My Savage Empire: Paperback

CLAUDIA
TWO YEARS AGO

It’s my birthday.

I stare at the open book in my lap, thinking that I
have to go to work at the diner in a couple of hours, thinking that if things were different – if my mother hadn’t been sliced to pieces, if my father hadn’t died suffocating in a coffin – I might have a birthday celebration to look forward to, instead of another day of endless, numbing silence.

From her spot on the arm of the sofa, Queen Boudica raises her head and regards me with a stoic nod. Even though she’s only lived with me for a couple of months, it feels like we’ve known each other my whole life. She seems to sense when the darkness of my solitary existence threatens to consume me, and chooses those exact moments to remind me that she’s here, she’s a cat so she doesn’t need anyone, but she quite likes me, and could I open another can of tuna, please?

Queen Boudica pads over my book and slumps across my legs, exposing her belly for rubs. I stroke her silky fur as a hard lump rises in my throat.

Daddy always took the day off work on my birthday. No
matter what was going on in his empire, he made the time for me. We’d do something together as a family, just the three of us. Sometimes Daddy let me invite Antony along, too – like that time he took us both to this crazy ranch in the middle of nowhere where we threw axes at trees and ate rabbit stew. It was one of my favorite birthdays ever.

For my ninth birthday, Daddy rented an entire rooftop
restaurant and hired a team of chefs to make me anything I wanted. I asked for lamb chops and strawberry ice cream sundaes, and the four of us had an epic food fight, coating the walls in strawberry sauce that dribbled like blood after a massacre. That one was pretty cool, too.

I often wondered if Daddy had the chefs killed after that
party, since they had seen my face.

But for my seventh birthday, I asked if I could have a party at a fast-food restaurant with a playground and a ball pit, like the kids I saw on TV. So Daddy emptied our pool and filled it with balls, and had his chef prepare gourmet burgers and trufflebutter fries. I cried the whole day.

Daddy tried. But it was never about the ball pit.

It was about being the only kid at my birthday party.

And here I am again, the only human guest at my lame-ass pity party. I mash the buttons on the remote, and Gabriel Fallen’s voice rises through the opulent ballroom, singing of broken wings and avenging angels. I feel his own broken wings wrapping around me, the feathers tickling my face.

Memories assault me,
I curl my back against the onslaught
of you
Memories are for sharing.
Forgetting is a refuge.
Pain is a weapon,
Sharpened to kill.
This pain I carry,
Into battle, toward death.
I carry for you.

How does he do that? How does he reach out of the speakers and squeeze my heart until my ribs feel like they’re going to collapse?

I slam the book closed and throw it across the room. Queen Boudica gives me a sharp ‘mew,’ reminding me that the company of a cat should be all I ever require to be happy.

Solitude is fine and dandy, except when it’s not.

Antony bursts into the ballroom just as the book clatters
against the wall, leaving a dent in the plaster. He’s dressed for the club in his favorite suit, and holding a couple of white takeout boxes. He stares at the ruined book a moment, the corner of his mouth twitching into a smirk. “I see the birthday’s going well.”

I hiss through my teeth. Queen Boudica sits up, peering at
the boxes, her whiskers twitching with anticipation.

“Don’t be like that. I didn’t forget about you. We’re going to have our own celebration.” He sets down the boxes and opens them for me. Fried chicken tacos from one of my favorite places (and a couple of fish ones for Boudica), and half of a pink frosted birthday cake, the swirls of icing like the lace of a prom dress. Gabriel’s voice swirls around me.

…there’s a hole in the world where you used
to be…

“There’s only half a cake in here.” I frown at the box. I want to hate Antony for something, because my veins hum with rage and if I don’t get it out of me I’m going to implode.

“It’s just the two of us.” Antony makes a big show of unfurling an oversized napkin and tucking it into the collar of his shirt. He picks up one of the tacos and takes a bite, juice dribbling down his chin.

“Three of us.” I press my finger into the frosting and give it to Queen Boudica to lick off. Who gives a fuck about being civilized? Who am I saving my mother’s immaculate manners for?
“It’s always just us in this big, creepy house. Except when it’s just me and the cat.”

“We’re nearly halfway through your five-year purgatory,”
Antony says, his mouth full of chicken. “I didn’t say it would be easy. You have to be patient.”

