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I tried to transfer everything I learned from Lukain to Jinneth, with a gentler hand.

For months, I became lost in my training. If I was going to be a slave-fighter, I wanted to be the best there was. I learned from Antones only ten percent of the fighters won their freedom—it had happened though.

I vowed to be part of that ten percent.

The first few months were strength and endurance training. Lukain would ask, “Are you ready?”

I would reply, “For what?”

And he would smack me with a wooden switch on the back of the legs, the stomach, the arms. Over and over, for weeks on end, until the abuse felt less like abuse and more like acceptance.

The initial stinging pain from the wooden weapons Master Lukain hit me with dulled over time, until I hardly felt them.

Meanwhile, I ate like a ravenous pig, stuffing down my bodyweight in meat and potatoes and ale. I would work off the belly-filling sustenance and find Jinneth late at night in one of the faraway tunnels, showing her what new stances and foundations I’d learned.

Lukain started with endurance and resilience training because without those qualities, he assured me I would be doomed in the ring. Forget my peers—it was the people I would have to fight in the future, real adversaries, who would try to do me in.

My half-vampire master said I showed promise. He molded me into what he wished to see in a fighter, because he knew I would listen to his instructions and not complain when things became frustrating or overwhelming.

My life revolved around Master Lukain, Jinneth, and occasionally Antones and a few others I had conversations with.

I made friends with the women, such as Helget, mean Aelin, and others.

The young men only saw me as an enemy. As the months turned into years and I kept growing, thickening, and becoming more imposing, their looks became different.

I wanted nothing to do with Culiar, Rirth, and the dozens of boys who ogled me like I was the next meal at eating time. My focus was solely on my sparring, to become the best physical version of myself I could be.

By the end of my first year with the Firehold, I had been on the Floorboards, the surface, a handful of times. The Beneath was all I knew.

I hit a new growth spurt when I neared fifteen summers.

My body had been thwacked and whacked into a muscular, powerful version.

My breasts grew annoyingly larger—they could only negatively impact me during a fight by getting in the way—and my hips widened.

My stance was sturdier thanks to that, as Lukain approvingly pointed out.

One of the few days when I walked the Floorboards with Antones as my guide and handler, and Jinneth tagging along, I saw my reflection in a puddle of water. Based on where the exit of the Firehold led up to the grate aboveground, I inferred we were in the western district of Nuhav.

The puddle was the first time I’d seen myself in a year. There were no mirrors in the Firehold. The shocked expression on my face in the murky-brown water said everything my words couldn’t.

I didn’t recognize myself.

Lukain had convinced me to cut my hair short, to my ears.

Long hair could be used as a handhold against me in the ring.

“Mitigate all possible advantages over you. Keep that hair short. Press those tits within your leathers as flat as they’ll go.

Cut your nails—you won’t be scratching and clawing, and a bent nail during a sword brawl is a stinging pain you won’t be used to. It will niggle and distract you.”

I took his advice and now realized what he saw in me, because I saw it in myself in the puddle. My face looked determined, pale from lack of sunlight, and drawn. My eyes were bright with life and anger.

No one called me “pretty” anymore, though the boys in the Firehold didn’t hold back from vocally admiring my body with lurid words and barked advances. I shunned them all. After a while, they stopped, because I had ceased letting their words get a rise out of me.

My arms were bulky, stacked with corded muscle straining against my tunic. I was taller than Antones now, and he was not a short man. Where before I had come to Lukain’s neck, now my eyes were level with his chin.

I grew into a fierce, fiery young woman.

During eating hours, I was given a wide berth by many except the most daring.

I had a reputation as a silent killer, even though I had never fought anyone in the ring.

It was legend built on my mysterious practices with Master Lukain, where everyone wondered exactly what we did when it was just the two of us behind closed doors.

Lukain never asked for sex. He didn’t linger on me, leer at me, or make any overt moves, no matter how sweaty we became during our training.

That being said, there was tension between us I was starting to see as I aged. When he took his shirt off during sparring, my body heated in a new way. I struggled to focus—perhaps his intent—sneaking glances at his sculpted chest and arms as we fought.

My feelings for the violent, wicked grayskin became bold and lurid in my mind. I wondered if he felt the same way about me after molding me out of fresh clay. It was the idea of what could be that danced in my mind—imagining the position I could find myself if I stayed part of the Grimsons forever.

I constantly vied with two conflicting notions: fighting my way to freedom; staying to become Lukain’s mistress once I was older. It was the last gasps of childhood, I knew, and a silly idea, since Master Lukain had never shown a romantic interest in me.

Yet, during the deepest hours of night when everyone slept in the stuffy quarters together, I found new ways to relieve the anxiety and stress of those torrid thoughts.

My hands disappeared between my legs, I pulled my covers tight, and kept my whimpers and moans deathly silent as I discovered an obsessively pleasant sensation.

It was training of its own, learning how my new body operated.

As many Grimsons aged, they formed romantic bonds where before things had been platonic.

It was not unusual to hear moaning coming from a training room where young men were supposed to be “sparring,” or for a lovely lass to sit and rock back and forth on a man’s lap during eating hours, right in public for everyone to see.

Antones had to break up the sexual deviancy. He had no qualms doing so, putting transgressors in the rot-house for a day or two.

