Then my chest tightened violently as I took in my husband. In the daylight, he looked like a skeleton, covered in dirt, dried blood, and seeping wounds. His broken leg didn’t look much better, still turned sideways, though the swelling on his face had gone down.
All except for the matching gash on his forehead.
But… I scanned the roaring crowd again until I found them.
Gabriel, his beaten face almost unrecognizable, and there, on the opposite side of the ring, Nico, his eyes assharp as razors. He looked unharmed, but it was hard to tell with the press of half-naked, writhing bodies.
Still, relief hit me hard.
So far, we were all still breathing, so that wassomething.
With a squeal loud enough to wake the dead, the twin iron doors opened, and a monster stepped through. He was a wreck of a thing, skin held together with old scars and malice, yellowed fangs almost touching his chin.
In some ways, worse than I’d hoped.
In other ways… not as bad as I’d expected.
I took off my jacket and tossed it aside, stuffed my long braid down the back of my shirt.In retrospect, had I known I’d end up in a fight ring, I would have shaved my hair to my skull, but twenty-twenty hindsight and all of that.
Me and Mr. Monster sized each other up, and apparently, we were both happy with what we found. The Overseer made a predictably self-aggrandizing speech about the grisly future I faced. I tuned out his bullshit.
He was finished; he just didn’t know it yet.
Dante’s gaze snagged on mine. For one flicker of a second, his expression cracked—fear, horror—his lips moving with words I couldn’t hear over the crowd, and I drew a breath, wishing I could tell him everything would be okay.
I’d come here to save my husband, and I wasn’t about to fail.
The crowd’s chanting dulled into the low, pulsing hum of background noise. My senses narrowed until there was only the distance between me and my opponent and the incessant drag of the sand around my ankles, the entirety of my existence narrowing down to surviving these next five minutes.
“Look at you,” the monster drawled, voice as rough asgravel. His Italian was older than what I was used to, heavy with a dialect that gave every word teeth. “He doesn’t want me to touch your face, but the rest of you…” He ran those leering eyes up and down my body. “The rest of you is fair game.”
He lunged, and I stumbled. A fawn to his wolf, barely capable of staying away from his teeth.
He licked his lips. “You’ll scream when I pull you apart, eh?”
Then he moved. Fast, but I’d expected that, a massive wall of muscle bearing down on me with all the subtlety of a charging bull.
Vaguely, I heard Dante screaming instructions, but I was already twisting out of his path, feet barely skimming over the sand. All that momentum kept him hurtling past me, our eyes meeting for a fleeting second, head turned to just the right angle for me to strike.
My fist sank into the bottom of his jaw, a few inches too high, and there was more bone than I’d expected, but I hit him hard enough to send him reeling across the ring. He skidded to a stop.
The roaring crowd filled the space, shouts ringing off the stone, the Overseer looking like someone pissed in his beer.
Mr. Monster charged, heels digging into the sand, an unstoppable force I would be a fool to get in the way of. I stood my ground, practically offering up one hand, wincing when his fist closed around it with such crushing force. I used that leverage against him.
This time, my blow landed perfectly where it was supposed to, knuckles crushing cartilage, all my power behind the strike, his larynx splintering beneath my fist.
He staggered away, clawing at his throat, making themost delicious gasping sounds as he tried to breathe through his collapsed airway.
“Won’t work,” I murmured, circling him again, studying those calves as big as boulders. “And while you’ll eventually heal, cartilage takes longer to mend than flesh, so by the time you can breathe again, I’m afraid you’ll be dead.”
I’d been trainedby a monster. Had lived among them my entire life.
I’d even married one.
Monsters didn’t scare me half as much as they should, and perhaps that would be my undoing one day, but not today. I knocked my right boot against my left ankle as I took my next step, a seamless move nobody would notice because they were too focused on the wheezing creature three times my size.
The scarred bastard curled one big hand into a fist.
