Switchblade Dolls
"In the fighting pits, they call him Razor. She owns his contract. He's starting to think she owns more than that."
The crowd screams for blood.
They always scream for blood. That's what they come for—packed into the underground arena like sardines in a can, waving credit chits and howling bets while two bodies tear each other apart in the pit below. The air reeks of sweat and synth-alcohol and something metallic that might be fear or might be anticipation.
The bell rings.
I move.
My opponent—a hulk named Crusher, all chrome implants and rage—swings for my skull. I duck, feel the air whistle past my ear, and drive my elbow into his unprotected kidney. He grunts. Staggers.
Not enough. The implants numb his pain response. I need to disable, not hurt.
I dance back, light on reinforced feet that cost more than most people make in a year. The mods under my skin hum with potential energy—muscle boosters, reflex enhancers, the bone-lacing that turns my skeleton into a weapon.
Crusher charges. I let him close, let him think he's winning, and then—
I twist.
My foot connects with his temple in a perfect crescent kick. The crack echoes through the arena. He drops like a puppet with cut strings.
The crowd erupts.
"RAZOR! RAZOR! RAZOR!"
I don't acknowledge them. Don't raise my fists or preen for the cameras. I just stand there, breathing hard, blood dripping from a cut on my cheek, and find her in the crowd.
She's in the owner's box, of course. Yara Vex always watches from the owner's box.
And she's smiling.
"Seventeen wins," she says later, in the private medical bay where her personal surgeon is stitching my face. "No losses. You're making me a very rich woman, Razor."
"Kai," I correct. "My name is Kai."
"Your name is whatever I say it is." She leans against the sterile counter, arms crossed, watching the surgeon work with casual interest. "I own your contract. I own your mods. I own every drop of blood you shed in that pit."
I shouldn't look at her. Shouldn't let my eyes trace the line of her throat, the sharp angle of her jaw, the way her black hair falls in a curtain around a face that belongs on ancient statues.
I look anyway.
Yara Vex. Thirty-one. Owner of the Obsidian Circuit, the most prestigious underground fighting ring in Neo-Jakarta. Rumored to have connections to every syndicate in the Pacific Rim. Cold, ruthless, beautiful in the way knives are beautiful—all edge and danger and the promise of pain.
"How long until I've paid my debt?" I ask.
"At your current rate? Three more years." She pushes off the counter, crosses to stand beside the table where I'm laid out like a specimen. Her hand brushes my jaw—tilting my face to inspect the surgeon's work. "Though at this rate, you might not survive three years."
"I'll survive."
"Will you?" Her eyes meet mine, and there's something there—something that flickers before she shutters it away. "You fight like you want to die, Kai. Like every match might be your last and you don't particularly care if it is."
"Does it matter? I win."
"It matters to me."
The words hang between us. The surgeon finishes, packs up his kit, leaves without a word. The door clicks shut.
"Why?" I ask.
She doesn't answer. Just traces her thumb along the fresh stitches, almost gentle, before pulling back.
"Get some rest. You have another match in three days."
She leaves.
And I lie there in the sterile light, feeling the ghost of her touch burn against my skin.
I was a soldier, before.
Special Forces, Pacific Coalition. Five years of classified ops, neural mods, and learning to turn my body into a weapon. Then my unit got sold out—an officer with gambling debts and syndicate connections, trading our lives for the clearance of his own ledger.
Six of us went into that ambush. I was the only one who walked out.
The syndicates found me three days later, half-dead in a jungle ditch. They offered me a choice: die in the dirt, or fight in the pits.
I chose the pits.
Yara Vex bought my contract two years ago. Since then, I've been her best fighter—her prize monster, paraded through the Obsidian Circuit like a thoroughbred racehorse. I win her money. She keeps me alive.
It should be simple.
It's not.
"You watch me."
We're in her private training facility—a converted warehouse filled with equipment that would make military quartermasters weep. I'm cooling down after a session, and she's appeared from nowhere, the way she always does.
