Page 3 of Bought by the Broken Beast
The first assassin comes at me, a blur of motion, all four arms striking at once. I do not attempt to parry. Parrying is for honorable duels. This is a slaughter. I duck under his wild swing and bring the axe up in a brutal, disemboweling arc. He screams, a high, thin sound, as his own entrails spill onto the sand. He crumples, his three remaining arms clutching at the gaping wound.
The second one is smarter. He feints, trying to draw me out. I do not fall for it. I let him come to me. He lunges, his blade aimed for my throat. I turn my shoulder, letting the hook bite deep into the muscle. The pain is a hot, white fire, but I ignore it. I have him. My free hand shoots out, grabbing his throat. I lift him off the ground, his legs kicking uselessly. I watch the life drain from his eyes before I slam his head into the stone floor with enough force to shatter bone.
Silence.
The entire pit is silent for a heartbeat, the crowd stunned. Then, they erupt. The roar is deafening, a wave of bloodlust and awe. I stand over the carnage, my chest heaving, blood dripping from my arm and spattering the sand. I feel no triumph. This is not a victory. It is a performance. The work of a butcher, not a warrior.
“As you can see,” the auctioneer’s voice booms, slick with greed, “the quality is undeniable! Let us begin the bidding!”
I tune it out, my gaze sweeping over the leering faces in the crowd. I see a Zotkak merchant I recognize—a man named Ghorak who once bowed to me in the halls of the Senate. He is the high bidder, his face flushed with the thrill of owning something he once feared. The humiliation is a fresh wound, deeper than the one in my arm.
A new voice cuts through the din.
“Five hundred gold.”
It is a woman’s voice. A human’s. Clear and steady, without a trace of the bloodlust that fills the air. I search the crowd and find her. She is small, unassuming, her dark hair pulled back in a severe knot. She is dressed in the simple garb of a servant or a scribe, utterly out of place in this den of vipers.
Ghorak scoffs, turning to locate the source of the bid. “The human mistakes the slave market for the fish market. Six hundred!”
“Seven hundred,” she counters immediately, her gaze fixed on me. There is no emotion on her face, only a calm, unnerving resolve.
The back-and-forth is a spectacle. The Zotkak merchant, his pride wounded, against the slip of a human girl with a seemingly bottomless purse. The crowd murmurs, intrigued. A human owning a Vakkak, even a disgraced one, is unheard of.
“One thousand gold!” Ghorak bellows, his face turning purple.
“Two thousand,” she says, her voice never wavering.
Ghorak stares at her, his mouth agape. He looks from her to me, then back again, sputtering. He throws his hands up in disgust and storms away.
“Sold!” the auctioneer cries, slamming his gavel down. “To the human woman!”
My world tilts. My fate, my very life, now belongs to this fragile creature. The rage that has been simmering within me boils over, a storm of shame and fury so potent it threatens to shatter my control.
The guards shackle me again and lead me to a small, torch-lit chamber off the pit. She waits for me, a rolled piece of parchment in her hand. The contract. My leash.
I stop a few feet from her, letting the full weight of my presence bear down on her. My shadow swallows her whole. I tower over her, a mountain of scarred muscle and barely contained violence. I want to see her flinch. I want to see the terror in her eyes. It is the only power I have left.
But she does not flinch. She meets my gaze directly, her brown eyes sharp and intelligent. It is a subtle act of defiance, and it stokes my rage to a white-hot inferno.
She holds out the contract. “Your name is Votoi Saru. You will answer to me now. You will protect me.”
A growl rumbles in my chest, a sound like stone grinding on stone. I am about to unleash a torrent of contempt, to tell her exactly what I think of her, of her species, of this ultimate degradation.
But before I can speak, she takes a single step closer, into my space, into the very heart of my fury. Her voice drops to a bare whisper, a sound meant only for me, a sound that cuts through the roaring storm in my mind.
“Lord Malacc.”
The name is a key turning in a lock I thought was rusted shut forever. The sounds of the market, the pain in my arm, the rage in my heart—it all vanishes. Everything stops, silenced by that single, impossible name on the lips of a human slave.
3
BELLA
He follows me from the auction house, a silent, hulking shadow that blots out the moonlight. His presence is a physical weight, a pressure against my back that makes it hard to breathe. Every drunken shout from a nearby tavern, every skittering rodan in the shadows, sends a fresh spike of adrenaline through my veins. I am walking through a city of predators with the most dangerous one of all leashed to my will by a flimsy piece of parchment.
I lead him into a narrow, refuse-choked alley between a tannery and a butcher shop. The stench of brine and blood is overwhelming, a cloying perfume of death that clings to the humid air. It’s a dead end. A cage of crumbling brick and darkness. Deliberate. If he is going to kill me, I want it to be here, away from prying eyes.
I turn to face him, my back pressed against the cold, damp wall. The satchel of stolen coin feels impossibly heavy. He stops a few feet away, his sheer size consuming the space, the splintered tip of his horn catching a sliver of moonlight like a shard of bone. The silence stretches, thick and suffocating, broken only by the sound of his slow, deliberate breaths.
