The Three AM Shift

Blood doesn’t bother me anymore. That should probably concern me more than it does, but after three years of scrubbing it off concrete, you either make peace with the metallic stink or go insane.

I chose option one.

Insanity is a luxury for wolves who have the freedom to fall apart.

Despite the subdued healing my wolf still offers, my hands are rough and cracked, and my knees hurt against the chilly stone floor of The Crimson Cage's main arena. She’s been suppressed for so long that even basic recovery crawls along slower than it should. The industrial brush scrapes against dried blood, the sound echoing through the empty space like a dying animal’s last breath.

Three in the morning. The witching hour for servants like me.

The arena, a vast underground colosseum beneath the opulent Obsidian Palace Hotel and Casino, extends above me. During fight nights, this pit holds three thousand screaming spectators, all rich enough to afford the quarter-million-dollar entry f*e and twisted enough to enjoy watching werewolves tear each other apart for entertainment.

Right now, it’s just me and the ghosts of tonight’s violence.

I work methodically, and this is how I've mastered it for over a thousand nights. Start at the bloodiest area where tonight’s loser fell and work outward in cautious circles, missing nothing. The cameras positioned every twenty feet track my movements, but I’ve learned their blind spots. Learned which angles show the obedient servant girl and which might accidentally capture me counting security rotation changes.

Survival isn’t just about staying alive. It’s about staying invisible while gathering every scrap of information that might matter when invisibility stops working.

My dark auburn hair hangs in a practical braid down my back, streaked with premature gray from stress I’ll never admit to. At twenty-three, I look closer to thirty. The Crimson Cage does that to you. Ages you in ways that have nothing to do with years and everything to do with witnessing too much death before you’re old enough to process it.

I’m small, barely five-foot-three, which makes the five-gallon cleaning bucket almost comically oversized in my grip. My golden-brown skin shows every scar and bruise from disciplinary actions I’ve learned not to repeat. The white servant’s uniform hangs loose on my frame because I’ve discovered that shapeless clothes draw fewer eyes than fitted ones.

The arena floor tells tonight’s story in crimson. Two fighters, both Alphas, based on the territorial marking patterns in the blood spatter. The one who walked out left size thirteen boot prints heading toward the direction of the Victor's tunnel. The one who didn’t leave a body-shaped outline that took four guards to scrub away before my shift started.

I don’t know their names. I don’t want to. Names make ghosts harder to ignore.

“You’re getting sloppy.”

I didn’t jump at the voice, though my wolf stirs uneasily beneath my skin. Scarlett Monroe moves like smoke when she wants to, which is often. At thirty-two, she’s the head healer in this nightmare factory and the closest thing I have to a friend in a place where friendship is dangerous.

She’s beautiful, tall and curvy, with deep brown skin and box braids she keeps pinned up during work hours. Her healer’s coat remains immaculate despite the chaos she faces every night. She smells like antiseptic and the vanilla lotion she applies obsessively to mask the scent of death.

“My sloppy self still gets the job done,” I say without looking up.

Keep scrubbing. Stay busy. Busy servants don’t get noticed.

"The northern camera has been watching you for the past five minutes." Scarlett crouches next to me so that the monitoring feeds won't hear what she says. “And Knox was in the control room when I walked past.”

That makes me pause. My fingers tighten around the brush handle, knuckles going white.

Knox Ashford. Owner of The Crimson Cage, billionaire entrepreneur to the human world, and slave master to those of us who know better. Forty-five years old and handsome in that silver-fox way that makes humans trust him and the supernatural fear him. A charcoal-gray wolf with gold eyes that never blinks, never shows mercy, and never forgets a slight.

“Knox doesn’t watch the help,” I say, forcing my hands to resume their work. “We’re beneath his pay grade.”

“Knox doesn’t watch the help unless he’s planning something.” Scarlett’s voice drops even lower. "And he's been observing you a lot recently."

My stomach drops, but I keep my face blank. Three years of practice makes lying with your expression second nature.

“Then I’ll make sure I’m not so intriguing to plan for.”

“Sierra.” Scarlett’s hand covers mine, stilling the frantic scrubbing I hadn’t realized I’d started. Her touch is warm and grounding. “I’m serious. Something’s different. The guards are talking. There’s a championship tournament being planned. Big money. Bigger spectacle. And your name keeps coming up in conversations it shouldn’t.”

I finally meet her eyes. Brown and worried and far too kind for someone working in a place like this.

“My name doesn’t come up in any conversations. I’m a servant. I clean blood, empty trash, and fix the refreshment stations. That’s it.”

"I also thought about that too." She gives my hand a single squeeze before letting go. “Just be careful. And if you need something, you know where to locate me.”

She leaves the way she came, silent as smoke, her healer’s coat disappearing into the service tunnel that connects to the medical wing. I watch her go, my pulse hammering against my ribs in a way that has nothing to do with physical exertion.

Knox has been watching me.

The words replay in my mind like a death sentence. Because in The Crimson Cage, being noticed by Knox Ashford is the beginning of the end.

I attack the remaining bloodstains with renewed focus, scrubbing until my shoulders burn and my vision blurs. The physical pain is grounding. Real. Something I can control when everything else feels like it’s slipping through my fingers.

The thing about fear is that it either sharpens you or breaks you. I figured out which one I’d be a long time ago.

My earliest memory is waking up in a hospital bed at age eight with no recollection of anything before that moment. No family. No home. No past. Just a name on a medical bracelet and a social worker telling me I was the sole survivor of a rogue attack that had killed everyone I’d ever known.

The foster system chewed me up and spit me out at eighteen. I worked as a waitress in a supernatural dive bar, saved every penny, and dreamed of community college and a life that didn’t revolve around survival.

Then I was kidnapped while walking home from a late shift. I woke up in a windowless room with twenty other terrified wolves. We were sold at auction to the highest bidders. Knox bought me for five thousand dollars and assigned me to the cleaning crew.

That was five years ago. Three of those years were spent in The Crimson Cage, invisible and obedient and desperately alive.

Now Knox was watching me.

And I had no idea why.