13
SYLVIE
“I’ll kill every one of them.” Graham wraps his arms around me again, and I sob on his shoulder for a couple of minutes, hoping that no one in the other room can hear.
Crying would be expected from any other woman in the universe, after what I’ve just been through, but not for me. I am a killer. A fucking gladiator, now at the mercy of sponsorships. Which depend upon my image. My viewership. How well-liked I am by the audience. How confident they are in my ability to win.
I know how this works.
“Come sit down,” Graham says, and I follow him to the edge of the tub, where he sits. “Bubbles?” he asks, tugging me onto his lap.
“Yes. Hell yes.” Tonight, I take the sand. Tonight, I will either kill or be killed. But today…
Today, for the first time in months, someone other than Graham is offering me comfort. Dignity. Luxury, even, if the scent of the bubbles in here and the food out there can be trusted.
Graham pours bubble bath into the flowing water, and I’m already pulling my stinky, blood-stained clothes off. I can’t get rid of them fast enough.
As I step into the tub, I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror, and I’m shocked by what I see. I’m so thin. I have a six-pack, and you can see every line of muscle in my arms. As well as my hipbones. But, to my utter shock, there’s not a mark on me. Not so much as a bruise.
How can there be no outward sign of what I just went through?
I slide into the hot water and scoop the bubbles around me, like I used to when I was a kid. “Would I be a total wimp if I admit that I want you to hold me?”
Graham’s smile looks pained. “I saw what you did out there. No one could ever accuse you of being anything less than badass, Sylvie.” He strips out of his prison uniform and shoes, and I scoot forward so he can sit behind me in the water. When he’s settled, I lean back against his chest and he wraps his arms around me. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”
“I’m glad you weren’t. They might have killed you.”
“They would’ve had to kill me, to get to you.”
“Don’t be mad at Hardy. He tried.”
“I know.” Graham smooths hair over my shoulder. “He took on three of them for you.”
“I almost killed Lincoln Gray.”
Graham laughs, and his whole body shakes against mine. “Don’t worry. You’ll get another chance.”
For a few minutes, we just soak in the hot water, and it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve ever felt, made even more so by the fact that he’s here with me.
Graham laughs again. “I just realized this means I’m going to step onto the sand smelling like…” He picks up the bottle of bubble bath and reads from the label. “Lavender and chamomile. Only a real man could pull that shit off.”
“I have confidence in you. Hey, you told me they trim and shave you guys, but you didn’t mention any of this. I’m almost happy to be fighting to the death tonight, for a hot bath and what smells an awful lot like a barbecue pork dinner.”
Graham snorts. “This isn’t the norm. I mean, it’s possible they pull out all the stops for Roth, but I’ve never seen anything like this in the time I’ve been here.”
I sit up and twist to face him. “This is just for us?”
He nods. “Well, it’s mostly for you. First woman on the sand, and all. Though Kaya did say the sponsors are eating up our ‘relationship.’”
I’m not sure how I feel about that. What Graham and I have—whatever this is—is none of their business. But if it plays well on the feeds, it might give us advantages that could save our lives.
“We should probably actually get clean,” Graham says. “There’s body wash and some kind of puffy sponge…thing over there.” He points at the far edge of the tub, by the wall. “Do you want me to…? We don’t have to do anything. It can just be a bath.”
I nod as I squirt sweet-scented soap onto the sponge. Then I turn to straddle his thighs and hand it to him.
I lean against his chest with my head on his shoulder while he runs the sponge gently over my entire back, and the warm water feels so good that I actually start to relax. And the next thing I know, I’m crying again.
Graham doesn’t try to cheer me up, and I’m thankful for that. He just holds me while he slides the sponge over my arms, then across my shoulders and up my neck. I sit up so he can reach the rest of me, and my gaze finds his. “Sylvie…” He leans forward and kisses me, and I feel the sponge bob past me in the water.
