Sophie shifted her seemingly unbalanced stance, bracing her weight and yanking on the whip with both arms. The Queen stumbled forwards and Sophie ducked behind, looping the slack whip around the Queen’s neck to choke her with her own power. The Queen dismissed the whip and Sophie acted quickly before the Queen had a chance to conjure it up again.

Sophie swept the Queen’s unbalanced feet out from under her, grabbed her by the hair and smashed her face into the floor. The hard-earth floor of the Fortress was practically stone and Sophie smashed the Queen’s face into it a second time and a third, over and over until there was a sharp crack and the Queen’s body went limp.

Skin painted red, silver hair matted with sweat and blood, Sophie left the cage without looking back.

“Your winner, ladies and gentlemen… the Nightingale!”

* * *

Three viewing boxes, normally empty in the early afternoon, all had occupants watching Sophie’s match. In one was Cole Silva, the newest member of the Big Three crime lords of Old City. With his father’s passing, the old man’s protection could no longer keep Sophie from his grip. Just as he had been closing his fingers around her, she had run to Clarissa Ventress. Now Ventress had Sophie fighting ever more-dangerous opponents. There was every chance she would be ruined before he could snatch her back into his clutches. Watching her bloody form stride away from the cage, he slapped the fruit platter in front of him across the room.

In her own viewing box, Clarissa Ventress was happily imagining the look on Silva’s face. She was less happy with Sophie’s friend, Belinda.

“You can’t keep doing this!” Belinda said. “You’re going to get her killed.”

Clarissa sighed, her good mood deflated. She responded to Belinda without deigning to look at her.

“The arrangement,” Clarissa said, “was that dear Sophie would help me provoke Silva into the kind of rash action that his father always kept him from making.”

She turned her head towards Belinda.

“The form that provocation takes is for me to decide,” Clarissa continued. “How Sophie survives it is for her to figure out.”

“You filthy—”

Belinda cut herself off as Clarissa’s enormous bodyguard stirred. Darnell had the predatory features universal to leonids, and Belinda took a step back.

“That’s what I thought,” Clarissa said. “I don’t want to hear your pitiful whining again. Go tend to your injured friend.”

Belinda desperately wanted to tear a chunk out Clarissa’s throat, but she was not the match of Clarissa or her bodyguard, two of the criminal underworld’s rare bronze-rankers. She also knew Sophie would be awkwardly applying medicine right now and making a complete mess of it, so she turned and left.