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Kohl
Before the Games
Ispat out the blood pooling in my mouth—right on the fucker’s pristine leather shoes. Watching as it slid down to the gravel below.
Partly as a final way to defy him before they left me for dead.
Partly because I didn’t want to look at my fucked up face in the shine.
My eye was swollen and purple, a deep cut in my eyebrow pouring blood down the side of my face. My teeth had shredded the side of my cheek after a couple blows to my jaw.
Lovely.
“What d’you say?” Murphy asked, his yellowed teeth bared in a shit-eating grin. His voice cutting through the silence of the dark alley way they had cornered me in.
“Sorry,” I forced through gritted teeth.
“Didn’t quite hear that,” he said, leaning closer to my spot on the ground. “Repeat it for me, sweetheart. One more time.”
His associates—better referred to asgoonsgiven their paperboy caps and dirty jeans—laughed around him. It was easy to be brave when you had the upper hand.
Especially when the person you had the upper hand on was a scrawny high schooler.Fuck, I really needed to hit the gym.
The violent anger simmering beneath my skin came to a boil.
I hated him.
Hated him more than just about anyone in this world.
Adding insult to injury, Murphy wasn’t even the one in charge. Not really.
He just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to feel powerful for once in his pathetic life. To make aLegacygrovel at his feet.
As much as I was loath to admit it, I understood the urge.
Most of the Legacies out there were spoiled brats without a clue of what the real world was like. What lurked behind the cameras. Screaming fans and sponsorships.
Sickos who entered the gamesfor fun, ignoring the very real possibility of their own deaths. Turns out it didn’t matter how famous you or your parents were or how much money you had, a bullet to the brain would kill you just the same.
But I was nothing likethem.Not like my father, who left whatever shreds of humanity he had in the first place in that arena. Not like my brother, who’d made a sport out of exploiting his title as a legacy for all it was worth. I hated everything that the games stood for. Hated how much they’d fucked up my life.
If not for them, I wouldn’t be here,embarrassing myself.
If the games didn’t exist, the man my father had become would be no more. Maybe he’d have been a normal parent fifty percent of the time. Show up to parent-teacher meetings. Drive me to football practice. Not spend all his time dreaming up ways to climb the ranks of the producers of a game that was a glorified for-profit prison where the only sentence was the death penalty.
AndVic—
“Cat got your tongue?” Murphy asked, pulling me back to the present.
It didn’t matter what circumstances had led me here. At the end of the day, I still needed to get this shit over with. And quickly.
Another bout of laughter stoked the flames of my temper as I fought to rise to my feet. My ankle had to be busted, and if it wasn’t my ankle, it was my knee. All I knew was that my legs and weight weren’t mixing.
Where the fuck is Terrance?
The leader of this pitiful group of ragtag petty criminals had pushed me off to fuckingMurphyas if I was some minor annoyance. Not someone he’d been doing business with foryears.
It irritated me more than it hurt, but I couldn’t write off just how easily he dumped me into this loser’s lap.
