Read Empress Game: The Empress Game Trilogy Book 1 Online
Authors: Rhonda Mason
Empress Game: The Empress Game Trilogy Book 1
Contents
Also Available from Titan Books
The Empress Game
Print edition ISBN: 9781783295241
E-book ISBN: 9781783295265
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
First edition: July 2015
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Names, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
© 2015 by Rhonda Mason
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
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To the best friends a girl could have, Jen Brooks and Diana Botsford, without whom I never would have finished this novel.
S
hadow Panthe.
Power, grace, deadliness defined. Always cunning, never merciful, and endlessly, infinitely, victorious.
She, Kayla Reinumon, was Shadow Panthe.
And she was tired of it.
Tired of fighting, of hiding.
Perhaps her foe would end it. Kayla gripped a kris dagger in each hand and eyed the fellow occupant of the Blood Pit. This one would not kill her. Could not, had she a wish to, which she most likely did. Every woman who earned the dubious glamour of fighting in the Blood Pit wished to vanquish Shadow Panthe and claim her throne. Well, this one would not.
The girl—who possessed the ridiculous stage name Angelic Assassin—came at Kayla with knives flashing. She had technique, at least. Flawless footwork brought Angelic close, her blade descending at the perfect angle to slice a hamstring. It might have succeeded if Kayla hadn’t spent her twenty-five Ordochian years training for moments such as this.
She lashed out with her booted foot and sent one of the girl’s knives spinning, arcing toward the crowd that sat above the Blood Pit. It struck one of the spectators, judging by the scream that rang out, and was followed by a chorus of cheers. Kayla smiled. Hopefully the man had been killed, or at least seriously maimed.
She hated them, the men who came to this planet on the edge of Imperial Space to watch her fight. They fed off the violence, swore, sweated and screamed her name all night. She hated them, but not more than she hated herself for being Shadow Panthe. For giving them exactly what they wanted.
Angelic rolled and recovered quickly. Impressive. Kayla glanced at the wavy edge of her own kris daggers before tossing the left one away. It skittered to the limit of the pit, out of reach.
“You’ll wish you had that back,” Angelic called. A round of boos met her declaration—the crowd didn’t believe it any more than Kayla did.
“We’ll see.” Kayla twirled her remaining kris. “Come.”
Angelic lunged again, grabbing at Kayla’s knife hand even as she stabbed at her with her long, thin blade. Clever girl. Not a worthy opponent for Shadow Panthe, but clever nonetheless.
The fight ranged across the pit floor, as Lumar liked it to. Despite her disgust for the owner of the Blood Pit, she knew who paid her prize money and how he liked things done. Lumar wanted a show. If Kayla and her brother, Corinth, didn’t depend on the credits the Blood Pit fights brought in she would have ended the fight in a heartbeat, spat at the spectators and told Lumar exactly where to shove his “show.”
But they did need the credits, so Kayla ignored the self-loathing and toyed with the blonde girl. If inflicting half-a-dozen minor cuts and bruises could be considered toying. Kayla herself had almost as many injuries. The fight had to look good, after all. The crowd wanted their
sport
.
Kayla closed with the girl again. Her sleek, cat-like movements and micro-fine reflexes had earned Kayla the moniker Shadow Panthe long before her nights in the Blood Pit. It had taken fighting like a caged animal in front of a crowd to make her hate the title and all the skill it implied. They chanted it now, the syllables elongated, the sound drawn out.
SHA-DOE-PANTH. SHA-DOE-PANTH.
The crowd’s mood turned. They’d seen enough sport, now they wanted blood—Angelic’s blood, never Shadow Panthe’s. Not their infamous champion wench.
Screw ’em.
She’d given them enough already, and she still had a final match tonight.
Kayla sidestepped, affecting a miscalculation that appeared to put her off balance. Angelic lunged to take advantage, as many fighters would have. Of course, a better fighter would have been more cautious. The best, like Kayla’s mentor, would simply have laughed at such an obvious move. Not Angelic. She dove right in.
Kayla shifted her weight, spun past the charging girl and brought the hilt of her kris down hard on Angelic’s temple. The girl crumpled without a sound to the stained organoplastic floor of the pit.
The crowd roared above them, and bile stung the back of Kayla’s throat. She glared at them, her adoring fans. She knew they sensed her enmity and cherished her all the more for it. What better champion had they ever seen? Who more flawless, more coldhearted than she?
None.
