Owen’s forward progress slowed at her sudden halt. There was a deliberate glint in his eyes as his gaze ran over her from head to toe. “Don’t be scared,” he said with slow malice. “I promise it won’t hurt—much.”
She didn’t reply, because he wasn’t worth the words or the effort. Instead, she stared him down with undisguised revulsion.
The smile on his face quickly twisted with anger, and he leaped at her. Time seemed to slow, pulling everything into perfect and brilliant focus. He was fast, but she was faster still. This was what she had trained for. With practiced ease, she twisted effortlessly to the side.
And so, it began.
Chapter 26 – Jamie
He didn’t want to be here.
The crowd screamed with a single voice, their lust for blood sending a bolt of pain throbbing through Jamie’s head. There was too little space and too many people. They pressed in close, and the heat of too many bodies combined with the humid heat of the tropical sun to make Jamie feel claustrophobic for the first time in his life.
He tried to shift in his seat to make room for Pete as he pushed his way past, his arms full of an assortment of snacks—everything from popcorn to beer. The sight of it made Jamie feel more than a little sick. Like this was somehow less a brutal fight to the death than some cheap form of entertainment.
Pete sat down and offered up his armful of food, handing over a box of popcorn to Eva and chocolates to Gemma. Jamie refused the food but downed a beer from a plastic cup in a single gulp, hoping that the alcohol might settle his nerves. He instantly regretted it when the foamy liquid turned on his empty stomach.
“The bookies are going insane down there,” Pete said. “The odds on Allyra have shortened considerably. I think I might’ve missed the boat on taking a bet out on her winning.”
“She was at a thousand to one odds when I took the bet on her,” Gemma said.
“How much did you put down?” Pete asked.
“Ten grand, I think,” Gemma replied off-handedly. “I can’t quite remember.”
Jamie swallowed, but the saliva in his mouth felt thick, like melted chocolate that he couldn’t quite force down his throat. Gemma might not act as entitled as some of the Gifted, but her casual comment showed just how little she understood about poverty in a country where ten grand could’ve fed an entire family for a few months. He glanced at Eva, and from the frozen expression on her face, he knew that the cavalier approach their wealthier friends took to money didn’t sit well with her either. Eva didn’t like to talk about her childhood, but he knew she’d been an orphan. Perhaps she’d even experienced poverty firsthand before discovering the privileged world of the Gifted and those who lived in it. In this, he and Eva were all too similar—they were Gifted but somehow didn’t quite fit into the mold.
A sudden hush swept over the crowd, and Jamie lifted his eyes, trying to see what had caught their attention. The two Five Finals pairs who weren’t fighting in the first round were making their way up the stands to seating set aside for them. First to come into view were François and Xolani.
Pete nudged Gemma. “Your brother looks confident,” he said with a grin.
Gemma rolled her eyes. “That’s just his default setting anytime he’s with Xolani.”
François and Xolani raised their hands to greet the crowd before taking their seats, and that tiny gesture seemed to fuel to crowd’s excitement, building it to fiery new heights.
A few minutes passed, and then, without fanfare, Jason and Allyra appeared. They kept their eyes straight ahead while climbing the stairs up to their seats, and once there, they sat down without once acknowledging the crowd, seemingly in a world that contained only the two of them.
“Well, they look friendlier than the last time I saw them,” Eva said cynically.
“Given that the last time you saw them, they were trying to kill each other—anything would be friendlier,” Jamie said sarcastically.
But Eva was right. Jamie could see the change in Allyra and Jason’s relationship. It was in the way Jason’s fingers brushed gently against Allyra’s waist as he stood aside to allow her to walk past him. It was in the slight smile she gave him in return.
Watching them, Jamie felt a flash of jealousy that he had no right to feel anymore. Jason’s blond head was tilted toward Allyra’s dark one, and there was no denying that they made a handsome couple. Each one of them was beautiful, but together, they seemed to enhance each other. Tall and willowy, there was a magic that surrounded them, and next to the heavy bulk of François and Xolani, they appeared to be creatures from another world altogether.
* * *
The first couple bouts were everything Jamie had expected them to be—brutal, vicious, and utterly painful to watch. Trying to spare himself the horrors of the Arena, Jamie found his eyes drifting to Allyra and watching her reactions. In the time since discovering her Gift, Allyra seemed to have also perfected her ability to keep her emotions to herself. If it had been difficult to read her thoughts before, now it was nearly impossible. Beyond a swift widening of her eyes at the sight of Elisha’s lifeless body, Allyra’s face remained hard and expressionless.
There was a break in the proceedings after the completion of the first round during which Marcus entered the Arena to perform the draw for the next round of fights. When Allyra and Jason were drawn