"I watch all my fighters."
"Not like you watch me."
She goes still. It's barely perceptible—a tightening around her eyes, a tension in her shoulders—but I've been trained to read bodies. I know what fear looks like. What want looks like.
She's feeling both.
"Be careful, Kai." Her voice is soft. Warning. "You don't know what game you're playing."
"Maybe I'm tired of games." I cross to her slowly, giving her time to retreat. She doesn't. "Maybe I'm tired of pretending I don't see it."
"See what?"
I stop an arm's length away. Close enough to touch. Close enough to destroy.
"The way you look at me when you think I'm not watching. The way you touch me during medical checks like you're memorizing my skin. The way you come to every one of my fights, even the ones that don't matter, even when you have a hundred other things that need your attention."
Her breath catches. "Kai—"
"I'm not stupid, Yara. And I'm not broken enough to miss what's happening here." I take the final step, cup her face in hands that have killed more people than I can count. "So tell me. Am I wrong?"
For a long moment, she doesn't move. Doesn't breathe.
Then she pulls me down and kisses me like the world is ending.
She tastes like expensive wine and desperation.
We crash into the wall, then the floor, then some piece of equipment that clatters away beneath us. It's not gentle—there's nothing gentle about either of us. We're both weapons, both edges, and this is a collision more than a connection.
She rakes her nails down my back. I bite her throat hard enough to mark. We fight for control even as we surrender it, neither of us willing to be the one who breaks first.
When it's over, we're both breathing hard, sprawled on the cold warehouse floor, staring at the ceiling like we've just survived a battle.
"That shouldn't have happened," she says.
"I know."
"I own you. There's a power imbalance. It's—"
"Wrong?" I turn my head to look at her. Her hair is a mess, her lipstick smeared, and she's never looked more human. "Probably. Does that change what you feel?"
She's quiet for a long time.
"No," she finally admits. "It doesn't."
I reach for her hand. Lace my fingers through hers.
"Then we figure it out."
We don't tell anyone.
Publicly, I'm still her prize fighter. She's still the cold-eyed owner who collects her winnings and walks away without looking back. We maintain the fiction because we have to—because the syndicates who fund the circuit would see this as weakness, as something to exploit.
But privately, in the small hours of the morning, in her penthouse above the arena, in the quiet spaces between matches—
Privately, I learn her.
I learn that she hums when she's reading reports, a tuneless sound that she doesn't realize she makes. I learn that she sleeps with a knife under her pillow and wakes at the slightest noise. I learn that she had a brother once, who died in a pit fight when she was twelve, and that's why she bought into this world—to be the owner instead of the owned.
She learns me too.
The nightmares. The flashbacks. The way violence has been hardwired into my brain so deeply that sometimes I don't know where the soldier ends and the man begins. The guilt I carry for surviving when my unit didn't.
She holds me through the bad nights. Doesn't tell me it's okay—we both know better. Just holds on until the shaking stops.
"This isn't sustainable," she says one night.
We're in her bed, her head on my chest, my arm around her waist. The city glitters beyond her windows, a fever dream of neon and smog.
"I know."
"One of us is going to get killed. Or exposed. Or—"
"I know." I press my lips to her hair. "What do you want to do about it?"
She's quiet for a long time.
"I've been thinking," she finally says. "About selling the circuit."
I go still. "Yara—"
"It's just an idea. I have enough money to disappear. Start over somewhere the syndicates can't reach." She props herself up to look at me. "We could start over. Both of us."
"And my contract?"
"I'd tear it up." Her hand finds my cheek. "You'd be free, Kai. Really free. And if you wanted to stay with me after that—if you still wanted this when there's nothing binding you—"
"I'd stay."
"You don't know that."
"Yes." I pull her down, kiss her soft and slow—so different from how we started. "I do."
We almost make it.
The buyer is lined up. The paperwork is drafted. Three more weeks, and we'll be ghosts—disappeared into a new life, free from the blood and the betting and the roar of crowds hungry for violence.
