7. The Rules of the Pit

Elena’s POV

Gideon came for me at a quarter past one.

He didn't knock. The door at the back of Jax's office opened and the big man filled it, scarred eyebrow, arms like cables, a face that had never in its life been asked for directions. Jax didn't look up from the glass. He had been standing there for an hour, motionless, watching the floor below as if he could stare a traitor into confessing.

"Take her back," he said. "Tell Marta to feed her."

"She hasn't eaten?"

"She hasn't eaten." A beat. "See that she does."

That was all. No glance in my direction, no word of dismissal, nothing. I had been standing in that room for an hour and a half, and he had already put me away in his mind like a tool returned to its drawer.

I told myself that was fine. It was better than being looked at.

Gideon didn't touch me. He simply turned, and I followed him past the mahogany desk to the far wall, where the black paneling seemed to be nothing but black paneling until he laid his palm against a plate I hadn't noticed. Something deep in the wall disengaged with a sound like a held breath let go. A slab of steel slid sideways, three inches thick, a vault door disguised as a wall.

The roar of the Pit cut off behind me as it sealed.

I had never heard silence like that. It pressed against my ears, thick and absolute. The corridor ahead was narrow and softly lit, carpeted in gray, and every door along it was shut.

"Rules," Gideon said.

His voice was a low gravel rumble. He walked a half step ahead of me and talked without looking back, as if reading from a list he had recited many times to many frightened people.

"One. You eat what Marta brings you. All of it. Don't make me come find out you haven't."

I nodded, though he couldn't see.

"Two. You don't go past this corridor without me or Jax. The steel door only opens for four people, and you're not one of them. Three. You don't go down to the floor alone. Ever. Not for water, not for air, not because you hear something." He paused at a door near the end. "Four."

He turned then, and I got the full weight of his eyes. They were a flat, tired brown, and what I saw in them wasn't cruelty. It was suspicion, plain and heavy as a hand on my shoulder.

"Nobody touches you," he said. "Not my men, not the dealers, not the fighters. If anybody so much as looks at you wrong, you tell me, not Jax. I handle it before it reaches him." His jaw shifted. "That's his order, not my opinion."

"What's your opinion?"

I don't know where the words came from. They left my mouth on their own, small and breathless, and I wished them back instantly.

Gideon studied me for a long moment.

"My opinion," he said, "is that a stranger with a sad face is the easiest way to get a man killed. I told him that. He didn't listen." He opened the door. "Don't prove me right."

He left me at the threshold.

It was my room. I knew it before I stepped in, the gray sheets, the narrow bed, the slits of windows with their iron bars dressed up to look like decoration. But now there was a lamp burning and a tray on the small desk, and a woman standing beside it.

She was somewhere past sixty, short and round, with silver hair twisted into a braid down her back and flour on the front of her apron. She smelled like onions and cinnamon and warm bread, so ordinary a smell that something in my chest ached at it.

"There she is," she said. Her voice was low and rough, with an accent I couldn't place. "Gideon, out. The poor girl has been frightened enough tonight."

"She's a prisoner, Marta, not a guest," Gideon said, but he went.

The door closed. The woman looked at me, up and down, once, and her mouth tightened. I knew that look. It was the look people gave a dog that had been kicked.

"Sit," she said.

I sat on the edge of the bed. My hands wouldn't stay still, so I pressed them between my knees.

"Marta," she said, tapping her own chest. "I cook for the wing. Fourteen years. Nobody tells me what happens past that door and I don't ask." She lifted the cover from the tray, and steam rose. Soup, dark gold, thick with barley. Bread. A little dish of butter. "You eat. All of it. Then you tell me what you want and I'll see if it can be done."

"I'm not hungry."

"I didn't ask if you were hungry."

I stared at the bowl. Mark had always said food was a privilege, something I earned by being good, being quiet, being clean. I'd gone to bed hungry more nights than I could count, and I had gotten so good at it that eating in front of someone felt like confessing.

"I can't," I whispered. "I'm sorry. It's been a long time since anyone put food in front of me without wanting something for it."

There it was. I had said it out loud, and shame swept over me like a rising tide.

Marta did not say anything for a long moment. Then she crossed the room, pulled the spoon from the tray, and put it in my hand. Her fingers closed over mine. They were warm and dry and strong, and I flinched on instinct. She didn't let go. She didn't pull away. She just held on, steady as a post.

"You are allowed," she said. "In this room, you are allowed."

My eyes filled so fast I couldn't blink it back.

The first spoonful was salt and heat and something that tasted like a place I'd once belonged. I ate. I ate every bite while tears slid down my face and Marta pretended not to see, busying herself at the wardrobe with her back turned. I ate until the bowl was clean and my stomach hurt and I felt like something wrung out and starting, very slowly, to unfold.

When I finished she turned and held out a bundle of folded wool.

"Put this on. The room is cold and you're all skin and bones."

It was a cardigan, soft and oatmeal-colored, too wide in the shoulders and worn thin at the elbows, as if someone had loved it for years. It smelled like soap and cedar. I slid my arms into it and it settled around me like an embrace from someone who didn't want anything.

"Thank you," I said, and it came out cracked.

"Don't thank me." She squeezed my shoulder once and went to the door. "Sleep, mi niña. Whatever you've been told, there's a lock on that bathroom for a reason. You can have this one thing."

And she was gone.

I lay down in my clothes and the cardigan, and for a long while I stared at the ceiling.

I couldn't sleep. The Pit had woken up beneath me. At first it was only a vibration in the floor, a pulse in the mattress, like a great animal's heartbeat. Then it grew into sound: the dull thud of bodies hitting canvas, a distant bell, the swell and crash of a crowd howling for blood. Muffled by steel and stone, but there, always there, a reminder that I was sleeping on top of a monster.

At three in the morning, something stupid and habitual made me get up.

It was what I did in Mark’s house. I would wake in the small hours and check every lock, every window, every door, not to escape but to know. To know the shape of my cage. Because Mark loved to leave things unlatched and watch what I did.

I stood in front of the door, and my hand found the knob, and it turned.

It wasn't locked.

I froze with my pulse hammering in my ears. The door swung open an inch and a thin line of gray hallway light cut across my feet. Beyond it, silence. A long empty corridor. And at the far end, the vault door that opened only for four people, and none of them were me.

I could walk out. That was what my body screamed. Just a few steps, just to see, just to feel what it would be like to be someone who could.

But Mark's voice came back to me, perfectly clear: Go on, Elena. Open it. See what happens.

And then, sharper, colder: Where exactly do you plan to go?

My hand dropped from the knob like it had burned me.

I pushed the door closed. I sat down on the floor with my back against it, knees to my chest, the oversized cardigan pulled tight around me, and I stayed there with my eyes open.

That was when I noticed it.

In the corner of the ceiling, above the wardrobe, a tiny red light blinked once. A smoke detector, I'd thought, when I first came in. But smoke detectors don't have lenses.

Someone had been watching me all night. Someone had left that door unlocked and wanted to see what I'd do.

I had passed. I hadn't even known I was sitting the test.

The red light blinked again, patient and unhurried. Far below, the crowd roared, wild and savage, as if applauding.