Broken

Wake up. Eat a too small meal of moldy bread or porridge. Break rocks until bones ached, muscles ripped, hands bled, hunger gnawed and thirst burned. Endure. Keep working. Keep an eye on the more sadistic prison guards and fellow prisoners. Protect the smaller prisoners who were easy prey. Avoid the sadistic guards or fellow prisoners hurting her when it could be avoided. Endure it when it could not be. Keep working. Endure. If her torn flesh from the flogging throbbed and burned and made her feverish, don't show it. Keep working. Endure. Eat thin soup for dinner. Share it with the gnome from whom the sadistic or opportunistic prisoners would steal food. Picture the faces of Khemma and the kids. Let exhaustion sink her into a too-short sleep in a cold floor of a crowded cell. Repeat.
 
It had been the rhythm of life in prison. And in some ways -- the hunger, the grueling work, the danger-- it hadn't been so very different from the orphanage. Better in some ways -- there was an end in sight. She had her sentence and she could serve her time. She just had to survive long enough to be done. She had to endure.
 
And unlike the orphanage, she had chosen to be there, hadn't she? Put in her time in that hell, but then be free from a worse one. Marlene had rolled her eyes, and Mr. Mueller had been happily surprised at the price she had named for confessing to his son's crime, but in the end, they'd agreed. The organization would never again require her to collect a debt from some miserable person down on their luck. She'd never have to threaten some terrified old lady to get her to hand over the money she had painstakingly saved for her medicine for the organization's "protection" ever again. She'd never have to see someone look at her the way her gnome fellow prisoner looked at that sadistic prison guard -- that trapped and panicked look, that "why?" behind their eyes -- ever again. She would not have to hurt anyone outside the ring for the Syndicate ever again. Her time in prison had been a small price to pay for not having the organization force her to be a monster.
 
And with two words and a shrug, Marlene had undone it. "Needs must." It was a punishment, of course. For the school. For Philippe's interest in her. For Marlene's bruised ego that someone had pulled rank on her. The job she was demanding wasn't so terrible. She didn't have to hurt someone vulnerable who couldn't fight back. These were fellow monsters, the biker gang, who were forcing the Warrens folk to pay "protection." Of course the Syndicate wanted them gone, and so did Nel.
 
But it wouldn't stop there. It never did. Marlene had a dozen other brawlers she could give the job to. She had picked James and herself. She was deciding whether the two of them were worth keeping around. If Nel passed this test, there would be others and eventually it would be as if she'd never made the deal. Never gone to prison to try and save her soul. It would only be a matter of time before she would have to give up pieces of herself doing terrible things until she was empty.
 
She'd wanted to flat out refuse and storm out, but that would have been unfair to James. He'd have still had to do the job, and there would have been nobody who cared about him to watch his back in this strange new world he was trapped in. So instead she would play to lose. Set James up with a win that would help him do well in the rings -- protecting him from the worst of what Marlene could do to him, and protecting Bella from having to see it.
 
She would play to lose and go back to the Pits. And at some point in the future, maybe next week, maybe a few years from now, Marlene would decide she had outlived her usefulness, and she would see her dead in a fight like she'd done to Peter. But it was better than the alternative -- becoming someone she wouldn't recognize. The sort of person who would hurt Cardinal, who people hid their children from, rather than letting her feed them and have a school for them.
 
The Syndicate's promise to her was broken, and soon she would be too. It was just a choice of how.