alpha down { lionel ; day 8 }

[k!ah]

I frown down at Lucky for a moment, waiting for him to get up, to lock me flat on my ass and rip out my throat with his bare hands. But he doesn't move and suddenly a canon blasts through the arena. A smirk pulls at my lips and I nudge the boy with my foot, flipping him over until he was staring up at me with lifeless eyes. I crouch down beside him, staring down at him as I sensed Mouse come up behind me. Reaching down I tug off the bejewelled eyepatch, slipping it into my pocket beside the ragged broken one. "I think I'll take that as a souvenir," I say around a grin as I give his face a not so gentle pat.

Straightening I move towards his discarded back, searching through his belongings before giving standing over his body one last time. I knew that deep down I should have some sort of shame about what I had done to him, what I had wanted to do to him. And as I stared down at him there was a bad taste in my mouth, but that had nothing to do with him and more to do with me and the last words I had spat at him before finally claiming his life as my own. They had been my fathers words, and it disgusted me that I had wielded them as a weapon in the same way that he had over the years.

I stare down at him for a moment longer before I felt Mouse push against my shoulder. "Yeah, let's get out of here, buddy," I mumble to Mouse, but I dont move for a long moment. "You should have killed me when you had the chance," I say as my lips pull back into a grin, despite the ghosts of my fathers words, my blood thrum and I felt almost gleeful. "But you were arrogant and cocky and look where that got you." I shake my head at him before I spit onto his corpse, smearing it with my bloodied, dirty foot. "Now I've marked you, not so alpha anymore, huh?"

I turn away from him, climbing onto Mouse's back before he leaps into the morning sky. "One down, one to go," I tell him and he shrieks, his predatory gaze pinned to the ground beneath us as he looked for the remaining tribute.