As we kiss, he gathers a pile of bubbles and begins rubbing them all over me with his hands. He starts at my neck, then moves over my collarbone. When he gets to my breasts, his hands warm and slick with soap, my body starts to respond. My nipples harden, and I’m disappointed when he moves on to my stomach, rather than lingering on the sensitive peaks.
So I slide my hand down his stomach into the water, letting my fingertips skim over his sack before I take his cock in my hand. He’s already hard, though he’s been careful not to press his erection against me. He groans when I squeeze him, and he breaks off our kiss to lean his forehead against mine. “Sylvie… You know I’m happy to oblige, but we don’t have to do this.”
I put my hand over his mouth to shut him up. “I won’t ask for something I don’t want. This is our reality, Graham. It wasn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last. They might succeed next time, and if they do, and that changes something between us, then we’ll deal with that when the time comes. But for now…I’m not going to let them take this from me. I like sex. You’re the only good thing to happen to me in this godawful place.” I stroke him a couple more times, and his eyes fall closed on a moan. Then I lift myself on my knees and hold him in position while I lower myself onto him. “You make me feel good, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let them take that away from me. From us.”
He pulls me down to claim my mouth and I begin to move, setting an unhurried pace that kindles a slow burn deep inside me. That heat builds with every stroke. His hands roam my body, rubbing my nipples into hard points with fingers still wet and slick with soap. Teasing me toward the edge of pleasure while our kiss goes on and on, until I pull away from him and let my head fall back. My mouth open.
He dips his head to suck on my nipple and I groan as I grind into him, sloshing water over the edge of the tub. I’m balanced right on the edge, every muscle in my body taut with the impending release. Desperate for it.
My body is alive with sensation—warm water lapping at my skin, rough hands kneading my flesh, blissful pleasure peaking inside me. “Graham,” I beg, and he thrusts up harder. Water slaps the undersides of my breasts, bubbles tickling the sensitive skin there.
He grabs my hips and grinds me into him. “Hurry, baby,” he groans, and as his cock swells inside me, I can feel his legs tense beneath me with the effort to hold back. “I can’t wait…”
“Don’t. I’m right there.”
A strangled sound leaks from his throat as he thrusts up hard, holding me in place by my hips, and that last bit of friction is all I need.
“Oh…” I gasp, and I cling to the sides of the tub as my muscles spasm around him, taking him deeper. Pushing me over the edge, into a blistering burst of pleasure that makes me feel…whole. Normal. Like there’s some part of my life that is still right—still mine—despite all the fucked up shit I live out on camera, every second of every day.
That part of my life is Graham and this human connection that is somehow thriving in an inhumane place. He is everything good in my entire existence, and the thought of losing him…
No.
“Sylvie.” Graham pulls me close, his cock still twitching inside me. “You have to fight out there. You can’t die on me,” he says, and I realize we’re thinking the same thing. “I can’t be in here without you anymore. Not now that I’ve had you.”
“Back at ‘cha.” I give him one more long kiss. Then, with a sigh, I stand and let the bubbles slide off my body
while I grab a towel from the stack on the end of the tub.
As I dry off, Graham hands me the robe hanging from a hook on the wall. But when I’m covered, he opens the bathroom door without a stitch on, still dripping water, and steps out into the main room to a chorus of gasps. “Just a head’s up. We made a bit of a mess in there.”
Kaya leans around him to peer at the water on the floor, and her mouth forms a perfect, scandalized O.
I have a feeling that if we ever make it back into this room, they’ll have installed cameras in the bathroom.
The joke’s on me. I forgot to use that hair remover cream, so Kaya sends me right back into the bathroom. By the time I come out, all slick and smooth, Graham has been dressed and ushered off for interviews in the media room, which is evidently in another building.
I spend the next two hours being made camera ready—one hell of a joke, considering there’s hardly been half an hour of my life in the past week that wasn’t on camera, even with me wearing nothing at all.
