Page 48 of Crescendo (Beautiful Monsters #1)

“A whole week?” Darcy shakes her head in disbelief. “And you couldn’t even come say hi?” She’s still smiling, but I don’t want to dissect the look that distorts her features for merely a second. I don’t have the time.

Apparently, neither does Mack. “Baby.” He jerks his head as if calling a trained pet.

But, to her credit, Darcy takes her sweet time turning to face him, her hands on her hips. “Yes?”

Mack grins. “Show Dante’s... friend to the best seats in the house.” He points to a bench at the highest point in the arena with the clearest view of the cage below. “It’s gonna be quite the show. The little Kitten returns to the cage.”

“Show?” Darcy frowns. Apparently, she wasn’t around for the excitement, but I don’t fill her in, and neither does Mack or Arno. She’s left to suspect the obvious from my stance and Mack’s excitement. Eventually, her gaze turns to the woman slung over my shoulder. “She okay?”

“She’s high,” I grunt, shifting so that the girl’s feet hit the ground, but she can’t even hold herself upright.

Darcy has to slip an arm around her shoulders just to keep her from falling, but she murmurs something, her gaze focused in my general direction.

“Don’t. No,” she slurs, the words running together. “Don’t. Don’t. Igobackto—”

I turn on my heel, cutting her off. Irritation runs down my spine when I realize that Arno is within earshot, watching me, his expression still unreadable for once. Mack, the fucker, is already strolling down the center of the arena, toward the cage.

“Twenty minutes per warm-up, Kitty?” he suggests without turning around. “Just like old times.” He wiggles his fingers toward a door that’s directly parallel to the center of the arena .

“Fine.” Already, I can hear murmuring about how quick of a fight it should be.

Mack the Mad Dog. Mack who fights dirty. Mack who has never lost a match since he opened his own cage.

I shrug hard, as if that might brush the doubt off.

Some of it even trickles from the back of my own mind.

Prison games were a little different from the fights in the cage.

There was no entertainment factor. No money on the line.

When some upstart punk came at you with a shiv, there was no boss waiting to step in and pull the match.

I was a show dog who’d been thrown from the stage and into the bowels of the pound, where a battle became less about glory and more about survival.

I flex my fingers, feeling them sting. The truth is that the “Kitty’s” claws were worn off from scratching at the concrete walls of a prison cell.

He was forced to shove new weapons into the gaps—whatever tricks and skills he could learn from men with more body counts to their name than the people standing in the cafeteria line every day.

How well would those makeshift weapons stack up against a well-fed, regularly trained mad dog?

Well, we would just have to fucking find out. I head for the door while Mack approaches another on the opposite side. I barely make it a step before a voice, low and mangled, calls me back.

“Wait.” Stacatto’s girl is watching me when I look over my shoulder. Her eyes drift up and down my body as if she’s trying to decide which end is which. “Tic-tac-toe,” she says finally, her tongue wrestling with the words.

I can barely understand her through her accent, and Darcy shoots me a worried look.

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of her—”

“Tic-tac-toe,” the woman insists, stressing every word as best she can. She’s fighting the high, trying to resist the pull of the wave sweeping her under .

I know from experience that she doesn’t stand a fucking chance.

I jerk my head in a nod and turn on my heel without responding out loud.

Tic-tac-toe. She certainly loves her old games—the strategy she laid out was simple but effective: split the board.

Allow your opponent to set the first piece and then draw them into opposite corners of the grid while you skillfully lay your trap.

By the time you finally spring it, you’ve taken the center of the board before they know what hit them.

The little bitch thinks that one lucky round with a batch of hired guns makes her an expert on battle plans.

I laugh darkly to myself as I skirt the end of the cage and pull the door open to a small room that contains only a row of blue training mats lined up lengthwise against the wall, a set of weights, and a flickering light bulb.

After closing the door behind me, I strip my coat and my shirt off and then approach a mirror hanging near the back corner of the pen.

I don’t recognize the man staring back at me compared to the boy who first cut his teeth on the cage at the age of sixteen.

The Kitty’s grown up. He’s lost his love of chasing the bloody ball of yarn for scraps.

He’s honed his skill in the alleys, and he doesn’t like to play with his food as much anymore.

Nowadays, he prefers to grind it down into a pulp to make it easier to swallow.