“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 else 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.

“What’s your plan?” I ask, when I realize she’s still waiting for my question. “You must understand that this is a long shot.”

“I understand that it’s my only shot. And it’s not like I can’t fight.”

I take another long look at her, reassessing. Her arms—what I can see of them—look well-toned. Muscular, even. For a girl. Her legs seem to be well shaped, based on the way her pants cling to her thighs. And objectively speaking, her ass is a thing of beauty.

“Your brother taught you?” I ask, and she seems insulted.

“We trained together, from the time I was ten years old until he went pro. And I never stopped.”

“Okay. Maybe you can fight.” She’s certainly in good enough shape. “But there are no weight classes in here, and the smallest man in the bullpen is easily half again your size. Most are twice your size. And no offense, but if you couldn’t take Ray, you don’t stand much of a chance against anyone else.”

Her brows rise halfway up her forehead, and she leans to the right so she can see through the bars into the cells across the aisle. “Who says I couldn’t take Ray? I don’t think he’s breathing.”

“Good. Fucker deserves it. But they won’t let you bring your own weapon into the ring, and they won’t let you earn one until you move up a couple of levels.”

“I know. I watched the feeds at home.”

Of course she did. Her brother’s a professional fighter. She probably grew up watching bloodsport for fun. But surely, she sees now that the reality is something else entirely.

Here, there are no commercial breaks. No time outs. No personal trainers. There are no safe spaces and no do-overs. No tap-outs. In the bullpen, there’s nothing but a hundred men who only want to fuck her and kill her. Maybe not even in that order.

She scowls, and I realize she can see my thoughts. “I know what I’m doing.”

I shake my head slowly. “You can’t possibly.”

“I—”

“No. Sylvie, you can’t know what you’re getting into until you actually step onto the sand. Until you can feel hundreds of eyes looking down at you. Dozens of cameras. Millions of viewers, all across the galaxy. Until you’ve looked the vicious motherfucker on the other side of the ring in the eye and seen how fucking determined he is to kill you. Because it’s you or him, and he wants to live just as badly as you do. And he’s willing to do things you aren’t.”

“There’s nothing I’m not willing to do,” she says. And though I’ve given her the bleakest, most accurate description I can of life in the arena, that fire in her eyes burns brighter by the second.

“I wish I could tell you that’ll be enough. But it won’t.”

“What is it you’re trying to talk me out of, Graham?” she demands softly, holding my gaze with an iron will. “I’m already here, and there’s only one way out.”

“I know. I’m just trying to give you a realistic picture of your chances. For every fighter who gets his sentence commuted to life, a hundred will die, either on the sand, in the yard, or right here in the bullpen. Sylvie, there’s virtually no chance in hell that you will walk out of this place alive.”