Then someone talks.
I'm in the pit when it happens—halfway through a match with a fighter called Venom, dodging cybernetic claws that drip paralytic toxin. The crowd is screaming. The blood is flowing.
And then I see the men moving through the owner's box.
Syndicate enforcers. Four of them. Heading straight for Yara.
Something inside me snaps.
I forget the fight. Forget Venom and his claws and the match I'm supposed to be winning. I vault the pit wall, hit the arena floor running, and tear through the crowd like a force of nature.
I reach the owner's box just as the first enforcer grabs her arm.
I kill him before his fingers can close.
The second one draws a weapon. I break his wrist, take the gun, put two rounds in his chest before he can scream. The third runs. The fourth—
The fourth has a knife to Yara's throat.
"Let her go," I snarl.
"The boss wants a word with her." He's sweating, pressed against the wall with my owner—my love—held in front of him like a shield. "Something about a business deal that was supposed to go through."
"Let. Her. Go."
"Or what?"
Yara moves before I can.
Her elbow snaps back into his solar plexus. In the second he's stunned, she twists, breaks his grip, and drives her palm into his nose hard enough to shatter cartilage. He crumples.
She steps over his body, straightens her jacket, and looks at me with something like wonder.
"You just killed three syndicate soldiers."
"They touched you."
"Kai—"
"They touched you."
She stares at me. Something shifts in her expression—some wall crumbling, some defense giving way.
"You're insane," she says.
"Probably."
"They'll come for us now. Both of us."
"Let them."
"Kai—"
I cross to her. Cup her face in blood-stained hands.
"I spent two years fighting to survive," I tell her. "Fighting because I didn't care if I lived or died, because living felt like punishment and dying felt too easy. Then I met you. And suddenly survival wasn't just existence—it was this. Every moment I get to be near you. Every fight I win so I can come back to you. Every goddamn breath I take, Yara."
I press my forehead to hers.
"So if they want to come for us, let them come. I'll kill everyone who tries to take you from me. I'll burn this whole circuit to the ground if I have to. Because you're the only thing I've ever had that was worth fighting for, and I'm not losing you to anyone."
She kisses me.
It's soft this time. Tender in a way that neither of us should be capable of.
"Then we run," she whispers against my mouth. "Tonight. Right now."
"What about the circuit?"
"Burn it." Her eyes are fierce. Certain. "You're right. It's just violence. And I'm tired of violence being the only thing I know."
We disappear that night.
The Obsidian Circuit goes up in flames behind us—a farewell gift to the syndicates who thought they could own us. Let them have the ashes. Let them sort through the wreckage wondering what went wrong.
We have each other.
We have a cargo ship bound for the Australian Outback, where the syndicates' reach doesn't extend. We have new identities, new lives, new possibilities.
We have the hardest, strangest, most brutal love story either of us has ever known.
"Do you regret it?" she asks on the third night of the voyage.
We're in a cramped cabin, tangled together in a bunk too small for one person, let alone two. The ship groans around us. The ocean roars.
"Regret what?"
"All of it. The pits. The killing. The—"
"No." I pull her closer. "Everything that happened led me to you. How could I regret that?"
She's quiet. Her fingers trace the scars on my chest—old ones, from battles before her.
"I'm not a good person," she says finally.
"Neither am I."
"This might not work. We're both—broken. Violent. We might tear each other apart."
"Maybe." I catch her hand, press my lips to her knuckles. "Or maybe broken things fit together in ways whole things can't. Maybe violence is just intensity, and intensity can be love as easily as it can be war."
She laughs—wet, raw, real.
"That's either profound or insane."
"Probably both." I grin against her skin. "Seems to be a theme with us."
She pulls me down for a kiss, and the ship rocks beneath us, and somewhere behind us the world we left is burning.
But ahead, there's nothing but ocean.
Nothing but possibility.
Nothing but a future where the fighter and his owner become something else entirely.
Something that looks a lot like free.