Hewes's voice cut through the roaring in my ears, and I jerked my head up, my vision swimming. He was already turning away, dismissing me like I was nothing.
The man I'd come here to kill was walking away, and I was being dragged in the opposite direction, and the plan was disintegrating like ash in my hands.
No. No, no, no—
My mind fractured, thoughts splintering into panic-sharp fragments.He's leaving. I can't reach him. The plan is gone. I'm trapped. I'm alone. I'm going to die here.
The guards pulled me toward a doorway, and I tried to dig in my heels, tried to resist, but my body wasn't responding. My muscles were locked with adrenaline, trembling so hard I heard my teeth chattering.
Breathe. Just breathe.
But I couldn't. My lungs were stuttering, shallow gasps that pulled in insufficient oxygen, that made my vision go gray at the edges. The corridor tilted, or maybe I was tilting, and the guards' grip tightened, their claws pressing deeper.
Ana's face flashed through my mind—not the terrified girl in Hewes's videos, but Ana at seventeen, laughing on the beach, her dark hair whipping in the salt wind, the Pacific crashing behind her. The smell of sunscreen and seaweed. The warmth of the sun on my shoulders. The sound of Sebastian's voice calling us back to the blanket, complaining we'd left him alone with the cooler.
Gone. All of it gone.
My throat was closing. I tried to pull in air and got nothing—a thin wheeze that barely reached my lungs, that left me gasping like a fish drowning in oxygen it couldn't process.
Mom's kitchen. The smell of her pozole simmering on the stove. The weight of her hand on my shoulder when I'd gotten my acceptance letter to college. "Mija, you're going to do amazing things." Grandpa's laugh—deep and warm and safe—echoing through the house on Sunday mornings.
Both dead now. Car accident the summer I went to work for Hewes. And I was about to join them, except there'd be no grave, no funeral, no one to mourn me properly. Just a body in a cell on a prison planet no one cared about.
Sebastian's face. Six years old, crying in my arms after Dad's funeral. "You won't leave us too, right? Promise you won't leave." And I'd promised. I'd sworn I'd always be there.
I was breaking that promise. I'd come to this hellhole and accomplished nothing except getting myself killed.
The guards were still dragging me forward—I felt the movement, felt my boots scraping against the metal floor—but I couldn't see where we were going. Couldn't see anything except that shrinking point of light and the darkness rushing in to swallow it.
Part of me was screaming to fight. To twist free, to run, to claw at their eyes, to do something except let them drag me to whatever horror waited in that cell.
But the rest of me—the larger part, the part that was winning—was frozen. Paralyzed. My muscles wouldn't respond to commands. My legs moved only because the guards were hauling me forward, not because I was walking.
I'm going to die here.
Like Hewes said. Worthless.
No.
The word formed somewhere deep in my soul, somewhere beneath the panic and terror and animal fear that was trying to consume me. A small, hard kernel of rage that refused to be swallowed.
No.
I wasn't worthless. I wasn't nothing. I'd survived Hewes's manipulation. I'd survived the journey to this hellhole of a planet, survived Hewes's fists and Persico's assessment and the horror of learning I was going to be given away like property.
I would survive that too.
The thought didn't stop the panic, didn't slow my heart or steady my hands or even out my breathing. But it gave me something to hold onto, something solid in the chaos of my fracturing mind.
The fighting pits.
My brain latched onto it, problem-solving even as terror flooded my system. Persico had said I'd be the prize for the next champion. Which meant there would be fights. Which meant there would be competitors. Which meant—
Which meant Hewes might come to watch.
He'd want to see what happened to me. Of course he would. He'd want to watch me be given to whatever monster won, would want to see me broken and defeated and destroyed. It was exactly the kind of cruelty he'd enjoy.
And if he came to watch...
