AllFreeNovel
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This is madness.
I stride over to my dad, pressing my hand against his arm. “Carter, what are you doing?” I hiss.
“Why? What’s it matter to you?” he replies, eyebrows arched.
“Toss the coin,Grim,” Beast orders, cutting in.
The sheer fact he calls me Grim and not Princess or Kate has me feeling all kinds of ways, and the look he gives me makes my stomach flip and my spine tingle with fear. Rodriguez, the prick, laughs, adding to the already building tension. What the fuck does he find so damn funny?
“Yes, toss the coin, Grim,” Carter adds smoothly, turning his back on us all and moving to stand at the edge of the cage as he addresses the crowd. “Tonight the winner is the last man standing. This is a fight to thedeath.”
“No!” I shout, unable to stop the word spilling from my lips, but it’s just background noise, lost as the crowd goes wild. Like a pack of baying wolves they’re out for blood.
This is a fight to the death.
To. The. Death.
“NO!” I repeat, striding over to Carter, anger firing in my blood and my heart beating out of control. I grab his arm, unconcerned now at how this looks to the crowd, to him. “What the hell are you doing?!”
Whilst the crowd goes fucking crazy, Carter grips my elbow and forcibly pulls me towards the centre of the ring where Rodriguez stands with the weapons and Beast and Derby eyeing each other up. “I’m doing this for you!” he hisses.
“What do you mean, for me?” I reply, glancing at Beast who shakes his head subtly.
Carter ignores me and Beast looks away, leaving me in total confusion as Carter once again raises his hands to quieten the crowd. “Grim is about to toss the coin. Let’s see who gets to choose first.”
“Do it,” Beast insists, softer this time as he meets my gaze. A thousand words and a whole host of emotions pass across his features. “It’sokay. I’ve got this.”
This time Derby laughs. He steps close to me and I freeze, not because I’m afraid that he might touch me, but because if he does Beast will lose his shit and show everyone how he truly feels and he’ll wind up dead anyway.
“Toss the coin, sweetheart, let the fun begin.”
I toss the coin.
The crowd falls silent as the gold sovereign flips in the air. I watch it in slow motion as gravity pulls it down, my stomach dropping out at the same pace until eventually I catch it, covering the coin up with my hand.
“Call it,” Carter demands as my racing pulse fills my ears with white noise.
Slowly I lift my hand, my eyes dropping to the coin nestled in my palm. “Tails!” I announce loudly, a rush of relief that’s quickly overridden by a powerful dose of fear, because it doesn’t really matter if Beast gets to choose his weapon first, he could die anyway.
“Tales you win, heads you lose,” Beast shouts as he steps towards the tray of weapons, picking up the butcher’s knife and gripping the handle tightly. He taps the tray twice with the blade, pointing it at Derby. “And the fighters of Talesneverlose!”
Then he turns to me and places his left hand over his chest, right where my handprint is tattooed into his skin. My stomach flips with apprehension and dread, but alsolove.
I love him so much it hurts.
“Beast—” I begin but around us the crowd go apeshit, and my words are drowned out by their hollering. “I know,” he mouths. “I know.”
And whilst the crowd might not be aware of the unspoken words between us, my father certainly notices. The look he gives is deadly.
He knows.
When the crowd settles, Carter steps forward and withdraws his gun from the holster at his hip, placing it on the tray. “Let’s up the motherfucking anti, shall we?” he rasps out on a laugh that has all the blood draining from my face.
“Dad?” I question, shaking my head in disbelief. “That’s not fair.”
“My club, my rules!” he snaps, jerking his chin at Derby. “Choose.”
Derby smirks, or at least I think he does because I can’t really tell beneath his skull tattoo. He glances at the gun and I wait for him to grab it. Only he doesn’t. He picks up the crowbar instead.