Renee turns out to be a small man with graying hair worn in a ponytail, who has the strongest fingers I’ve ever felt. He shampoos the living shit out of my hair, as if he thinks he can wash the death sentence out like a bad dye job, then he comes at me with a pair of scissors.
“You’re welcome to just shave it off,” I tell him, only half joking.
But then Kaya runs across the room in her heels, shouting, “No, no, no, no!” in her high-pitched, horrified voice. “She’s the first woman ever to step out onto the sand. We get that she’s badass and everything, but what’s the point of putting a woman out there, if she’s just going to look like a man?”
“Lots of women have short hair,” I point out, but it’s like I’m not even there. “Can’t we just pretend that gender equality applies to hairstyles, as well as death row sentences?”
Kaya scowls. “The hair stays.”
“Even if it gets me killed?” I demonstrate wrapping a long strand of it around my own hand, like Lincoln Gray will no doubt try to do, and she frowns. Then she turns to Renee. “Isn’t there something you can do to make it harder to grab? Yet still keep her looking feminine? Maybe with some little tendrils loose to frame her face?”
“This is absurd,” I snap as Renee begins to braid my mass of curls into the tightest, most secure plait I’ve ever worn. When he’s done, he tucks the end under and pins it in place. I’ll probably have a migraine from the pressure, but I have to admit, my curls will be much harder for Link to use against me now.
But the “soft tendrils” are ridiculous.
When my hair is done, a woman named Margie works on my face with makeup she assures me will stay relatively fresh, even with the heat and sweat I’ll be enduring in the arena. It’s almost a shock to see myself made up again, after months without so much as a tube of moisturizer, but I can tell from the way my entire “team” is staring at me in the mirror that I’m not the only one who’s impressed.
Evidently, I still clean up pretty well.
After makeup comes wardrobe, and even though there’s an entire rack of clothes to choose from, Kaya is already holding the…thing she wants me to put on. She hands me a one-piece, seamless outfit and I’m honestly a little relieved. The sleeveless silver-accented white garment is reinforced through the bust for support. “I was half-afraid you’d have me out there fighting in a bikini.”
Kaya actually laughs. “You’re an attractive woman, and that makes you marketable. But the thing that makes you most marketable is that you’re alive for me to pitch to sponsors. I can’t sell a fighter without a pulse.”
“I’m glad we agree on that.” I head into the bathroom to change, and when I come out in my all-white, skin-tight, calf-length gladiator garb, there are two cameras aimed at me, ready to catch my reaction.
“Well, what do you think?” Kaya asks, her hands clasped to her chest.
“It’s actually kind of perfect.” I drop into a deep squat, to demonstrate. “It moves well. Plenty of support. And the shoulder armor-things are a nice touch.” Even if I’m not sure they’re actually functional. “The color’s absurd, though. It’ll show blood.”
“Yes.” Kaya nods sagely. “Yes, it will.”
14
SYLVIE
“Okay, have a seat over there, and we’ll get started.” Charles points to a director-style chair surrounded by a bank of screens, in one of half a dozen identical three-sided booths spaced out around the large media room. Graham is in the booth next to mine, already being interviewed by another producer, but whatever he’s saying fades into stunned silence when he sees me. He smiles, but it’s the heat in his eyes that tells me just how good I look right now.
He looks even better. They have Graham decked out in solid black with red accents, including rounded shoulder armor that coordinates with mine, but looks more functional than decorative. And that’s when I remember that in the top tier, sponsorships could bring him—or his opponents—weapons.
Similar armor lines his thighs and curves over his knees, but most of his torso and his arms have been left bare of everything except the skintight, flexible fabric, through which every single line of muscle is highlighted by the light as he moves.
“This way.” Charles waves me toward my seat, and my escort of six armed guards follows to fan out behind him as I take a seat. I don’t see any microphones, but I have no doubt the recording will pick up every word I say and every breath I take.
