He caught me looking and jerked his hood back up, throwing his face into shadow. I cursed myself, trying to think of a way to apologize, but the damage was done.
“I gotta go,” he said, and dropped my hand.
I felt something wrench, soul-deep. This was wrong. I knew, somehow, that he was important—maybe the most important person who’d ever walked into my life. But he was already walking, his powerful shoulders squared as if to fend off any attempt to stop him. With his hood up and his back turned, he was suddenly closed off and distant.
And alone.
“Wait!” My hand was tingling where he’d held it. I grabbed it in my other hand, not wanting to lose that warm glow. “How do I find you again?”
He kept walking. I could hear the sudden bitterness in his voice. “You don’t.”
4
AEDAN
Feck.What the hell had I been thinking? Sure, I’d had to go pull those bastards off her, but I shouldn’t have started talking to her. If I really wanted the best for her, I had to stay the hell away from her.
Even now, I could feel my hands unconsciously forming fists, my knuckles cracking as I thought about what they’d done. What they would’ve done, if I hadn’t followed her down that hallway.
Herbrother.Koning was her brother. Shit.
I’d come to watch the fight because I needed to scratch that itch. Once, I’d been happy with that bloodlust inside me. I’d accepted it as part of me. But then I’d been woken up, in the ugliest way possible, to what I was. A thug. A beast. The more I fought, the worse I got. So I’d stopped, and now I hung around on the fringes of society instead. A non-life: working to keep me busy, fucking, a little drinking to take the edge off. Just whiling away the hours. I stayed away from my old life.
And yet I still came to the fights.
I realized I was rubbing at the scars on my neck, and pulled my hand away.
There was a fight at The Pit most weeks, but I only came once amonth or so. Probably why I hadn’t run into her before. Sylvie. My angel had a name, now. And fate was laughing at me.Her brother!I had to get out of there,now.I’d come to watch the fight, but suddenly I couldn’t stand to see it. Suddenly, it wasn’t just two guys in the ring. Suddenly, it was personal.
I headed for the door. I had to fight the urge to look over my shoulder and try to catch another glimpse of her.
Alec Koning was her brother. I’d been around the scene enough that I could peg a fighter’s chances just by looking at him. I’d seen Alec when he’d arrived and I knew his opponent, a guy called Morgan. “Ripper”Morgan.
Sylvie’s brother was going to get annihilated.
5
SYLVIE
The tiny,pipe-lined rooms where the fighters got ready were meant to be off-limits to the audience. But after what happened, I needed Alec.
Going downstairs meant negotiating a rusting metal stairwell, sticky with spider webs and barely lit. Being somewhere dark, on my own, was the last thing I wanted right now. But the guys Aedan had fought weren’t getting up any time soon.
The thought of Aedan made my heart skip in a way it hadn’t in a long time. Thoughts of boyfriends had been off my radar for so long that I’d almost forgotten what that felt like—that lift you get inside, when you think of his face, the little shiver that goes down your spine when you hear his voice.
Crazy.Okay, sure, he’d helped me, but he’d ripped through those guys as if they were made of paper. He was obviously some kind of fighter, embedded deep into this world that Alec and I only fleetingly touched once a week. Not a guy anyone would want to get involved with. And yet....
And yet I couldn’t stop thinking about him. The pain I’d seen in those pale blue eyes, the way he’d seemed so...protectiveof me. Before I’d driven him away by staring at his scars.Idiot!
It was all irrelevant, anyway. I didn’t have room in my life for a boyfriend. Every day since Dad died had been about getting by, scraping together the money from my hotel maid’s job and Alec’s construction work and figuring which bills we could get away without paying. It had been getting harder, since both of us had our shifts cut.
The only thing that had kept us going was Alec’s fighting. Rick, the guy who organized the fights, paid him a flat fee with a bonus if he won. The big money, of course, was in the gambling. The rich thought nothing of putting thousands on a fighter to win, or to draw first blood. But we never saw any of that. We didn’t have the money to put any bets on ourselves, even if we’d dared to risk it.
Tonight, Alec had to win. He’d won every time so far, thank God, and hadn’t gotten too badly hurt. Tonight’s win would give us enough money that maybe it could be the last one. It would buy us some breathing room, at least. I could job hunt and maybe find something better paid than the maid job. Alec could do some of those community college courses and move up a little at the construction site—learn wiring or plumbing or something.
Ifhe won.
I emerged into the cramped little room where Alec sat. With his olive-green tank top and cut-off jeans, he could have been some guy chilling on a beach. That’s what he should have been doing, instead of risking his life to pay our bills. Great cheekbones, blond hair—my brother had it all going on. He should have been a lifeguard or a DJ or something, knee-deep in adoring women. Not sitting there in this overheated tomb, maybe minutes away from—
