Chapter 1 · Stripped from the Board

Chapter 1: Stripped from the Board

"Wipe it."

Kane Voss said it to the board clerk like I wasn't standing three feet away in my wraps, still bleeding from the split on my eyebrow, wrist taped, pulse in my throat. The lock on the river-cage door had sealed. The clerk's marker hovered over my name — CALDER, slot four, river cage, 11 PM — and then it went through it. One red line. Gone.

"Excuse me?" My voice came out louder than I meant. The whole roll-call hall heard it, forty-some night fighters still sweating from warmups, all of them turning to watch.

"You heard me." Kane didn't even look at me. He had his clipboard, his jaw set, that cold river-dock cologne clinging to his collar like it owned the place. "Calder's off the public board. Effective now."

"I earned that slot." I stepped into his space, close enough that I could see the muscle jump in his cheek. "I've held slot four for six weeks. Six weeks, Voss. You can't just —"

"I can do whatever I want with the roster." He finally looked down at me, and it was the kind of look that was supposed to make me shrink. It didn't. "You're reassigned. Flood intake. Night watch on the lethal line."

Someone behind me laughed under their breath. Lethal line meant the runoff chambers, the ones that had killed two fighters last winter when the voltage locks glitched. It wasn't a transfer. It was a burial with a time card.

"That's not a reassignment, that's a death sentence, and you know it."

"Then maybe you shouldn't have scored so high you made the real fighters look bad." His voice dropped, quieter, meaner, just for me. "Pack doesn't need a girl from the day shift pretending she's elite."

The word girl landed like a slap. Forty people in that hall and he said it loud enough that half of them caught it. My face went hot. I thought about the locked locker three floors down, the folded trial sheet hidden in the lining of my gear bag, the score no one in this building had ever seen because I'd buried it myself. Elite. Higher than his. I almost said it right there. I didn't.

"Fine," I said instead, and my hands were shaking, not from fear. "Write it up. I'll take the lethal line."

"Didn't ask if you wanted it." He grabbed the clipboard off the clerk, turned, and started walking toward the cage corridor like the conversation was over. Like I was over.

I followed him. I don't even know why — pride, maybe, or the fact that nobody gets the last word on me in front of forty witnesses. The corridor narrowed fast, steel walls sweating condensation, the hum of the river current running somewhere under the floor. He stopped at the glass cage — the training one, mesh-reinforced, built so the Alpha King's inspectors could watch a fighter work without getting close enough to get hurt.

"Say it again," I said. "Say it to my face without the audience."

He turned. Too fast. I didn't expect him to be that fast, and my back hit the cage frame before I registered he'd moved. His hand came up — not a hit, never a hit, just flat against the mesh beside my head, boxing me in, close enough that I could feel the heat coming off his chest through his shirt.

"You want it again?" His voice had gone low, rough at the edges. "You're reassigned because you don't follow orders, Calder. You never have."

"I follow every order that isn't you trying to bury me."

"I'm not —"

He stopped. His nostrils flared, just slightly, and something in his face went wrong — confused, almost scared, which was not a thing I had ever seen on Kane Voss in two years of him making my life hell.

I smelled it a half second after he did. Cedar and rain and something under that, something that hit low in my stomach and didn't let go — his scent, but wrong, too close, too much, mixing with mine until I couldn't tell where the line was anymore.

"No," he said. Not to me. To the air. "No, that's not — "

"What is that." My hands came up against his chest to shove him back and instead just stayed there, flat on his shirt, feeling his heart slamming under my palm as hard as mine was. "Voss. What did you just do."

"I didn't do anything." His hand was still on the mesh by my head, but his whole body had gone rigid, leaning in instead of pulling away, like something was pulling him and he hated it. "This isn't — mates don't — "

"Don't say it." My voice cracked right down the middle. "Don't you dare say that word to me after what you just did out there."

"Rhee." First time he'd ever used my first name. It came out wrecked, like it cost him something to say it. His head dropped lower, close enough that his breath hit my jaw, and every instinct in my body screamed two different directions at once — run, and don't you move an inch.

Footsteps hit the corridor behind him. Fast. More than one set.

Kane's head snapped up. His jaw went hard again, the heir mask dropping back over his face so fast I almost thought I'd imagined the last thirty seconds — except my whole body was still humming, still leaning toward him like gravity had rearranged itself around one person in this building.

"Get in the cage," he said, flat, cold, like he hadn't just said my name like a prayer. "Lethal line starts tonight. You want your slot back, you earn it in here first."

"Kane —"

He shoved the mesh door open, pushed me through it before I could get my feet under me right, and stepped back fast, like touching the frame one more second would undo him.

"Voss, open this —"

The steel cage slammed shut behind him, the lock bolt sliding home with a sound like a verdict, and he was already walking away, leaving me locked inside with the mesh still warm where his hand had been and nowhere, nowhere at all, to run.