As Charles sinks into the chair across from me—off camera—he taps on his screen, and the monitors lining the booth around me light up. A second later, they begin to play a loop of my “greatest moments,” each starting at a different spot on the reel.
I’ve seen this before, of course. As a spectator. But I’ve never seen a prolonged interview or a “greatest moments” reel for a rookie. Because I haven’t been in the arena yet, all of the footage is either from my trial or from the bullpen.
Across the room, Lincoln Gray and Jack Clarke are being interviewed in booths of their own, and while Clarke’s reel is as long and grisly as it is glorious, Link’s is short, so it repeats much more often.
“Let’s start with an intro,” Charles says, as the cameraman sets his lightweight rig on a tripod in front of me. “Tell us your name and what you did to get sent here. Feel free to editorialize.”
I look into the camera, trying to push past the surreality of experiencing this moment for myself, when I’ve seen it on the feeds so many times, all with fighters much bigger and more experienced than I am. “My name is Sylvie Wolfe, and I’m a convicted murderer. Though I prefer to think of myself more as a vigilante.”
“Who did you kill?” Charles asks, as if he doesn’t already know.
“I killed the man who murdered my sister, Skye. He was a city councilman, and she was his intern. She left me a message one night saying she’d caught him doing something illegal and she needed some advice. The next day, someone found her body in a trash bin across town from his office. The local authorities were either too scared of the councilman to hold him responsible for what he did, or they were in his pocket. So I stepped in.”
“The police report says you tied him to a chair, nude, and stabbed him twenty-six times, but that it took him nearly three hours to bleed out, because you didn’t hit any major organs or nick any arteries.”
I shrug. “Skye was eight weeks pregnant when she died. She was less than a month away from her wedding.” From her happy-ever-after, with a great guy she’d known since she was fifteen years old. “If I could have made his death last longer, I would have.”
“I have no doubt about that. So…how did you know where to cut him, to keep from killing him too quickly?”
“I have a degree in biology, with a concentration in human anatomy and physiology.”
Charles turns his screen around so I can see the official-looking document he’s loaded. “In fact, that’s a bit of an understatement. According to your college transcript, you’re something of an anato
my…enthusiast. We’ve all seen footage of you driving an ink pen into an inmate’s jugular vein within minutes of arriving in the bullpen. Then, this morning, we saw you stab another inmate in the chest. The coroner on Station Alpha says your blade slid between two of his ribs and punctured his left lung, then destroyed his left ventricle. It was a very precise and efficient kill.”
I can only shrug.
“Are you a medical professional?” Charles presses.
I shake my head, and I can’t resist a small smile. “I teach—I taught—high school biology and anatomy.”
“Uh huh.” He clears his throat. “Let’s visit that moment at the end of your trial. At the sentencing.” Charles taps something on the screen in his lap, and the largest of the monitors lining my booth, the one on my left, stops playing the loop and shows security footage of my trial.
We both watch from the odd, overhead angle as the judge announces my guilty verdict. Then sentences me to death.
I see myself begin to panic, my eyes wide. My hands trembling. That was less than three months ago, but the Sylvie on-screen looks so much younger than I ever remember being.
A door opens at the front of the courtroom, and the man who comes out carries a single pre-loaded hypodermic pen on a stainless steel tray. The bailiffs haul me toward the chair on one side of the room, where straps wait to immobilize my arms and legs.
“Wait!” I shout, and my attorney flinches. “Wait, no!” I’m twisting and kicking, fighting the bailiffs. I manage to get free from one officer, and I swing around to punch the other one in the face. His nose explodes in a shower of blood, and he drops my arm.
I back away from them both, knees bent, arms out, and as I watch myself now, from three months and a lifetime later, I realize I looked like a madwoman. “Wait!” I shout again from the screen, as guns all over the courtroom are drawn on me. “I get to choose my method of execution, and I choose combat. I want to fight!”
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