The crowd’s roar cuts off like someone sliced through a wire. Twenty thousand people holding their breath.
“No.” The word tears from my throat before I can stop it. My palms slam against the glass.No, no, no!“Marco.” I spin toward him, panic clawing up my chest. “We have to get down there. We have to—”
“He’s breathing.” Marco’s voice is steady. “Look at his back.”
I press my face against the glass again. Cas lies crumpled on the blood-slicked stone, but Marco’s right—his shoulders rise and fall in shallow, rapid movements.
“He’s just badly injured,” Marco says. “They’ll skip the ceremony and take him straight to Evander.”
The game architects are already flooding onto the platform. They roll Cas onto a stretcher, one of them pressing gauze against his thigh wound.
“I need to see him.” My voice cracks. “Now. Please.”
Marco doesn’t argue. He barks orders at the guards, demanding immediate escort back to the dungeon. Usually, we all stay in the box and receive food and wine. Sometimes sponsors drop in to see us.
But today, we’re out of there, moving through corridors at a pace that feels like crawling when every fiber of my being wants to run.
The next ten minutes blur together—stone walls, echoing footsteps, Marco’s tense silence beside me. The guards unlock doors with maddening slowness. Everything takes too long.
By the time we reach Evander’s office, my shirt is soaked with sweat.
Cas has beaten us there.
He’s stretched across Evander’s operating table, still in his bloodstained arena gear, writhing around. Low moans escape his throat—horrible, animalistic sounds that make my stomach clench.
But he’s alive. Making noise. Moving.
“Oh, good,” Evander says without looking up from the supplies he’s laying out. Not sarcastic—genuinely relieved. “You can tell Caspian to calm down. Or help me restrain him.”
“What’s going on?” I demand, rushing toward the table. “We saw him collapse.”
Evander glances up, his dark eyes sharp with concentration. “Profunda femoris branch. Deep artery in the thigh.” He gestures toward Cas’s leg, where blood seeps through hastily applied bandages. “Serious bleeding, but slower than if he’d nicked the femoral. Otherwise he’d already be dead.”
My throat goes dry. “He lost consciousness from blood loss?”
“Adrenaline likely kept him upright until the fight ended.” Evander moves to Cas’s side, peeling away the blood-soaked gauze. “Now I need to work.”
I rush to Cas’s head, his wild curls damp with sweat. Emerald eyes just about flutter open when I squeeze his shoulder.
“Cas. Hey.” My voice sounds steadier than I feel. “You did it. You’re a champion.”
His lips curve into a weak grin. “Told you.”
I glance toward where Marco was standing, expecting to find him watching us with that jealous tension he gets whenever Cas and I are close. But the space is empty. He’s given us privacy.
Guards enter carrying a bottle of fizzy wine—the victor’s prize. Cas’s eyes light up, and he feebly reaches for it. I pass it to him, popping the cork and sending foam across Evander’s sterile workspace.
“Robin! Caspian!” Evander barks. “This is a medical facility, not a bloody tavern.”
But Cas is already drinking straight from the bottle, wine running down his chin to mix with the blood on his chest.
I get my first clear look at his thigh wound. The gash runs from just above his knee to mid-thigh—deep, jagged, like the Deathball’s spikes carved through muscle and sinew. Dark blood wells from the torn flesh, more than bandages can contain.
“Fucking hell,” I breathe.
Evander reaches for scissors, cutting through Cas’s arena shorts with quick movements, peeling away the fabric.
Cas, eyes wide with delirium, grins up at Evander. “Always knew you secretly wanted to get in my pants.”
