Burn For Me (Phoenix Fire #1)(23)

That man wasn’t Trace.

Trace had his claws in the air. Sweat glinted off his body, and the guy was … smiling.

Her back teeth clenched. She hadn’t realized just how much he would enjoy the violence.

The cage opened and Trace stalked out. Someone else dragged his bleeding opponent toward one of the back rooms. More money exchanged hands. The smoke in the area deepened.

Beers were tossed around.

The blood pooled in the cage.

Eve shoved her way through the crowd around Trace. He was getting slapped on the back. Figured. Shifters and violence. They went together too well.

And she knew Trace had a dark side. Taking the guy there hadn’t been her best plan ever.

She grabbed his arm. “Where’s Vance?” They weren’t there so Trace could rip and claw his way through the fighters. They had a job to do.

Trace glanced her way. Blood dripped from his mouth. “I talked to the organizer …”

Wait, there was an organizer?

The cage door was being opened again.

“Vance is fighting now.” Trace wrapped his arm around her shoulders and turned her to face the cage. “Provided he survives this fight, you can talk to Vance all you want—after.”

She stared at the man entering the cage with an arrogant swagger. His head was shaved, and his eyes, small, angry, swept over the crowd. A tattoo of a giant snake covered his bare chest and an old pair of faded jeans hung low on his hips.

“No weapons,” Trace murmured in her ear as he leaned in close to her. “Except the ones God gave you. Those are the cage rules.”

Jimmy opened his mouth and the light glinted off the too sharp and far too long teeth on each side of his mouth.

That just was seriously scary. She’d never seen teeth quite like those before, not even on vamps. “W-what kind of shifter is he?”

“Snake.”

Hell. The tattoo made sense then, and so did the sharp, thin fangs. Fangs that curved a bit, just like a snake’s.

Snake shifters were supposed to be devious. She’d heard rumors about them, but tonight was her first shot at an up-close look at the real deal.

Jimmy lifted his hands and the people watching and drinking roared.

Trace’s hold tightened on her. “It seems that Vance is a crowd favorite.”

Looked that way. She glanced over at Trace. She’d seen him shift once, that was how they’d met. She’d found him hurt, far too close to death, on a lonely stretch of Texas highway.

She’d thought about leaving the bloody wolf when he snarled at her with his bared fangs, but she hadn’t been able to walk away.

Not even when the wolf had become a man.

“How long have you been coming here?” On top of everything else that was happening, she had to deal with this, too.

Her best friend, sliding right back into that dark pool of violence and blood that had stalked him before they’d met.

Trace didn’t answer her and that alone was answer enough. She knew he had to feel the tension in her body.

His gaze was on the cage when he said, “If I hadn’t come here, you wouldn’t have found Vance tonight.”

Right. One problem at a time. She edged back toward the cage with Trace at her side. She’d managed to find clothes at Trace’s place—mostly because Trace had far too many female friends who left their shit behind—so she was wearing a miniskirt, one that was a little too short, and a top that was a little too loose. It kept slipping off her shoulder. The heels were high, ridiculously so, but the clothes made her fit in with the other women there, and that was the point, right? Blending in was a necessity with the supernaturals.

“Vance!” She yelled his name, but he didn’t glance her way. The crowd was roaring so loudly that she knew he hadn’t heard her. She tried again, yelling louder this time, “You’re in danger!”

He needed to slither his butt out of that cage and get over to her.

Eve didn’t know how much of a lead she had on Cain, and she sure didn’t want to waste any lead time while Vance enjoyed getting bloody by beating the hell out of some other shifter.

“We’re not hurting any humans,” Trace told her, voice gruff.

Oh, what? Was he starting to feel guilty for keeping this secret from her?

“That’s why we come here. You know the beasts need to fight. Here, we can face off against each other.”

Face off—until what point? Until only one shifter could claim dominance on a bloodstained floor?

The cage door opened.

The crowd didn’t cheer when the next fighter entered the ring. There wasn’t any sound from them at all. Her head turned toward the fighter because she wanted to see why everyone had gone so deadly quiet.

“He doesn’t smell like a shifter,” Trace said, lifting his head. “And I haven’t seen that guy before.”

The guy had a dark hood over his head, a hood that connected with the loose sweatshirt he wore. His shoulders were broad, his legs braced apart.

Vance frowned at him and … backed up a step? Eve caught the flash of fear on Vance’s face.

The new fighter shoved the hood off his head. The bright, almost glaring lights hit the stark lines of his face. It was a face she knew too well.

“Cain,” Eve whispered.

And she knew that she’d arrived too late.