Chapter Thirty-Seven
The smell of the oil was familiar as was the feel of it gliding across his skin. Though he was sure their beta attendants had never been so careful with him. He remembered harsh hands scrubbing at him, always grumpy, always in a hurry. Forcing himself to keep his eyes closed, he tried to relax and let the memories come. Another scent found him, smoky. His nose twitched at the familiar smell. It was the cigars the spectators would smoke sometimes. Usually the rich ones in the good seats, the ones they were really putting the show on for. The ones with real money, big stakes, in the game. A third scent hit him and almost sent him reeling. Blood, he could smell blood.
“Finn?” His voice was tight, fearful. Was his mate hurt?
“Shh,” his mate soothed. “Everything’s fine. It was a pinprick, nothing more. Just focus on what you can scent and what you can feel.”
Griffin’s hand continued to glide across the oil he’d rubbed into Beau’s skin, and Beau forced himself to calm down and return to cataloging the scents. Oil, smoke, and blood. It was that third one that caught him, wrapped itself around him and drew him down deep. He was still conscious of Griffin’s hand on him but it felt like the omega was growing more distant with each passing moment.
When he opened his eyes, he was in the ring they trained in. The head of their fighting club stood in front of him. Up in the balcony around him were the other fighters, watching, waiting. The air was heavy with anticipation and not in a good way. This was training but not the sort they did every day. They were about to learn a lesson of another kind.
A man was dragged in through the door on the opposite side of the ring. Beau jolted with recognition and took a step forward.
“Andrew?”
The trainer held up a hand, and he stilled, watching as he turned in a slow circle making eye contact with every fighter on the balcony.
“You all know the rules. You run. You fight. To the death. Andrew ran. Today is the day he fights.” The trainer’s gaze returned to Beau. “Today is the day he dies.”
Beau had known Andrew since they were kids, taken from their families and given to the care of the trainers. They’d trained together, grown up together, fought side by side. They always had each others’ backs.
“No.” He wasn’t even sure he’d spoken the word aloud, but the trainer rounded on him.
“You’d rather we took him out back and put him down? At least this way, he gets to go out fighting. He has a chance.”
There was a smirk on his face as he said it. Beau and Andrew had never fought head to head for a reason. Drew was a leopard shifter, strong, fast, and wiry, but no match for Beau’s bear.
He shook his head once, and the trainer got all up in his face, his words menacing.
“You fight or we’ll have to make a bigger example for the rest. We’ll kill him and all the fighters he shared a room with the night he ran.”
Word on the grapevine was that they hadn’t sounded the alarm, had said nothing until the trainer came to get them up the next morning.
The trainer stepped back, disgusted.
“Take them,” he said, with a jerk of his head.
Guards advanced on the gathered fighters above, shock sticks in their hands.
Beau looked to Andrew, their eyes meeting across the arena. Drew looked shell-shocked, as if the light was too bright, and he couldn’t quite figure out how he’d gotten there. They’d drugged him. Had he any idea what was going on? Did it matter? Beau knew Andrew wouldn’t want the others to share his fate. Like Beau, he’d take the consequences of his own actions, alone.
“No,” he said quietly. “I’ll do it.”
With a wave of his hand, the trainer stopped the advance of the guards.
“Shifter form,” he threw over his shoulder, heading for the door.
Beau whipped his head around to look back at him, his eyes pleading.
“Oh for-” The trainer’s hand shot out, his shock stick hitting Beau in the side and sending a wave of pain through him. He roared in anger and that roar deepened as he shifted. By the time the change was over, the trainer was gone, leaving him alone with Drew, the latter stumbling a little as he walked around, trying to get his bearings.
Beau couldn’t kill him like this. Not as a man. It would make him no better than a monster.
Ambling forward, he watched until Drew finally noticed the hulking form of a bear closing in on him.
“Wha-”
Beau didn’t give him a chance to speak, knocking him off his feet with a swipe of his paw.
Andrew hit the ground with a surprising amount of grace for someone so clearly off-kilter. That was cat shifters for you. When he tried to get up, Beau knocked him flat again. He hadn’t hurt him, not yet. His intention was to goad Drew enough that his shifter took over.
The third smack of his paw did the trick, a low growl coming from the leopard that rose from the ground to meet him. And then they were fighting, for real this time. Beau knew two things: they’d never let Drew live and they’d never let him kill Beau. All he could do was make it as painless as he could for his friend.
But the moment he realized that was the moment Andrew really started to fight back. Beau didn’t think he even knew who he was fighting. It was all anger and instinct.
He heard a voice shout from nearby.
“Finish it.”
Their trainer. He wanted to see Drew defeated, savaged. To stamp out the hope that anyone else might have of making a great escape like he had. If Beau didn’t do this right, they’d make him do it again, with someone else. Someone who hadn’t taken that chance. Who’d never even tasted freedom.
He lashed out, his claws catching Drew’s exposed flank, tearing into flesh as he sent the leopard sprawling across the arena and careening into the wall. Drew scrambled to get his paws under him.
With a roar of anger and pain, Beau stalked toward him, tossing him again with another vicious blow. This time, when Drew went down, he stayed down, his head twisted to watch as Beau closed in, his neck exposed. Beau reared up onto his hind legs, his roar filling the training arena until no other sound could be heard.
He swung for Drew, his claws going for the leopard’s throat, and saw too late that he was now facing a very human Drew.
“Beau?” his friend whispered, confused even as Beau’s claws tore into his skin…
“No!”
He jerked upright, shouting and struggling, feeling someone holding him from behind. The fighting ring had fallen away, Drew’s body disappearing like a shattered mirror.
“Drew!”
Faces appeared in the doorway as Beau clawed at the air in front of him, trying to anchor himself.
“Beau,” a voice said in his ear. “I am right here. I won’t let you go.”
He knew that voice, knew the face and scent that belonged to it.
“Finn?”
“That’s right. You went away for a little bit but now you’re back.”
“I killed him.” Even to his own ears, he sounded broken.
Finn’s arms wrapped around his chest, the omega hugging him from behind.
“He was my friend, like a brother to me. And I had to… I had to…”
He roared out his pain, his hands clenched into fists, his knees digging into the hard floor. He remembered. All of it. The look of betrayal on Drew’s face, the stillness in his body as the trainers carried him out while Beau knelt on the ground, just like he was doing now, his mind lost.
“I remember,” he gasped out, reaching for Finn’s hands to have something to hold on to. “I remember.”
It wasn’t like a switch being flicked, oh no. His descent to feral had been a slow slide into madness, Drew’s face haunting his every dream and then his every waking moment, until there was nothing else he could see and no way to stop the anger, the utter abhorrence, he felt for himself. He’d become the beast he’d always feared he could be.
“Tell me,” Finn whispered in his ear, his chin a warm pressure on Beau’s shoulder. “Tell me all of it.”
So he did.