“Easy for you to say – you get to go outside. Smell the roses, stick your dick in someone warm and living. All I’ve got is ugly statues and Howard Malloy’s porn collection, which let me tell you is not to my taste. I’ve been hiding away most of my life, and I’m fucking done. I’m going crazy in here.” I roll my eyes at the ceiling as Gabriel lets out a tortured scream. “And with those fuckwits crowded at the gate, I feel like I’m an exotic fish or a creepy doll trapped in a glass cabinet.”

“If you were a doll, you wouldn’t be nearly as creepy as the ones upstairs.” Antony reaches for another taco. “You need a hobby that’s not listening to emo music and simmering existential rage. I’ll bring you some crochet supplies. You can make a hat.”

“Only if you want a crochet hook up your asshole.”

“Such a mouth on one so young and beautiful.” Antony
nudges the box. “I’d be nicer to me if I were you. We’re going out tonight.”

“We are?”

“We are,” he grins. “But you’ll have to go in disguise. Can you do that?”

We finish off our tacos and cake, and I skip upstairs and
throw open Mackenzie Malloy’s closet. I’ve already raided Ainsley’s for her comfy designer loungewear and garish evening gowns, but Mackenzie has some slutty dresses appropriate for Antony’s club. She only disappeared two years ago, and as well as being similar looking we seem to be the same dress size, so they fit okay.

Antony watches from the bed as I perform my own fashion show for him, trying slutty dress after slutty dress until he nods. “That’s the one. It’s just slutty enough.”

His throat sounds tight. I glare at him, arms folded across the tight black bodice. “Don’t get all fatherly on me now. I need to get out of this house, and you’ll be right there beside me if anyone tries anything.”

I twirl around, admiring the way the flared black skirt swishes around my knees. It fits so snug and perfect it feels like it’s made for me, which I guess is kind of true. This is Mackenzie Malloy’s dress, and she looks an awful lot like me.

“You need a wig,” Antony says. “And to shave those gorilla legs of yours.”

Ainsley Malloy has an impressive fashion wig collection. I select a black one and do my face with dark, smoky eyes and plump red lips. I look like a goth whore, but I also don’t look anything like me. Perfect.

I tuck my arm into Antony’s as we head down to the garage. I know exactly where we’re going. He’s taken me to Colosseum before, as a treat. He doesn’t like to do it because he spends all night worrying about me, and he needs his head in the game when he deals with club stuff.

But I love everything about Colosseum. The crunch of arena sand – pink-colored particles coating every surface and glittering under the floodlights. The smell of sweat and sex and blood heavy in the air. The crowd a many-limbed monster, writhing and undulating as it gorges itself on a feast of debauchery.

Antony grips the steering wheel so hard his knuckles glow white. He keeps looking over at me, frown lines etched across his face. He’s starting to regret taking me out, but it’s too late to turn back. We pull into a space behind one of the abandoned warehouses and walk out to the old roundhouse.

As soon as we enter the crowd, I’m swept up in the hum of anticipation. All around me, people mill in small groups – the men in dark, expensive suits, the women resplendent in figurehugging gowns, their throats dripping with diamonds. Cigarettes and glass pipes are shared freely. People rush to Antony, talking a mile a minute about all sorts of things I’m not familiar with. Some he greets in friendship, others he brushes aside as he leads me behind a velvet rope and up a narrow staircase.

He has a whole life here, a whole world of responsibilities and friends, that I’m not part of. Why can’t I have that too?

Antony settles me into a table at the rear of the VIP area.
Waiters and staff bustle around, setting the tables. No one gives me a second glance. I’m just another of Antony’s nameless dates. How many women has my cousin sat in this very same chair? I shift my ass, trying to get comfortable.

Antony plonks a blood-red cocktail in front of me and goes off to tend to his duties.

As the moon rises over the mangled railway tracks, the fairy lights illuminating the audience dim and people take their seats. In front of me – in the prime spot directly overlooking the arena – are the tables reserved for the Imperators. Nero Lucian bends to whisper in the ear of Marion, his second wife. No one knows what happened to the first wife, but everyone agrees she was annoying and her three sons by Nero are as much use as a hedgehog at a condom factory. Two of Marion’s sons and her daughter are here tonight – they’re about my age and are both staring at their phones, looking bored. They’re hardly an improvement in the brains department.