Nights like this made her almost thankful for her mentor’s murder. If she were ever to have seen Kayla thus, fighting for money, for the pleasure of men in a pit of filth on the slum side of Altair Tri…
An oddity in the crowd caught her eye. Had he moved, she would never have noticed him. That he didn’t stand wasn’t in and of itself strange. Many men couldn’t be bothered to rise for her, though they applauded and shouted as loud as any.
This man, though, didn’t clap. He didn’t wave his arms about, say something to his neighbor or point at the unconscious body of her latest victim. He held himself as rigid as the trinium decking and stared at her. She wanted to hate him, group him with the others. He sat in the arena, had paid to watch her fight another woman, hadn’t he? One look at him and her mind refused.
Different
.
In his eyes she saw none of the admiration, none of the lust or possessiveness that shone in the others’. What she saw instead disturbed her: calculation. As if he saw past the façade, past the paint that covered her, the stage-name that shielded her.
She touched her fingers to the black
ashk
that wound around the lower half of her face, afraid she’d been unmasked. The cloth was still in place, revealing only her eyes.
The
whoosh
of pressure locks releasing tore through the crowd noise, offering her an escape. A battered section of the pit wall opened toward her, all the invitation she needed. She scooped up the dagger she’d tossed aside and fled the pit.
* * *
“What the frutt do you think you’re doing, Shadow? They didn’t come to see you play footsies, they came to see you
fight
.”
Kayla didn’t bother to look at Lumar as he ranted behind her.
“I told you to punish that upstart, but no, you let her off easy. I swear …”
Even if this same scene didn’t play out after most of her fights, she still wouldn’t have listened just then. She waited on the airway, a catwalk of trinium alloy that ringed the top of the arena and led to the fighters’ dressing rooms. Lumar’s uneven tread rattled the plating behind her while she peered down at the pit. Against her will, her gaze sought out the single man.
He sat as still as ever. Was he enamored with the spectacle in the pit? She glanced at the current contest—Oriala versus some unknown. All of Lumar’s fighters wore skimpy costumes, and Oriala’s chest threatened to burst out of her top with every breath. Kayla snorted. The look in the man’s eyes must have been fanciful imagining on her part. He was just like all the rest.
Before she could decide if the revelation relieved or disappointed her, she noticed that the angle of his stare was off. His gaze was a touch high. He looked as though… he studied the ring of lights circling the pit. His posture indicated attentiveness, but she doubted he saw anything of what was going on in there.
Odd.
What sort of man came to the Blood Pit and didn’t watch the fights? Mercenaries, smugglers, slave runners and unsavories of all sorts came to the pit to do business, but they always confined it to the intermission between matches. No one ignored the violence on display.
Except this man.
A chill crept over her, raising the fine hairs on the back of her neck. Why, then, had he been staring at her after the match? What was he doing here?
“Are you listening to me? I have had it!” Lumar grabbed her upper arm, heedless of the damage to her body paint. “Do you want to lose tonight?”
She tore her gaze away from the mysterious man in the crowd and focused her coldest stare on the pit’s owner. “Shadow Panthe never loses.” Kayla bared her teeth in a feral smile. “That’s why they love me.”
“You’ll lose when I tell you to. I control every match here.”
She arched a brow.
“You’re a credit-whore for me, Shadow, I admit. You win because it pays for you to win, but you don’t show off enough. The people want drama.”
“Frutt the people. They want blood, I give them that.”
“Not enough. They won’t pay to watch you dance with the other bitches. Your match with Phoenix is the headliner. If you want to keep your status as golden girl of the Blood Pit I had better see some drama, I had better see some blood, and I had damn well better see Phoenix crippled before the night is over.” He leaned in close. “The Blood Pit brought customers in from across the Altair System before you ever arrived, Shadow Panthe. You’re not irreplaceable.”
He walked away and she let him go without a reply. She
was
irreplaceable and they both knew it. The Blood Pit could only claim patrons from all corners of this star system because of its location; the slum side of Altair Tri was a catch-all for human filth. People didn’t fly here to build a reputation. They didn’t come to make a profit, gain a name or find their destiny. They came for one reason: to hide. As she and her brother had. Now the Blood Pit was famous on worlds beyond Altair Tri, and people came to this voidhole of a planet for another reason: to see Shadow Panthe fight. They were still the lowest of the low: murderers, rapists, slavers, but
she
brought them in. Lumar would never get rid of her as long as she continued to win.
She had no intention of losing to Phoenix tonight. The promise of four hundred credits to the victor would ensure her full efforts. The potential of another hundred as a bonus from a pleased Lumar was worth stirring up some drama.