Mia stayed in the dark, counting heartbeats. She did not attend the next day’s games. But she heard, whispered through the city’s sewers and shadows, that the Sun Wolf died with his own sword in his throat, and the man called Vex walked from the arena with the word Numen carved into a fresh strip of skin.
The horns blared. The gates groaned.
Vex laughed, a sound like grinding gravel. “Everyone in the vomitorium is a shadow, girl. The sun doesn’t touch us here. That’s the point.” He finally glanced back. His eyes were the same grey as the sea before a squall. “You’re not a gambler. Not a whore looking to wet her sandals in a champion’s blood. So why are you here?”
“The moment the man forgets himself.”
And somewhere in the black between stars, the dark mother laughed.
She was not here to kill the Legatus Prime. Not today. Acolyte Ashlinn had that honour, threading poison into the man’s evening wine three leagues away. No, Mia was here to watch. To learn. To count the heartbeats between a gladiator’s swing and the crowd’s roar.
The fight lasted seventeen heartbeats.
“You breathe too loud, little shadow,” he said without turning.
The Wolf finally drew his sword across the Grieve’s throat. The sand drank.
The sand of the Stormholt Arena was not red. That was the first lie they told you.
The Wolf spat in his face.
She should have lied. But the dark in her chest—that old, hungry companion—whispered a different truth. He sees you. Let him.
Mia frowned. “A gladiator who doesn’t kill?”