At the second table, Constantine Dio sits with a group of his top assassins. They sip their drinks, eagle eyes surveying the room. Constantine’s back is to the staircase, but there’s an edge to his posture, an ease in the slope of his shoulders that implies he’d be impossible to surprise. Constantine isn’t married, and is rarely seen with a female date. The gossip around my father’s house parties was that he’s gay, but it’s never been proven. Gay or not, he’d better find a woman quick, or he’ll be without an heir. The life expectancy of crime lords isn’t exactly stellar, and a dead Imperator without an heir will leave the entire system unstable, vulnerable to a coup.

At the third table, accepting a plate piled high with creamy spaghetti, is Brutus.

Brutus the betrayer.
Brutus the murderer.

Cold rage settles in my stomach. I grip the edge of the table, breaking the edge of my nail on the cold metal. I repeat Gabriel’s lyrics over and over in my head, reminding myself that my pain can be a weapon. A single line repeats over and over again.

Drink and be merry,
for tomorrow we bathe in blood.

My time will come. One day I will bathe in that man’s blood.

But it’s not today.

Today, I watch my uncle Brutus sling his arm over the back of the chair Julian August should have occupied. Today, soldiers I remember from my father’s office jostle each other to kiss his feet. Today, he bends over and snorts a line of cocaine through a small straw. The light illuminates the back of his hand – the skin puckered around an old injury. My father’s sacer mark, now so mangled with scar tissue it’s unrecognizable as the August sword and laurel. Brutus dares to wear it with reckless pride. I’m surprised he hasn’t had surgery to hide the sacer – we do live in Emerald Beach, home of the best plastic surgeons in the world.

It must serve his purposes to have it on display, a sign that he’s beaten death.

I’m so busy glaring at the back of Brutus’ hand, twirling my butter knife around in my trembling fingers, that I don’t notice the fights have begun. First up is a couple of bouts between condemned men – disgraced soldiers from Lucian and Dio fighting to the death. One is a man named Cicero – a loyal soldier of my father’s, a man whose voice always sounded kind. Was his only crime loving my father?

The Imperators and their entourage show no respect for the men circling each other in the ring – they call out friendly insults to each other, placing wagers on which man will win his freedom.

Cicero gets in a few decent punches, but is stuck in the guts by his opponent’s trident and collapses in a pile of blood. Brutus pounds his fist in triumph as Cicero’s opponent hacks off his head and lobs it into the crowd.

After that, they bring out the lion.

I grind my teeth, dig my nails into my skin – anything to hold back my scream. The poor creature circles the ring, ribs sticking from his emaciated frame, his shoulders hunched and malformed from being kept in a too-small cage. He lifts his nose high, his dirty mane streaming behind him, and licks at the dried blood around his mouth, baring his terrifying teeth. The front rows of the audience lean away from him, unable to bear being so close to such beauty, to be confronted with what they’ve done to a graceful creature in the name of entertainment.

This close, they can smell the decaying human flesh on his breath.

The lion turns its head toward me, and all I see is my kitten. My Queen Boudica’s defiant yellow eyes peering back at me from the darkness behind the dumpster. This lion will do what it has to do to survive.

My father banned the beasts from the ring. It turned his
stomach to see beautiful creatures reduced to this… this
baseness… for entertainment.

But my father isn’t in charge anymore.

Brutus and Nero laugh and cheer as the lion stands on his
hind legs and roars with wild hunger. A man is tossed from the gangway into the ring. He barely has time to stagger to his feet before the lion is on him.

When there’s nothing left but bones and gore, and the lion
lopes away to fall asleep, they prod him back into his trapdoor, scoop out the carcass, and call for the night fight to begin.

Antony marches into the ring, his arms raised as the
applause washes over him. I raise my hands to applaud too, even though I want to turn away in disgust. My phone – hidden in my bra – buzzes.

I slide the old iPhone from my bra, tracing the sparkly pink heart on the case. A notification flashes on the screen – a new SMS. The only person who messages me is Antony. Mackenzie Malloy used to get a few SMS messages from old school friends, but they stopped… except for…

Jace.

This guy must’ve been someone special to her, because he kept texting long after the others gave up. A few times I’ve almost been tempted to answer him. He seems so desperate for answers, I want to do something to put him out of his misery. But of course that’s insane.

My finger trembles as I tap the notification.

“Wherever you are, Mackenzie, I’m thinking of you.”

I’m thinking of you.

I choke back a sob. Today of all days it’s exactly what I need to hear. Somewhere out there, someone cares about me.

Except that this message isn’t for me. Except that Jace is
thinking about a dead girl and the life I stole from her.

I wonder why he chose today, of all days, to message her?

