or the one I left out there by the gate.” She points in the direction of the shuttle landing pad. “Be good boys and clean up your fucking mess. And clean up mine while you’re at it.”

  Holy shit, she’s magnificent.

  For a moment, no one speaks. No one even moves. Then the entire crowd bursts into raucous laughter from the other side of the bars. Some of them think she’s ridiculous. Some obviously think she’s hilarious. Yet none of them think she’s timid. And they all want her.

  But these aren’t men who take care of pretty things. These are men who break pretty things into a thousand pieces, then stomp on the shards, just because they can. Because even if you aren’t psychotic when you get to the bullpen, you will be by the time you die here.

  4

  GRAHAM

  “Come on, guys, you heard the lady.” I make a round-‘em-up gesture in the air. “Get rid of the body. We can’t have him rotting in here.”

  Finally, the men who killed Craig pick him up and carry him off. Everyone e
lse turns back to the woman in my cell—an anomaly I still can’t wrap my head around.

  “Well, what do the rest of you want?” she demands, her cheeks flushed with exhilaration, her arms still spread. “You want to stare? Fine. Look, then fuck off. I’m here for the same reason all of you are. So as far as you’re concerned, I’m just one of the guys.”

  But she is not just one of the guys.

  “Strip,” someone calls out. “Give us a peek, and we’ll go away.”

  The woman rolls her eyes.

  “Just the shirt then,” another man suggests.

  “Come on, Anderson.” One of the tall ones in the back sounds more pissed than curious. “You got the girl for the night, so get down to it. The least you can do is give us a show.”

  “Fuck off!” she shouts, and now she seems to be avoiding my gaze. I probably should have said that I have no intention of ripping her clothes off and fucking her for their entertainment.

  “Okay.” I face the crowd, no matter how badly I hate to look away from her. “I know most of you were gifted with more brawn than brain, but just think about this for a second. You can stay here all night, waiting, and when the sun comes up and this door opens, you might actually get your hands on her.”

  Behind me, the girl snorts.

  “But how long will you be able to keep her, when someone who got a full night’s sleep gets ready to fight for her?”

  A grumble echoes from the crowd, and at first nothing happens. So I sit with my back against the concrete wall, content to wait, since I have nothing better to do and no other choice. The girl sits next to me.

  After several minutes of staring in at the most boring live act any of them have probably ever seen, the men on the edge of the crowd start wandering away. Most of them have already lost their shot at a secure cell for the night, which means they’ll have to sleep with one eye open in the atrium, or in one of the offices. On the ground.

  The last half-dozen or so are stubborn, but when the woman begins scraping dried blood from beneath her fingernails, most of them wander off too.

  The last to go, a broad, grimy fucker named Troy, grips the bars before he leaves. “I’ll be back in the morning, Anderson. So you have your fun tonight, but if you don’t want another enemy in the bullpen, you better damn well hand her over peacefully when I get back.”

  “Fuck off,” the woman mutters without looking up from her fingernails. But the tension in her frame says she isn’t as relaxed as she’s trying to appear. She exhales when his footsteps fade into the nighttime chorus of snores, shouts, and the occasional angry curse.

  It isn’t very late, but men who have nothing to do all day but work out and nothing to do at night but sleep tend to do plenty of both.

  “So.” I stand and back away to give her some space, because she still seems skittish. Not that I can blame her. “What’s your name?”

  Her brows rise over crystalline blue eyes I swear I’ve seen before. “Does it matter?”

  “Well, I’m not filling out government paperwork or anything, but it’d be nice to have something to call you.”

  “‘Bitch’ seems to be popular,” she says with a glance through the bars, where she can obviously still picture the recently disbursed crowd. “With ‘cunt’ coming in at a strong second place. But if you just have to know, my name is Sylvie.”

  Sylvie. Her name’s as beautiful as she is. All soft, lyrical syllables that will probably taste as good as they’ll feel on my tongue. But that’s a problem. Just like her name, she’s too soft and beautiful for the bullpen. For all of zone one. Why—

  “—the hell are you here?” The thought finishes itself out loud, as I lean against the wall next to the bed.

  “Same reason you are, I suspect.”

  I lift one eyebrow at her. “You got caught escaping from zone two and doused with a chemical paralytic, then thrown into the back of a patrol shuttle?”

  Her brows arch. “No, but that sounds like a hell of a story. I just killed someone.” She seems to think that actually answers my original question, but it doesn’t even come close.

  “Is Universal Authority recruiting women for the fights now?” That makes no sense. She won’t last twenty-four hours here. Hell, I’m not sure how I’m going to get her out of this cell in one piece, once the sun comes up.

  “No. I volunteered.” She frowns. “Actually, I demanded my right to choose my method of execution.”

