Page 21 of Savage Striker

I grabbed a towel and held it against my chest, which was irrational, since the frost had already reduced me to a shadow and the shadow had already been seen. Modesty was not a protocol I had ever needed before. I appeared to be improvising one.

“I’m showering. Go back to sleep.”

He didn’t move, but pressed a hand against the glass. The warmth of his palm cleared a small circle of frost.

“Nice mark,” he said.

“Turn around,” I snapped. “Asset Protection rules. Privacy during hygiene protocols.”

Leander laughed. It was a low, sleepy sound that vibrated through the glass wall, and I felt it arrive through the floor in my feet.

“There’s no privacy in the Pit, Felix. Better get used to an audience.”

The Pit had taught him in days what the suite upstairs had spent twenty years installing in me. Different classrooms, same curriculum.

He tapped the glass one more time, right over the reflection of the bruise.

“Don’t cover it up,” he said. “I want to see it on the field today.”

He pushed off the wall and walked back to his bed.

In the bright bathroom light I stood naked and shivering, the bruise staring back at me in the mirror.

I turned on the shower and didn’t wait for the water to warm up. I stepped under the freezing spray, gasping as the cold hit my skin. Cold immersion was supposed to be a procedure too, shock the system, reset the baseline, and I stood in it until my teeth chattered, waiting for a reset that did not come. The mark on my neck burned as I scrubbed it, but I knew it wouldn’t wash off.

He had marked me. And now he was going to make me wear it like a collar.

CHAPTER 9

LEANDER

“Get closer,” I said right into the back of Felix’s neck.

We were running at sixty percent pace, a warm-up lap before the real challenge started. Our Director wanted us to move like a single organism, kept inside a fifteen-foot radius by the haptic sensors in our suits, and the mesh fabric hummed against my skin like a second nervous system, waiting to punish a mistake.

If we drifted apart, the suit buzzed. If we broke the tether, it shocked us.

I ran off his shoulder until my arm brushed his with every stride.

“You’re crowding me,” Felix said through his teeth. He kept his eyes locked on the horizon, chin up, that fucking compression turtleneck zipped to his jaw and hiding my handiwork.

“Just following protocol, Princess,” I said. “Tegula said to stick to your shadow.”

I sped up and clipped his heel. Just a tap, enough to annoy him.

Felix stumbled, breaking his perfect rhythm, and recovered instantly. His cheeks flushed pink as he glared at me, and it wasn’t the cardio, because the man ran like a machine. It was me, my arm on his arm, my breath on his neck, the tether hauling him back into my orbit every time he tried to open up an honest yard. He hated that I was there. He hated that he could smell me.

And I fucking loved it.

“Focus, Regillen,” he snapped. “The defensive line is setting up.”

Anatol Getha stood at the center of the defensive formation. The giant goalkeeper wasn’t in the net today; he was commanding the back line for the drill, smiling, watching us approach with his arms crossed over his massive chest.

I didn’t like that smile. I had seen it before, through chain-link, on the faces of men who had already been paid.

“Ball in play!” the drone announced.

A cannon fired the ball into Felix’s path. His pace exploded.