Warlord Anghar, The Colony

      My beast was raging. The Prillon standing across from me in the fighting pit had not chosen a second to fight beside him. Either the poor bastard was an idiot, or this stubborn Prillon hadn’t been in The Colony long enough to choose one.

      I would place a wager on the second. I saw the need in his eyes. The need to rage.

      To hurt.

      He wanted to come at me. To fight. To hold nothing back. I knew that feeling, that desperate, clawing need to punch, kick. Beat.

      To hurt. To bleed. To feel something real.

      I missed the rush of battle, the elation of victory. When we fought the Hive, we were important to the Coalition. Protecting others. Doing important work.

      Now? We mined for the transport system. We counted the days and fought off boredom with every waking breath. Irrelevance. We were nothing now, and that was like swallowing a blade. It hurt, all the way through.

      “I’m going to make you bleed, Warlord.” The Prillon was panting, eager to get the fight started. His hands were in fists at his sides, his chest thick and well-muscled. Anger and anticipation simmered.

      I welcomed the challenge. The distraction. The only thing I wanted more than to spend a couple hours in this fighting pit was a warm, wet pussy. A mate begging me to fuck her. Taste her. Fill her with my seed. My beast prowled within me at that thought.

      But there was no bride for me. Never would be. I’d taken the bride testing more than long ago with no success. I happened to believe the ban on brides for contaminated warriors was a valid one. We were not whole. Never would be. Not that my opinion mattered. Most of the warriors here had submitted to the Interstellar Brides Program testing protocols when Prime Nial lifted the ban for Colony exiles more than a year ago. And we could count the brides that had arrived at Base 3 on one hand.

      Just because he’d allowed the contaminated to be matched didn’t mean there was hope for any of us.

      Brides were few and far between here. Some said their presence gave the other warriors hope. But I’d always been a realist. There would be no saving me. No soft, beautiful female deserved the monster I carried within. He was too feral. I doubted even the legendary Atlan mating cuffs would affect him, would soothe the animal within.

      The Hive had taken too much. Forced me into beast mode and tortured me for days. In the end, they had broken me, and my beast, and I still carried the shame.

      I should have made them kill me. And when Seth Mills had the chance, he hadn’t done it either, taking away the quiet of death. And now I lived. And fought. Not for life or death, not against the Hive that still stalked us all, but in a round pit on a desolate world with other fucked-up and exiled warriors. Not to save people, but for a break from the monotony of this new existence.

      If I wasn’t such a bastard, I’d end it. But despite all the rambling that went on in my head, I was a survivor. Always had been. Hope or no hope, I’d hold on until the bitter end, until my beast raged and they were forced to execute me. I was too stubborn to die.

      “Fucking Atlan. What are you waiting for?” The Prillon was pacing me. Circling. His gaze filled with horror and rage and hatred, all directed at himself. We were one in that moment, and I knew my gaze matched his. Broken. We were both broken.

      “You can’t beat me, Prillon. But you already know that, don’t you? That’s not why you’re here.” I threw the taunt, knowing it for truth. He wanted to feel the pain. To attack with nothing held back. He couldn’t kill me. Not without a second Prillon warrior to back him up. And I wouldn’t kill him. He was a warrior, an honorable soldier who’d survived the same horrors I had. Death matches were not allowed in the pit, so fighting me was the closest he could get. But I could make him hurt. Bleed.

      Feel.

      Two more steps. Three. Screaming voices fueled us both, but there was one sound that drew my beast’s attention away from the match and my gaze lifted to scan the crowd before I had processed the instinct. I never looked away from an opponent in the pit. It was a rookie move. A stupid one. But I had no choice. My beast forced my hand.

      It was a woman’s voice. A female.

      My beast awoke, practically howled as fire rolled through my veins and my cock grew hard.

      I shook my head, trying to blink away the urge to hunt down that voice. To claim her.

      She was probably one of the Academy cadets here for training but leaving tomorrow.

      I should ignore it. Let her go. She wasn’t my matched mate. Couldn’t be.

      I didn’t have one.

      Another reason my beast was so edgy. There seemed little hope I’d be able to hold on long enough to discover a mate that my beast would want to claim. Of the warriors here, only Warlord Braun understood the monster inside me, raging to break free. Every moment was an act of discipline. Every step. Every breath. The beast seethed, and I held him down with an iron fist, my will the only thing standing between me and execution.

      The fighting pits helped release some of the beast’s restlessness, the hunger. But my time as a Hive drone hadn’t dimmed the beast’s fury, as it had with Warlord Rezzer.

      Feeling helpless to resist the Hive’s commands, the constant buzzing in my head that never completely went away, that just made me edgier. The battle against the internal enemy was constant. This Prillon before me was the latest outlet available, and I planned to make him miserable. Beat him bloody. Let the beast have some fun. Give him what he wanted.

      I saw the hopeless rage in the Prillon warrior’s golden eyes. He was new here. I didn’t know his name, but I didn’t need to. I recognized the wrath, the trapped feeling. We all did. Every single warrior banished was here on The Colony, not by choice, but because we’d been contaminated with Hive technology. Captured. Tortured. Modified.

      We were no longer wanted by the people on our home planets, the people we’d sacrificed for. We were too dangerous.

      Me, especially.

      I wanted to hate the policy that required all