Free Bash, Volume III by Candace Blevins

or seats they can sit in to watch from upstairs. The audience pays to get in, and then the house handles all bets. It’s shifters and a few other kinds of supernaturals only — humans who come to watch have to be vetted beforehand, vouched for by whoever wants to bring them, and they can only watch from the upper level, because if someone gets hurt bad enough they change in the cage. Most fights are in human form, occasionally he does a half-form night, or even a night of fights with everyone in animal form. He doesn’t do it often, though, and security’s a lot tighter on those nights. LEO usually leaves him alone, but it’d be bad if they chose to do a raid on one of the special nights.”
    “Why do you do it?”
    How much should I tell her? Fuck, she’d seen me kill Sloane — she knew how I fought. “Unless I want to kill someone, I have to pull my punches, even for other wolves. People talk about my temper, but if I hit at full strength there’d be a string of bodies in my wake. I hit humans at maybe ten to fifteen percent if I want to hurt them bad. Five percent if I’m just sending a message. The strongest wolves usually get about half my strength unless I intend to kill them — other wolves get a good bit less.”
    “And they put you with people you can whale on without killing them?”
    “Yeah. There’s a lion I like to fight, and a grizzly bear. Rules are, if you shift before a winner’s announced, you lose. Otherwise they’d both have the upper hand.”
    “How often do you go?”
    “When I’m pissed, I just show up and see if he’ll work me in. He pretty much always does, even if he has to add a fight on at the end of the night. He loves being able to announce, “ And the winner of the final bout gets a shot at Bash .”
    “Not exactly fair, is it? You’re fresh and they aren’t?”
    I smiled. “If I let him know a day ahead of time, I get to fight them fresh. I’m sorry I didn’t mention it before, it wasn’t something I intentionally kept from you.”
    She nodded. “I get it, because I didn’t intentionally keep Brain, or the thing when I was twelve, from you.”
    Her eyes went to the drawer with the sweeper Brain had made for her, and I said, “Did it before you got here. We’re clean.”
    I laughed at the roll of her eyes, but then sobered when she said, “You know me better than you think. Maybe Dawg’s smoother, but don’t sell yourself short. Just pay attention.”
    “Something else we need to talk about. It isn’t an us thing, so much as something I just need to talk to someone about.”
    She leaned backwards, pulling me with her until we were lying side-by-side on the sofa, crammed together, her face in my chest. I don’t know how she knew what I needed, but this made it so much easier to say what I needed to tell her.
    “Somehow, in everything that happened before my family sent me away, I started seeing myself as a monster — the type of person who could bash people’s skulls in without remorse. I told my family I was distraught over it, but deep down, I knew the truth.” I sighed and rubbed her back. It was soothing, having someone to hold. “They’d pushed me to it, thought they had the upper hand, and I’d been happy when they realized their mistake had just cost them their lives.”
    “If that makes you a monster, then I’m one, too. There wasn’t much time for the men I killed to see what was coming, but the last two knew. They didn’t have time to get to their weapons, but they knew.”
    And that was my point, but I didn’t tell her that part, yet.
    “When I killed Sloane, I assumed you’d never look at me with affection again. You’d seen the monster in me and we’d never be close again.” I’d turned music on before Angelica and Dawg arrived, and I spoke softly now, just to be on the safe side. The sweeper hadn’t picked anything up, but it was still never wise to admit to murder aloud unless you were certain LEO couldn’t hear.
    “You