An answering growl is the only response I get.

“Keep it clean,” Emetterio warns. “Go.”

My heart drums so loudly, I can hear it in my ears as we begin to circle each other.

“Offense. Now. Strike first,” Tairn snaps.

“Not helping!”

Jack lunges, striking out with his knife, and I slice my dagger across the back of his hand, drawing first blood.

“Shit!” He jumps back, his cheeks blotching.

That’s what I want, what I need to win this match, for him to get so angry that he acts without thinking and makes a mistake.

He dances forward and then kicks out, aiming for my midsection, and I stumble back, narrowly avoiding the blow. “Bet you wish you could throw that blade, don’t you?” he taunts, knowing I won’t break a rule when it can hurt someone in the matches going on around us.

“Bet you wish you didn’t know what it feels like to dig out one of my knives, don’t you?” I retort.

His lips press into a thin line before he comes at me in a series of punches and swipes with his dagger. I can’t deflect—he’s too strong for me, as evidenced by the dagger he easily kicks out of my hand—so I use my speed, ducking and diving while getting in another cut, this one along his forearm.

“Damn it!” he rages, twisting to follow as I come around his back. He catches me off guard, locking onto my arm and flipping me over his back to the mat.

I take the blow on my shoulder and wince, but there’s no sound of tearing or snapping. Thanking Imogen will be my first order of business if I make it out of this.

Keeping my arm locked, Jack thrusts his knife straight at my chest, but it’s deflected by my vest, skimming along my ribs to lodge in the mat.

“He’s using death blows!” Ridoc shouts. “That’s not allowed!”

“Pull it back, Barlowe!” Emetterio bellows.

“What do you think, Sorrengail?” Jack whispers in my ear, holding me immobile with my arm behind my back. “Admit it. You and I both knew it would be like this between us. Quick. Embarrassingly easy. Fatal. Your precious wingleader isn’t here to save you.”

No, but Xaden will suffer…if not worse if Jack achieves his goal. The thought spurs me to action. Ignoring the pain, I throw my weight into a roll, subluxating my shoulder but freeing myself from his grip when he gets tangled in my legs.

Then I kick him straight in the balls.

He hits his knees as I gain my feet, clutching himself as his mouth opens in a silent scream.

“Tap out,” I order, picking up the dagger I dropped. “I can cut you open at any second. Both you and I know if this were real life, you’d be done.”

“If this were real life, I would have killed you the second you stepped onto the mat,” he seethes through gritted teeth.

“Tap. Out.”

“Fuck off!” He throws his dagger.

I throw up my hands to block, but it lodges in my left fucking forearm. Blood streams and pain sears the nerves along my arm, erupting with alarming poignancy, but I know better than to remove it. Right now, it’s holding that wound as shut as it can.

“No throwing!” Emetterio shouts from the sidelines, but Jack is already moving, barreling toward me with a series of kicks and punches that I’m not ready for. His fist slams into my cheek, and I feel the skin split.

His knee forces the air from my body when he rams it into my stomach.

But I stay on my feet until his hands clasp my face. Agony fills every cell in my body as violent, vibrating energy rips through me with an intensity that makes it feel like he’s cleaving ligament from bone, muscle from tendon.

I scream as I’m shaken by an internal force I don’t understand, as though he’s forcing his own power into my body, shocking me with a thousand stings of vibrating energy.

Now. If I don’t do it now, he’ll kill me. My vision is already darkening at the edges.

I reach a trembling hand into the pocket of my leathers and thumb open the stopper on the vial.

His sadistic grin and a red rim around his eyes are all I can see as he forces more and more power into my body, but his hands are occupied and he’s too obsessed with his victory to hear that I’ve stopped screaming, to see that I’m moving.

“He’s using his powers!” Ridoc roars, and from the corner of my decreasing vision, I see movement on both sides.

I shove the vial against Jack’s smile so hard, I feel one of his teeth break.

Hands reach for us both, and I hear Ridoc and Emetterio cry out, jerking their hands away after contact. Whatever Jack is doing is transferring from me to them by touch.

My teeth rattle as the pain consumes me, my body fighting to pass out, to escape the unbearable torture, but I refuse to succumb to the darkness until Jack wheezes.

His eyes fly impossibly wide, and he drops his hands, clutching his own neck as his airway closes.

My knees give way, my body still shuddering as I hit the mat, but so does Jack, heaving and clawing at his neck as his face turns purple.

Ridoc’s face is in mine within seconds. “Breathe, Sorrengail. Just breathe.”

“What the hell is wrong with him?” someone asks as Jack writhes.

“Oranges,” I whisper to Ridoc as my body finally gives out. “He’s allergic to oranges.” I fall into nothingness.

When I wake, I’m not on the mat, and I can tell by the windows of the Healer Quadrant infirmary that night has fallen. I’ve been out for hours.

And that’s not Ridoc lounged in the chair next to my bed, glaring at me like he’d like to kill me himself.

It’s Xaden. His hair is tousled, like he’s been tugging at it, and he’s flipping a dagger end over end, catching it by the tip without so much as looking at it before sheathing it at his side. “Oranges?”

I know you don’t want to hear this, but sometimes you have to know when to take the death blow, Mira. It’s why you have to be sure that Violet enters the Scribe Quadrant. She’ll never be able to take a life.

—Page seventy, the Book of Brennan

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FOUR

I move to scoot up the bed so I can sit, but the pain in my arm reminds me that there was a dagger in it a couple of hours ago. Now it’s bandaged. “How many stitches?”