ChaPter 2 - Carnival of Souls by Melissa Marr

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ChaP ter 3
The men nodded at Belias as he helped the girls and
women over the back of the gatekeeper. They gave him the
attention befitting his caste and his fight standing, and he
accepted it without drawing attention to it. Not everything
has to be a show. Belias couldn’t get Aya to understand that.
He could accept her need to make her way in the world,
respected it even, but she seemed determined to choose the
hardest possible path to do that. Highborn girls didn’t brawl
in the street, and they surely didn’t enter death matches. If
her father had survived a few years longer or if her brother
were older, she wouldn’t have been able to risk herself so
foolishly, but the way things had unfurled, Aya had achieved
her majority—eighteen—and with no one to stop her, she’d
refused their wedding and entered the competition. Once