¹ THRONE ─ the hunger games

[ 025 ] killing fields of fire to a congress of ravens

RAGE. That was the first thing Iko felt raking its talons through her chest, a blinding electricity surging through her veins, a furnace searing white-hot and thermonuclear. Titus was dead. Someone else had claimed her kill. For a rigid moment, she was so paralysed with it she couldn't answer Alex. Fingers staking into her knee, Iko ignored the other two girls, fixing her flinty gaze on Alex, who only stared back, awaiting her response. Did he take her for a fool? Sure, her methods might be harsh, and the blood she'd spilled was fuelled by malice and a visceral adversity towards coming out anywhere but the top. Iko wasn't above playing dirty, but she wasn't so insensible as to risk the alliance yet, when they still had use for the Career pack. She needed them as much as they needed her. Wolves in the wild hunted in packs and only tore each other apart when the time called for it. A lone wolf was a dead wolf. As her training partner whose palms seem to have been fused with hers since the day they'd met, Alex knew this. Knew that she knew this, above all.

Rage was a rogue blade pinwheeling through her body wildly, slashing up her insides, begging to be freed from her skin so it could bury itself to the hilt in someone's face. Rage bled into betrayal, a sting that pounded like a nail through her chest as she searched Alex's face for any sign that he didn't believe that she could possibly pull off such a risky operative. Nothing. Just a flat glare whetted on the basis of suspicion.

"I'll ask again," Alex gritted out, teeth clenched, frustration hardening his features, the steel-eyed glare piercing through her impenetrable armour, needling the fury tearing through her veins. "Did you, or did you not, kill Titus?"

Livid, Iko's lip curled. "I wish I had, but, no, I didn't," she said, her tone ice cold. Her eyes narrowed when Alex's expression didn't even shift. Even when she was telling the truth. "But you don't believe me," she sneered, and watched the micro-expressions in Alex's face, watched his eyes flash, his features tighten up. "So this is what it's come to, then, partner."

A muscle in Alex's jaw ticked. "Show me your knives."

The final cut. A thread snapping.

Mistrust festered between them, smoke-thick as heatwaves cloying in the humid air, dark as storm clouds, obscuring the effortless ability to read each other that once came as second-nature as language. Between them, there was this palpable shift, a reorientation of the land they both stood on, a visible crack running through the earth forcing them so far apart, he didn't even recognise her.

Even if she was still the same girl from back home. Nothing had changed. She had always been the girl who took her violence to the extremes, exacted her rage precise as a blade to make her mark as she would when she was a victor. That same girl who'd carved her name letter-by-letter into the flesh of those boys who called her names other than her own, who bore the scars till this day and flinched each time she walked by them, this diabolic entity. That same girl who culled her competition in a sword fight, chopped off his leg, essentially clipping his wings, rendering him incapable of flight. No remorse, no mercy, no apology in her relentless forward momentum. He was just seeing her as she was. A monster, a girl given in to the abyss. And now, the abyss was staring back at him: What else did you expect?

It felt like a kick to the chest. One she thought she could've shrugged off, but couldn't. She'd already accepted that only one of them was going to make it out alive, and no matter the cost, it was going to be her. She'd already accepted that he might put up a fight at the end. After all, nobody would willingly go to the slaughterhouse submitting to the cruel fate that they were going to die. But this—the fact that he was looking at her like she was the one who'd lied to him, like she hadn't shown him this part of herself before, like she was the one betraying him—this was the final straw.