He saw them and made a decision.
He grabbed me and started dragging me toward cover.
One of them raised a gun and aimed at me.
Troy threw himself between us. The shot went wide and hit the wall behind us.
More of them came and surrounded us. Troy kept fighting and kept putting himself between me and every threat.
Dmitri appeared and took down two of them. But there were too many. They kept coming.
I watched Troy get grabbed and watched him fight back. I watched them finally overwhelm him through sheer numbers.
“No.” I tried to stand. My legs wouldn't work. “No, let him go.”
Rafael appeared above me and looked down with almost gentle concern. “You should have stayed down, Declan. This didn't have to be your fight.”
“Fuck you.” I grabbed his ankle and tried to pull him down.
He kicked free and nodded to his men.
They dragged Troy away. I watched him struggle and watched him scream my name. I watched him disappear into smoke and chaos.
“Troy!” My voice was raw and desperate. “TROY!”
Rafael crouched beside me. “He's alive. For now. Because Luka needs to understand the lesson fully and needs to feel what it's like to lose control.” He stood. “Thank you for your cooperation, Declan. You played your part perfectly.”
Then he was gone too and disappeared into the destruction he'd orchestrated.
I lay there bleeding. The championship belt was still around my waist, useless metal that meant nothing without Troy.
Dmitri reached me with his hands checking for injuries and his mouth moving but I couldn't hear what he was saying.
The world was going dark at the edges from blood loss and concussion and shock. All of it was finally catching up.
The last thing I saw before everything went black was the emergency lights painting the ruined arena in shades of red and orange. The last thing I heard was my own voice screaming Troy's name into the void.
Then nothing.
TWENTY-FIVE
THE SHAPE OF DROWNING
TROY
The cold woke me before the pain did.
It had settled into my bones the way cold does in concrete rooms, deep and patient, the kind that doesn't announce itself and doesn't leave. My back was against the floor, damp seeping through what remained of my shirt. When I tried to move my arms, I found them chained above my head, bolted to the floor with heavy steel that didn't give when I pulled, even when I pulled hard enough to feel the metal bite into my wrists.
My legs were free. That didn't mean anything when the rest of me was pinned.
I made myself catalog the room before I let myself think about anything else. Low ceiling, exposed pipes running overhead, condensation dripping from them in slow rhythms that had already stained the concrete in dark lines below eachjoint. A single bulb hung crooked in the corner, dim enough that shadows gathered everywhere it couldn't reach. No windows. One metal door with a lock on the outside.
I didn't know where I was. Didn't know how long I'd been out or how far they'd moved me.
The arena came back in pieces. The explosion tearing through the space below the stage, the heat of it arriving before the sound. Fire spreading fast and wrong, like it had been placed rather than started. Dmitri grabbing my arm and pulling me toward the exit while armed men closed in from three directions. And Declan on the ground, blood spreading dark and fast beneath his head, his body completely still while the chaos moved around him like water around a stone.
I'd screamed his name until my voice broke. I'd kept screaming it even as they dragged me away.
