strode straight past the girl's hiding place and she crept out behind him, leaping up onto his back and swiping her blade across his throat before he had the chance to fight her off.
Tatum sucked in a sharp breath beside me as his blood sprayed out and I clenched my teeth as I drew her closer to me, my arm tight around her waist.
"Oh yes. I just placed a bet for fifty grand on her, and you wanna know the best bit?" the man beside me asked, leaning in so the acrid stench of stale sweat and brandy sailed beneath my nose.
"What’s that?" I asked, my muscles tightening with the desire to shove him back a fucking step.
"I told them I don't even want any money for a prize. If she wins, I get her, for the whole night," he laughed throatily and my spine straightened as I felt a shudder run through Tatum at my side.
"What do you mean you get her?" Tatum asked, her voice hard but void of emotion so it wasn't totally clear how disgusted she was to someone who didn't know her.
"I mean, I get her to myself in one of the private rooms to do as I please until dawn," the guy chuckled. "And with only two contestants left in the game, I'm pretty sure I'm in for a good night."
"I thought the winners got membership?" Tatum asked, leaning forward to see him better.
The guy's gaze was fixed on the fighting beneath us so he didn't return her look, but he did laugh loudly at her words.
"I can tell you're new," he said, slapping me on the back like we were sharing a joke and a fierce kind of anger coursed down my spine at the contact. "Maybe next time leave your wife at home, eh? Then you could get in on some of this action too? Or do you like to play with them together?"
"Naw, that's not the kind of monster I am," I said in a low tone which would have been warning enough to most people but not this drunk, entitled son of a bitch.
"Well, I'll happily enlighten you then, my dear," he chuckled, seemingly oblivious to the danger lurking right beside him. "Every person in this fine establishment who is not wearing one of these masks is up for sale. That means that for the right price you can do anything you want to them. Think of them like sex toys or slabs of meat, mice in a trap, whatever you want. Point is, they're nothing. Not unless we decide they are. That girl is just fighting as a proxy and the man whose membership she's playing for has happily agreed to my terms of the bet because once she wins for him, she will have served his purpose."
"So her prize for winning is serving your purpose?" Tatum asked and that time the disgust was more than clear in her voice, but our revolting companion only seemed egged on by that.
"Yeah. And she looks like the kind of girl who wants to be fucked in the ass, don't you think?"
The asshole didn't even get the chance to fight as I grabbed him by the back of his cloak and launched him over the railing. But his scream as he fell drew the attention of every screwed up motherfucker in the area.
He fell on top of the cage where the death match was taking place with a sickening crack that said he'd most definitely broken something and chaos broke out around the walkways as he shrieked and screamed for help.
"Holy fuck, Kyan," Tatum gasped but as she looked up at me, I found her blue eyes alight with excitement and I grinned even though she couldn't see it beneath the mask. "Do we need to run?"
"Naw, baby, everything here has a price. I'm sure my trust fund can take the hit for that little misunderstanding," I assured her.
"What the hell is going on?" Saint demanded angrily in my ear, but he didn't need to know that right now, so I ignored him. Tatum took pity on him though and muttered an explanation.
“Kyan just tossed that piece of shit over the balcony and now he’s crying like the little bitch he is,” she said proudly.
“For the love of Christ, just get the hell out of there before you get yourselves into the kind of trouble you can’t get out of,” Saint demanded and I could just about hear Monroe saying something too,