Hearing the kicking of a can down the far side of the nearby alley, the man pulled up his hood, his disguise and, in a flash, sprinted away into the darkness.

I failed to pull oxygen into my lungs, wheezing as I tried. Those eyes… those eyes were imprinted into my brain, they were soldered onto my soul. My voice was stolen by the shock of what I’d just seen.

Brown eyes… a pair of rich chocolate-brown eyes, the left iris smudged with a flash of blue… the exact blue from my eyes… just like…

No… how could it be?

He died… He had died over twelve years ago.

That man was a monster, a killer, devoid of emotion, with little ability to communicate. Luka… Luka was my best friend, my love, a Bratva boy… He died…

But… But…?

“Kisa!” Serge’s voice cut through my panic. Suddenly appearing before me, his arms instantly scooped me off the floor. “What the hell?” he spat out before carrying me back to the car, placing me in the backseat. “Shit!”

He asked me several times what was wrong, but I didn’t know what to say, what to believe… My mind kept replaying what I had just witnessed.

Brown eyes… rich chocolate-brown eyes, the left iris smudged with a flash of blue… the same color of my eyes.

“Kisa!” Serge called from the driver’s seat as he fired up the car. “What happened? Were you harmed?”

I shook my head in response to his increasingly frantic questions, all the time gripping my seatbelt with fisted, trembling hands.

“Fuck! Then what?” Serge pushed. “Where did the man go? Why are you crying? Shaking?”

I met Serge’s eyes with my vacant stare, still too busy replaying the scene in my head to really see him. It couldn’t be Luka… It was impossible… He was dead…

My heart exploded like a cannon. Serge slammed his heavy fist down on the steering wheel and threatened, “Kisa! You tell me what’s wrong or I’m telling your father that you took money from the gym and handed it out on the street to a homeless man like it was fucking Christmas!”

Silence filled the Lincoln. I took a deep breath, wrapped my arms around my waist, and I whispered, “I… I think I’ve just seen a ghost…”

Chapter Eight

818

“So are you ready to kill or are you ready to be killed?”

As I sat on the bench in the back room, the cries of hundreds of men shouting their bets beyond the door made my hands shake with nerves. 362 sat in front of me, smiling with a shit-eating grin as he wrapped his hand in a well-soiled white sports bandage.

This guy had been on my ass since I’d arrived a month ago. He was three years older than me, one of the best fighters in his division here at the Gulag, yet he immediately saw me as a threat. Three years his junior, I still matched his size. For a few weeks, the warden took me to a gym, made me train in fight techniques, telling me I would have my first match soon. Every day, I would wake, train, eat, and sleep. I had a routine, but my dreams were plagued with the boy I’d seen in the ring. The one with the dead look in his eyes, his opponent’s guts on the canvas. I knew it would be me soon, forced to kill or be killed.

362 stared me down waiting for my answer.

“I’m going to kill whoever the fuck gets in that ring with me,” I promised. 362’s smile just grew wider at my pissed-off tone. I focused my attention on the white tiled floor, psyching myself up for all that I’d worked for. My legs bounced as the noise from the cage grew louder, and I knew the current fight was coming to a close. My skin was twitching from the shot I’d been getting everyday. My muscles were growing, aching all the time. I was sweating constantly and I was agitated twenty-four-seven, the littlest thing pissing me off.

“You’ll become addicted, you know,” 362 said, and my eyes slammed to his, fiery rage racing through my veins. His long black hair ran down his back, and he jerked his chin in the direction of the door that led to the cage. “Out there, all the men betting on your strength, on your will to survive. You’ll become addicted. You’ll live for the kill… live to see the life force drain from your opponents’ eyes. In that cage we’re both Gods and monsters.”

My mouth tightened and all my muscles tensed. “Never,” I spat back, my voice sounding deeper, rougher.

362 simply laughed.

“This is your first fight. You have no idea how it’s going to feel,” he taunted.

Fists clenching, I said flatly, “I’m going to do what I need to do to get out of here. That’s it. I’m not like you. I won’t like it.”

362 jumped to his feet and approached me. I stood, the concrete cold beneath my feet, and we met face to face. I was Russian; some Georgian piece of shit wasn’t going to best me.

“Not like me?” 362 quizzed. I clenched my jaw and glared into his fucking dead eyes. He smirked, then stepped farther forward until his feet touched mine. “You’re gonna end up exactly like me. You’re gonna die inside. You’re gonna spill so much blood that it’s all you’ll see. At first, you’ll hate it, but with each kill, you’re gonna need it more and more, like some fucking drug. You’re gonna change. Who you are now will no longer exist. You’ll forget who you were. You’ll forget anyone you ever loved.” 362’s lip hooked into a dry smirk, but then his face went blank. “I’ve been here years.” His head tilted forward until his mouth was at my ear, but I held my ground. “And I have no fucking idea who I was before I was brought to this hell. And in time, neither will you.”