One night, after a young lady got caught riding Rirth’s cock in the eating hall, sending Rirth to the rot-house, I spied that same girl being led to the rot-house in the wee hours—while I was sneakily training with Jinneth—so she could be mounted all over again.

In a corner of that room, allowing her entry into the cell, was Antones. He acted stern and stoic when Lukain was around but he was not against “helping out” the young, promiscuous members of the Grimsons.

Antones explained his position during one of our monthly outings in the Above. As we leisurely strolled the streets, my body soaking up nice summer sun for the first time in a month, I asked why he let the young men and women fuck in the Firehold.

“Two reasons,” he told me. “First, it’s a way for the grimmers to reduce anxiety and frustration at their lot in life. You are slaves, Sephania, as am I. What better way to forget that for a few days—become obsessed with living underground, even—than by plunging yourself between a pair of legs?”

His words made sense. In short, if Lukain kept the people happy, allowing them to form intimate relationships, they wouldn’t revolt or complain about their status.

“The second reason?” I asked, glancing over at a merchant selling brown-skinned melons who I swore I recognized but couldn’t place from where.

Antones shrugged his stout shoulders. “The women have to learn somehow. As you well know, the Grimson girls have a goal of marriage, breeding, and status building. It’s why we provide them with nice clothes . . . like this.”

He stopped at a trader with bundles of gowns stacked high under an awning. Perusing the stacks, he picked out six dresses he thought looked nice, and then gave the merchant some coins from his purse.

We were in a bazaar, surrounded by busy people and thick dust clouds. The sun was stifling, hotter than I’d felt it in years.

“. . . And it’s why we let them fornicate with each other,” he continued on a few minutes later, once he had the dresses slung over his shoulder. “We have means of making sure a girl does not get pregnant, by the way. Should you ever need one.”

I blinked at him. “I won’t.”

Antones smirked, scratching at his day-old stubble. “It would not do well for a fighter to be with child, I admit.”

“No.”

“Just as it wouldn’t do well for broodstock not yet chosen by a fullblooded mate to be with child. The vampires of Olhav choose our human companions because humans are easy, lustful, and don’t come with a past . . . such as a child.”

I furrowed my brow. This was the first I’d heard such a thing. “The women are to be . . . unspoiled?”

“Not necessarily. Being childless and, even better, chaste, does increase their chances of getting chosen as a vampire’s broodstock and leaving the Firehold.”

“What does Master Lukain get out of these deals? Sounds to me like he’s only losing property at that point, to vampires more financially and socially powerful than him.

He plucks younglings out of difficult lives, paying scraps for their meager existence, only to build them up and sell them off to the highest bidder when they reach their fullest potential? ”

“You have the gist of it. To answer your question, Master gets clout . Lukain regains his position in Olhav, slowly but surely, with every new union he creates. Each coupling of a Grimdaughter and a pureblood Olhavian builds more debt owed to him in his future.”

I tapped my chin. “He plans to call in those debts at a time of his choosing? To return to his rightful place, as he sees it, in vampiric society?”

Antones nodded, wincing. “I will not say more on our master or his strategies. I have already said too much. Most of your peers were stolen from their lives, sold at auctions, and have no agency in deciding their course. For that, I am sure you see Lukain as a monster. You’d have every right to.”

“But you don’t?”

“Master Lukain treats me well, Sephania. Before him, I was at the end of my rope. Now I am given food, board, and I become part of something greater than myself.”

Yes. Slave trading and sex trafficking. So much greater than yourself, dear Antones. My thoughts dripped with sarcasm.

Knowing all this about Lukain . . . why do I still have such trouble hating him? Is it purely because of my selfish attraction to the grayskin, or is there something deeper there? A sense of longing and belonging I have not yet filled?

Granted, Lukain was the only man I’d grown anything close to intimate with over the past year. My options were sorely limited, and I was starting to think Lukain made it so on purpose by challenging me to new training sessions nearly every day.

As I walked and talked with Antones, appreciative of him opening up to me and telling me things the grayskin would never tell me himself, my feet stumbled when a jarring image played in front of me.

I kicked up dirt, freezing, as a group of people walked perpendicular in front of me and Antones in the street. The group had no less than fifteen young people in beige robes and tunics, ranging from knee-high whelps to taller children on the cusp of adulthood.

Mute vowagers marched in lockstep behind the youths, their hands tucked in the sleeves of their robes.

At the front, leading the procession, strode Father Cullard. He did not see me as he crossed the road opposite us. He walked slower now, with a more stooped gait and a longer face.

A wave of dizziness passed through me, joined by jarring memories of my time in the House of the Broken, the Diplomats, and everything I’d done since coming to the Firehold.

I hadn’t realized my leisurely once-a-month stroll with Ant had led us all the way to the southern region of Nuhav. Cresting over the buildings ahead was the impressive Temple of the True. It was the Seventh Day, which meant the entire House was going to the temple for almsgiving and prayer.

Antones noticed the shocked expression on my face and the way my legs were rooted to the ground. “Sephania, are you all right?”

Just as quickly as they had appeared from a cross-street, the procession disappeared down another road.

I blinked at Antones’ concerned features, trying to find my words past a dry throat. It took me nearly a minute before I started nodding my head slowly.

“I . . . I’d like to return to the Firehold now, if it’s all the same to you, Antones.”