I held my breath, searching the darkness, heart stalled in my chest.
What had woken me?
The back of my neck prickled—an old instinct that kept me alive through five decades inside this place and before that, as Don Marcello’s eldest son and heir—then I swung my legs over the edge of the rock hollow I called a bed.
The hairs along my arms lifted. My blood, slow with hunger, turned sharp as a blade.
Someone was inside the Fossa.
Someone who didn’t belong.
Had Giovanni come to finish me off? By my reckoning, I still had another day left, but the dough-faced bastard was treacherous to the core.
My body screamed as I limped to the cell door, dragging my bad leg, pain lancing through my ribs, my shoulders, my spine. Courtesy of the Overseer. After Giovanni’s departure,I’d survived my next fight, then he’d taken his time, methodical as any expert in his field, breaking and crushing virtually every inch of bone with clinical, ancient patience.
The Overseer never raged.
Emotions didn’t play into his tortures.
He simply enjoyed causing pain, the way decent people enjoyed a good meal.
I sank to the floor and pulled in a shallow breath. Air scraped down my throat, tasting of piss, old blood, and rot until my dried-out lungs felt like I’d swallowed the pit itself. My tongue was thick, my mouth parched, the ache of starvation a gnawing hunger in my belly.
More than anything, my broken leg throbbed.
Not a clean snap, but a splintered fracture that had the bone grinding every time I moved a fraction of an inch. I could feel the jagged edges moving under skin that was already black and swollen.
This would never heal, not in the time I had left.
Certainly not for the fight that awaited me in just a few hours. At dawn, the Overseer would pair me with someone equally weak and broken because he’d want to draw this final contest out, so he’d make sure we were evenly matched. But he’d give the other prisoner an advantage... a weapon perhaps.
And instructionsnotto end me quickly.
If I survived that fight, there would be another.And another.
And then…
Heat surged through my veins, as if I was filled with fire. I squeezed my hands into fists, fighting the urge to just let go and burn this entire place to the ground.No. Lose yourself, and you’ll become nothing but what they made you.
You are Dante Dominico, and you are not a monster.
The heat ebbed away, and I closed my eyes and let the truth settle into my bones.
I was going to die down here.
If not today in the ring, then tonight.
If not in the ring, then by the Overseer’s hand. Then I’d be dropped into a hole out in the desert where no one—not Emberline, not Gabriel or Nico—would ever know what happened to me.
I should feel relief. I’d been fighting my entire life. First, my father, then every single day since they’d thrown me in this hole. I’d fought while I was starving, bleeding, half-blind with exhaustion. I’d fought males twice my size and things that shouldn’t have been alive at all.
But if this was the end… I stared at the ceiling and knew one thing for sure.
I wasn’t ready to die.
I wanted to see Venice again. Kiss Emberline, hold her in my arms. Embrace my pain-in-the-ass brother one last time.
The Fossa would be the last thing I knew, and the Overseer’s face the last thing I saw on this earth. I closed my eyes, managed one jagged inhale—and froze.