  “What?” Every successive word she says makes less sense. “Were they not offering lethal injection? Or even a baseball bat to the head? Because either of those would be a hell of a lot better than what you’ll get here.” If she even makes it to the arena. “Do you actually intend to fight?”

  “Do you know of some other way out of here?” she says, and it take me a second to understand that not only does she intend to fight, she intends to win.

  Have I mistaken delusion for ferocity? Really, it was only a matter of time before some woman found guilty of murder became convinced that she actually stood a chance in the arena, but this woman…

  She doesn’t seem crazy.

  “Yes, I’m going to fight,” she adds, when I only study her in silence. “But despite what I said, I’d rather not start tonight.” She stands, and her gaze strays to the bed, before snapping back up to my eyes. “If I promise to cooperate, do you think you could be…normal about this?”

  “Normal?” I think I get what she’s asking, but I’d love to hear her definition of normal. And of abnormal.

  “I’m just saying…there’s no reason to get violent, if I cooperate. Right?”

  She’s fucking breaking my heart. “Sylvie, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Good.” She looks cautiously optimistic. Yet still a little skeptical. “I mean, I’d hurt you back if you tried.”

  “With your ink pen.”

  “Laugh if you want, but I killed a man with that pen earlier.”

  “You may have killed two.” Ray has taken his shirt off and is pressing it to the wound in his neck, but the material has already soaked through, and I can’t tell that the bleeding has slowed at all.

  “Let’s hope,” she says. “But my point is that I can hurt you if I have to. However, I’d rather do this the easy way, so we can both get some sleep afterward.”

  “I’m game. So…what is it we’ll be doing the easy way?” I can’t resist a smile.

  “Are you fucking laughing at me again?” Her jaw clenches, and that flush in her cheeks is back. God, she’s beautiful. “Just tell me what you want, so we can—”

  “Sylvie. Relax.” I lower my voice, because this is none of anyone else’s business, even if there’s no real privacy in the bullpen. “If you’re offering, I’m certainly up for it. But you don’t owe me anything, and I’m not going to take anything from you.”

  “You don’t want…?”

  “I didn’t say I don’t want.” I’ve never wanted anyone in my life like I want this little scrap of a woman, with fierce blue eyes, long, wild hair, and blood caked beneath her fingernails. “I said I’m not going to take.”

  She glances at the bed again, then at the cell door. “Then why did you pull me in here?”

  “I don’t know,” I admit. “I didn’t have time to give it much thought. I just saw a woman in the bullpen. Then I saw that Ray had you by the throat, and I fucking hate Ray Gibson.” And she’d looked terrified, and I’m fucking sick of seeing everything pretty in the world get destroyed by people with more power than brains. “So, I just pulled you away from him.”

  “And you expect me to believe that you’re not asking for anything in exchange for that?”

  “I expect you to take me at my word, yes.” Though I’m hard just thinking about the way she shouted orders at a crowd full of murderers, as if there were no doubt they’d do whatever she told them.

  And suddenly, with that memory playing over in my head, I know exactly where I’ve seen her before. She was shouting insults then too, only back in
the day, she was shouting them at me.

  “Sylvie…Wolfe!” I can’t resist a smile when the rest of her name falls into place in my memory.

  Her gaze narrows on me. “How do you know that?”

  “We’ve met. Kind of. It must have been nearly eight years ago, at one of the youth championships.” I really wish I could remember which one. “We were both just kids. Your name was on your badge.” She’s changed since then, but those eyes…

  They still seem to see right through me.

  She frowns, her gaze unfocused as she searches her memory. “You’re a boxer?”

  “Among other things. You were cheering for the other guy that day. Loudly. I guess that was your boyfriend?”

  “Brother.” Her frown deepens. “How can you possibly remember that, eight years later?”

  I remember because she wasn’t just cheering her brother on and insulting me from the front row. She was shouting advice to him. She’d studied his opponents. She knew her shit.

  And she was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. But I can’t tell her that.

  “You’re kind of hard to forget.”

  She doesn’t seem to know what to say to that, and I know a change of subject is coming before she even starts talking. “So, I guess UA recruited you because you’re a fighter? They probably do a lot of that.”

  “I think they do, but they actually slotted me as quarry for the hunts, first. When I escaped, they looked into my background, then they offered me a choice. Lethal injection, or the arena.”

  She nods. “The warden offered me a needle too.”

  “May I ask you another question?”

  Across the cell, Sylvie sinks onto the ground and shrugs. She seems a lot less suspicious about my motivations, now that she knows something about me. And while part of me is happy about that, I feel like I’ve done her a disservice in letting her believe someone in the bullpen can be trusted. What if she extends that assumption to someone else?

  There are very few other men here who won’t hurt her, if given a chance. Or at least use her.