Lethal Vows：Married to My Rival novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Pit

She wakes in an ankle band under Pier 9 and wins a death match in her wedding dress; the buyer behind the glass is her family's rival.

I woke up on concrete with a steel band locked around my right ankle.

The ivory silk was still on me, torn to the knee and gray with dust.

The veil was gone. Somebody had taken my hairpins, every one.

My head felt packed with wet sand.

I scanned the room before I let myself move.

A cage of chain-link, ten feet wide. A drain in the floor. A bucket in the corner.

Beyond the mesh, a long concrete tunnel, and at the end of it a roar.

"Up, Bride," a man's voice said.

A guard stood outside the chain-link in a black vest, eating sunflower seeds.

"Where am I?"

"Pier Nine. You were bought for the Pit. Your first fight is in ten minutes."

I got to my feet.

My legs held. The drug was still in my blood, but I had trained through worse.

"Who bought me?"

"Your brother did the selling." He spat a shell on the floor. "Said you'd last two fights. I put twenty on three."

Calvin.

I locked that name away to deal with later, because anger would not get me through the next ten minutes.

They walked me down the tunnel with a gun at my back.

The Pit was a drained shipping hold, a hundred feet across, cut into a round of sand and ringed by steel bleachers.

Four hundred people in good coats were leaning over the rail.

They held drinks. They held phones. A few women held each other's arms and laughed.

At the far end hung a long black window, glass from floor to ceiling.

An announcer in a red jacket strolled across the sand with a microphone.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Tonight's novelty! A runaway bride, straight from her own wedding!"

The crowd howled.

I stepped into the sand. The gate clanged shut behind me.

The announcer lowered his voice, delighted.

"No weapons for the Bride. To submission or to death. Her opponent, the house giant!"

The far gate opened.

A man walked out who could have carried a refrigerator on his back.

Six foot six, shaved head, tape on both hands, a smile that had been broken and set wrong.

"Pretty," he said, and the crowd roared.

I kicked off my shoes.

I gathered the skirt of the dress in my fist and tore it off at the thigh, a long rip of silk, so I could move.

The crowd loved that too.

The giant came in with a swing.

I let it pass an inch from my jaw.

He was strong and slow, and he had never fought anyone who wasn't afraid of him.

I went in low, drove my knuckles into the soft place under his ribs, and felt something give.

He grunted and swung again.

I took that one on my forearm.

It hurt more than I wanted to admit, a deep bruising ache, and my arm went numb to the elbow.

The giant caught my braid.

The crowd screamed with joy as he wrapped it around his fist and dragged me off my feet.

He lifted me by my hair to look at my face.

"Told you," he said into my ear. "Pretty."

I hooked my thumb into his right eye.

Not hard. Just enough.

He bellowed and let go, and I dropped on my feet and swept his knee, and he came down on one side.

I was on his back before he hit the sand.

I wrapped my arm around his neck, locked my wrist, and squeezed.

The crowd's roar changed, and some of the shouts turned into curses.

The giant clawed at my arm. His heels beat the sand.

"Say it," I said. "Say you're done."

He fought for a few desperate seconds.

Then his hand slapped the ground, three times, and I let go and rolled away and stood.

My braid was half torn out. My arm was ruined. Blood from his nose was drying on my wedding dress.

Nobody in the stands was laughing now.

The announcer stared at me with his mouth open.

"Well," he said into the microphone. "The Bride lives to fight again."

Then I looked up at the long black window.

A man was standing behind the glass, alone, with one hand in his pocket.

He was tall, in a black suit. His eyebrow was cut by a pale scar that split it in two.

I knew that face.

The Harlow family had been at war with his for thirty years.

My father had a photograph of him pinned in his study, with a line through it.

Valentin Creighton, head of the Creighton family.

He was watching me fight, not like the others did, with greed, but the way a man watches a lock he intends to open.

Valentin raised two fingers from the glass.

The announcer touched his earpiece and grinned.

"And we have a bidder for the Bride!"

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