“Stay with me,” Leto growled. “You pass out and I’ll find some new pieces of your soul to steal. You stand here and behave like a Dragon-damned champion.”

He’d hit that particular timbre, even among the crazy cheers—the tone of voice that she recognized as hypnotic but was powerless to resist. She nodded. With his hand at her back, she was able to refashion the numb lumps at the bottoms of her legs into feet. Feet in boots. Boots on scuffed floor. Leto still scowled down at her. How could a victor appear so dissatisfied and angry? Well, in her case, how could a victor feel ready to vomit and lie down on the clay?

That wasn’t Leto, and that wasn’t her.

She grasped his hand and lifted her chin. “I told you. Astonishing.”

His lips quirked. “So I’m to trust your word now, neophyte?”

She hadn’t wanted to let go of his bare shoulder, so she didn’t. This was not a gesture of necessity, but one of greed. She wanted the feel of his flexing muscles and pulsing blood where she dug her fingertips into his flesh. His eyes briefly fluttered shut. She raised up on tiptoes and pitched her voice above the echoes in the Cage room. “I am no longer your neophyte.”

Leto abruptly let her go and circled the Cage with a shout of victory, even more powerful than the intimidating growl he’d postured to the crowd before the match. Every step was powerful, his thighs taut. His back was arrogantly straight. His outthrust chest was accentuated even more because of that beautifully crafted armor. He swung the mace in quick, deadly arcs.

Show-off. But Nynn soaked up every minute, as did Leto’s audience.

Only when he turned, met Nynn’s eyes, and flung the mace aside did she shiver in what could only be described as anticipation. He strode toward her and positioned his body within inches of hers. “You’re not wrong. You’re no longer my neophyte. But you will be mine. Tonight.”

“What happened to that arrogant crap about how I’d come to you?”

They stared at one another. That tingle of something otherworldly and profound glimmered between their eyes. Nynn wanted to blink if only to clear her senses, but the sensations were too seductive.

“Does it really matter who chooses whom?” Pitched so low, beneath the diminishing applause, Leto’s voice was an earthquake ready to rip her open. “We’re both victors.”

“And if I choose someone else?”

Rather than continue his posturing menace—much better suited to those who wagered on his prowess and adored his blunt ferocity—he licked his lower lip. “Then I’ll convince you otherwise. Or I’ll convince your choice that you’re not worth fighting me for.”

“But I am. I am worth fighting for.”

She said it with as much assurance as she’d ever known.

Leto’s nostrils flared on a long, deep inhale. The muscles on either side of his jaw bunched, with radiated movement up to his temples, to his tattoo. “Yes.”

That moment fled, like clinging to smoke and expecting it to hold her in return. Nynn followed him out of the Cage. Her body and her mind felt equally abused. She was still buzzing with an indescribable tingle of violence. If she wanted anything from Leto of Garnis, it was to strip his armor and become combatants of another sort. She wanted to get rid of her edginess, rid of the confusion that kept her from thinking clearly.

She exited the Cage just in time to see Leto and the Old Man squaring off. Before, she’d seen only deference from Leto when talking with the head of the Aster family. “Keep him away from her,” Leto said with unmistakable force. “Feel free to ask him why.”

The skeletal man’s smile never faltered. Never even changed shape. “You overstep.”

“You brought this on us all.”

Leto didn’t even wait for the Old Man’s dismissal; he simply turned and walked out of the arena. Now Nynn was not only confused but also bereft of her partner in this madness. Although she followed him, she was unable to refrain from looking back toward the Asters’ patriarch. That smile remained. Her skin shivered up her arms and down her spin.

Keep him away from her.

Nothing about the fight compared to the way her brain fractured on the most random thoughts.

“Trouble in paradise,” came a voice at her shoulder.

Nynn found the near-inseparable pair, Hark and Silence, suited up for their match. Only once had she fought Hark. He had a don’t-give-a-damn demeanor that he backed up with canny, daredevil tricks. Nynn had been in the complex for only three or four days when she’d met Hark in the practice Cage. He hadn’t even needed to borrow her gift in order to leave her busted and humiliated. His brown hair was shot through with blond streaks that seemed out of place in their underground world. As if he . . . belonged on a beach. A beach. The word sounded unfamiliar in her mind, but she knew it was right.

Silence whispered something in his ear and he laughed. He had a big laugh and a big smile and a really big nighnor in his right hand. The left he wrapped around Silence’s trim waist, as if the woman might actually require protection of any kind. Ever.

“Tell me,” Hark said. “Since you’re in a unique position of knowledge.”

“Unique?”

Hark’s smile was infectious. She might’ve been sucked into his good humor had she been in a less cataclysmic mood. “You’ve spent more time with the grand Leto of Garnis than anyone. No one can remember a neophyte thriving so well under his tutelage.”

That knowledge sank in slowly, like water eroding stone with only drip after drip.

Leto. Neophyte. Survive. Thrive.

“Mostly,” he continued, “they’re made ready to fight and do well to hold their own. You seem to have become his special project. That means you’re unique. And that means, as his most doted student, I’m curious . . . Have you ever seen him so defiant? Toward the Old Man?”

Nynn swallowed back her reply. She’d registered the strangeness of it. On some level, she understood that it had to do with her. These two warriors, with their bizarre whispers—Hark’s disarming smile, which was almost a weapon of its own, and Silence’s cool, appraising stillness—they knew something she did not. She hated them for their mockery.

“Good hunting,” she managed to say.

Another whisper between them. Another private smile. Their names were announced and they turned toward the Cage. Hark tipped two fingers to his brow, as if in salute. Nynn wanted her collar disarmed so she could fry them both.

Despite her disorientation and a labyrinth of hallways, she searched until she found the weapons room. Leto was standing with his back to the door, which bothered her more than she could say. He was not a man to turn his back on any potential threat. That warriors such as Hellix and those from the other cartels were still within the complex should’ve been enough to keep him on guard. Instead, he’d placed both hands on the wall, as if propping it up. His head was bowed. Had she not recognized the armor and his distinctive tattoo, she would’ve thought her initial assessment wrong.

Yet . . . he was Leto.

“Which blade should I have chosen?” she asked quietly. Everything sounded muted once beyond the din of the arena.

“The gilt-edged one.”

“Why?”

He pushed away from the wall and retrieved the dagger in question. “This one is thin enough to be wielded as a whip—slicing rather than hacking.”

“What lesson was I supposed to learn from picking the wrong one? Weren’t the odds bad enough already?”

Leto swept the blade. The air parted in a swish of sound, as if molecules could be split as easily as skin. “Now you know you can win even when conditions aren’t perfect.”

“Oh, because you were perfectly happy with being chained together. I saw your frustration.”

“That wasn’t frustration.” He tossed the weapon aside so that it slid beneath a metal bench. “That was humiliation.”