I toss the phone on the table, trying to fight back the tears stinging the corners of my eyes. I’m not going to cry. I refuse to waste a single moment of my one night of freedom feeling sorry for myself.

I snap my fingers for the waiter to bring me another drink.
As I sip, I focus back on the arena. It’s hard to see what’s going on because the crowd is on their feet, waving their fists in the air and chanting, “Barbarian! Barbarian!”

I stand and move to the edge of the platform, only a few feet behind Brutus’ table. The bastard is telling a story to his admirers, and they’re all cracking up as if he could possibly say something worth laughing about. If I’d brought a knife, I could twist it into his kidney before he even saw me coming. I’ve been practicing. I’m quite good.

The locked box in my mind rattles its chains. The darkness inside longs to be unleashed.

I force myself to angle my body away and focus on the arena. Two men lock together in battle, naked except for horned masks and tight athletic shorts that reveal hard, muscled thighs. They fight bare-knuckled, with no weapons apart from their bodies. There are no rules. They fight having decided that only one of them may go home at the end.

The older fighter is drenched in blood. He has some fancy footwork and a mean left hook. But it’s the other – the one they call the Barbarian – who arrests my attention. He’s young – around my age, I guess – with hard shoulders and the kind of long, delicious legs I want wrapped around my body. But it’s not his youth that captures me, it’s the way he moves. He throws his whole being into every punch, every kick and grapple, as if he knows it will be his last and he intends to make it count.

This boy is wild. He bites, scratches, roars, and rains down blows like he’s an avenging angel. He fights like someone who has gone numb on the inside. He needs the taste of blood and the bite of pain to feel alive.

It’s hot as fuck.

I press my thighs together, aware that the slap of skin on skin as the Barbarian pummels his opponent flares heat deep in my core. Aware that even though I’ve never slept with a guy before, that the last person who touched me did so without my consent and is sitting ten feet away from me right now, I’m not immune to the raw, feral scent of lust.

Of longing.

My breath catches in my throat as the Barbarian goes for a chokehold but ends up slammed against the wall of the arena. Blood spurts from his nose, drenching the wall, but he whirls around and attacks like he doesn’t even notice. He moves… exactly like Antony. I know it’s not my cousin beneath that mask, because I can see him standing on the end of the gangway, watching intently. But this Barbarian has Antony’s same desperate energy, his wanton revelry of pain.

He’s been trained by the best.

What could have driven that boy into Antony’s hands?
What’s happened in his life that makes him come here and throw himself into the fray?

Applause erupts from the crowd as the Barbarian knocks out his opponent with an uppercut so fierce I half expect brains to fly out his ears. Antony walks down into the ring, shakes his bloody hand, and lays a laurel wreath around the horns of his mask. The crowd roars as the Barbarian glares blankly into their depths, still swimming in the adrenaline haze of his fight.

Antony wraps his hand around the Barbarian’s wrist and raises his arm in a salute to the Imperators. The Barbarian looks up then, right at me. From behind the mask, his eyes graze my face before falling to my body. A shudder rocks through him like he’s seen a ghost.

The Barbarian turns to Antony and slams his fist into his
nose.

What the fuck?

Antony’s head snaps back. Chaos erupts as the crowd reels, as soldiers storm the arena. They try to pull the Barbarian off Antony, but he’s unstoppable.

I can’t watch any longer. I fling myself away from the edge, spilling my cocktail down my dress. I run for the stairs. I shove my way through the heaving, cawing crowd, into the train sheds.

Antony… is he…

I can’t get any closer. I’m hemmed in on all sides by people. The crowd has become a wild beast – a herd that’s scented a predator on the breeze and are stirring to bolt in a million directions. I hug my arms to my chest. If I’m not careful, I’ll be crushed.

As I try to shove my way toward the arena, I catch a glimpse of a blonde head moving the opposite way. Toward me. I start at the sight of her. It’s not just that she’s young to be attending the fights. It’s not that she’s beautiful, although she is.

She’s a mirror image of me.

In every way.

Except…

Except for the blood streaked across her face.

“Hey, wait!” I try to push myself toward her, but by the time I’ve broken through a wall of men, she’s gone. Sucked back into the crowd, or never there at all.

A memory made real. A birthday gift from Brutus that I will
never, ever forget.

Stonehurst Prep
Book 1 - My Stolen Life
Book 2 - My Secret Heart
Book 3 - My Broken Crown
Book 4 - My Savage Empire