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The next one was already snapping dripping pincers, scuttling toward me. I swung forward, but its mammoth leg slammed into me, sending me flying.

The oxygen rushed from my lungs. Aching ribs had me blinking up into that angry sun through a plume of dust. A scream cleaved the space, and I forced my body to roll as I fought down air.

The spiders were down. The spiders were dead, but…

The blond withdrew a dagger from the little one’s throat.

Oh, fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. I fought to my feet and shakily grabbed a knife.

“Alvara, wait!” That voice. That lilting voice. “Easy.”

But I wasn’t about to take it easy. My heart was pounding, ribs still screaming as I weighed the dagger in my hand.

“Same side, remember?”

I blinked as I staggered back a step, trying to find my balance.

Same side? Nobody was on the same fucking side in here. It came down to the last one standing.

But that thought emptied from my mind.

Because I knew him. The blond. The blond with forearms so horrendously scarred it looked as though he’d reached through fire to fish someone from the blaze.

He dragged a blade across one of those mottled arms before chucking it into the dirt at my feet and⁠—

And held his bleeding arm out to me. “Come on, Alvara,” he said in a voice more taunt than pleading. “We’ve done this before.”

A dark dungeon.

A dark dungeon, and a shadow who gave me a shirt.

Panting, grip still firm on my dagger, I held my ground as he tentatively closed the distance to the roar of the arena.

My senses were consumed with the sound. With the reek of piss and blood and something fouler.

“Not that I don’t deserve it, but you’re gonna really piss me off if you stab me,” he warned, his expression somewhere between a smirk and fear. My eyes flicked up to Moros, whose face gave nothing away as he watched the man stalk toward me between monster carcasses.

Wrong.

Something was wrong.

But I didn’t think it was the scarred man. Boy, really, now that his features were in sharper clarity.

“Don’t tell me the legend I grew up on let them break her. You’ll shit all over my childhood.”

Confusion had my brows furrowing as he got closer. That bleeding arm still between us like an offering.

“Read me,” he demanded as something else roared. New horrors emerging, no doubt. “Now, Ally, while we have the time.”

Read him? What the fuck did that mean? I eyed the blood.

Then lifted my gaze to the harsh, once-beautiful features of a man I knew. Knew and didn’t. Didn’t but should.

It was his eyes that hit me like a punch to the gut.

Eyes I’d seen in the harsh glow of moonlight through narrow windows.