To Hell and Back (League of Guardians 1.50)

Logan’s chest rumbled. The beast scratched beneath the surface and it took every ounce of his control to keep himself in human form. His father had always hated Logan. Always. He’d been born of brimstone and fire, yes, but he was also light and magick. Logan was not from the same bloodline as his brothers.

His mother was not from the Hell realm and Logan was not a child born of love. He was a child born of lust, of illicit desires and unquenchable need. All of it one-sided, of course. Sadly, Logan Winters was a child born of rape.

His mother had kept his existence secret for the first twenty years of his life. Not only for his own protection but for hers as well. As princess of the in-between worlds, she would have lost everything if it had become common knowledge that she’d given birth to a child of darkness. Logan would have been killed within moments of his birth and his mother would have had the fight of her life. There were those who would use such information to destroy her. There were those who would use the life of her child as a weapon against her.

Her royal line would have been broken and she never would have been able to claim her birthright. Queen of the in-between world.

So she’d kept him at her Winter Palace. She’d loved him. She’d nurtured him until he had matured. Until he’d shifted that first time and had become something so volatile and unpredictable that not even her power could hold him at bay. Afraid her kind would hunt him down and kill him, she’d surrendered him to his father, and Logan had hated her for it for hundreds of years. It had taken that long for him to realize that he couldn’t exist in her world. The darkness inside him was too strong. There was nothing to counter it. His mother had had no choice.

Until now. Kira and his unborn child were his anchor.

The little boy began to sob uncontrollably, and something so fierce arose inside Logan that for a moment he couldn’t speak. He glared at his father. He felt the beast shift beneath his body, setting every cell on fire, and in that moment, he knew what he had to do. He would not sacrifice an innocent, not for the perverted power play going on here. Not for his father.

Not even for Kira. He couldn’t.

Logan squared his shoulders and let everything fall away.

He would get the child out of District Three. Or he would die trying.

He moved until the boy was safe behind him and spoke directly to his father, his tone hard. “I asked, who sanctioned this run? Why has the child been brought down here? I sense no darkness in him.” Logan scowled fiercely. “In fact I sense nothing at all except puppy dogs and rainbows.”

“You would question me?”

Logan ignored his father. “You took this child from his bed because you wanted to teach me a lesson. You wanted to torture me as much as you could, but it’s not going to work. An unsanctioned run to District Three is punishable by time spent in the pit.” Logan paused. “Even for you.”

Santos’s eyes bulged as his anger boiled over. “You think to threaten me?” he roared.

Logan shook his head. “No,” he said softly, “I’m issuing a challenge.”

“Well done,” Lilith murmured, sipping from a glass of blood-red wine. She nodded at Logan in approval, her thirst for a diversion finally appeased. “Well done.”

Santos didn’t have a chance to reply because Logan beat him to it.

“I challenge you to the cage.” Logan’s fists clenched and his eyes blazed red.

Santos’s chest rumbled. His eyes flashed crimson and his brows furrowed so low he looked demented. “You know what this means?”

Logan bared his teeth, more than ready to meet his fate. More than ready to claim his destiny.

His father snorted, amused, though the amused look faltered for one precious second when he caught sight of the fire in Logan’s eyes.

“I know exactly what it means.” Logan scooped the child up in his arms and strode toward the door., His father laughed—a harsh, guttural sound that died a quick death when Logan paused at the door and focused his steely gaze on Santos.

The two men stared at each other for several long moments and then Logan spoke so quietly that Santos wasn’t sure he’d heard him correctly. It was only several seconds after Logan had disappeared from the room that his words penetrated Santos’s brain.

“Only one of us will leave so you’d best be prepared to spend the next several centuries in the pit because it won’t be you. And I hope every single second is absolute fucking agony.”

Chapter Ten

* * *

THE CAGE WAS suspended a hundred feet in the air. A ten-by-ten torture chamber designed to break the strongest of fighters. That was the thing about challenges. It wasn’t just your opponent you needed to defeat—it was the cage itself.

The arena chamber was a catacomb-like structure, several stories high, with hundreds of viewing chambers layered in a circular pattern all the way up. It resembled the inside of a bee’s nest and, in fact, was referred to as “the hive” by all.

At the moment it was filled to the brim with all sorts of otherworld creatures. Word had gotten out quickly—most likely due to Lilith’s insatiable desire for pageantry and mayhem. It wasn’t every day that an overlord of Santos’s reach and power was challenged to the cage; in fact, it probably had never happened before. That it was his son who’d issued the challenge made it all the more interesting.

Demons loved to gamble and favors were trading hands, currency exchanged. It was a veritable feast of darkness and not unlike the human spectacles held in Sin City, otherwise known as Las Vegas—the ultimate fighting championship. Except down here the stakes were so much higher and the rewards …