From Broke Technician to Luna novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Blood Challenge

The arena was an old quarry behind the pack house, with a floor of packed dirt and stone walls forty feet high.

The whole pack stood along the rim in the moonlight.

Floodlights on steel poles lit the pit white.

I stood at the bottom in a sports bra and shorts, barefoot, with a plastic zip tie around my wrist that held a small flat box.

Tiernan stood at the edge of the circle, and the bond between us was pulled so tight it hummed.

"Your last chance to say no," he said.

"No to what? I'm already down here."

"Stevie."

"You'll hold your place," I said. "I'll hold mine. Don't come in, whatever you hear."

His jaw worked.

He kissed my forehead, hard, and stepped back.

Across the pit, Sonja sat in a high-backed chair at the rim with her hands folded on her knee.

The champion walked out of the shadows below her.

He was even bigger in the light, six and a half feet of scarred muscle, and he wore the gold locket looped around his fist.

"Little Ashworth," he said, almost fondly. "Let's make it quick."

"Rules?" I said.

"No rules. One of us walks out."

I looked up at the rim.

"Who calls it?"

"I do," said Sonja. "Begin."

The champion changed before the word was done.

It was the same ugly fold I had seen on the road, except faster, and a black wolf the size of a small horse stood where he had been, shaking the locket off his fist onto the dirt.

It came at me across forty feet.

I did not run.

I pressed my thumb on the box on my wrist.

Every floodlight in the quarry went out.

The dark was total. A hundred voices cried out at once.

The thing that had been charging me skidded to a halt, claws scoring the dirt.

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