Chapter 2

Cain stepped toward the cage door, toward me, and every instinct I had screamed to leave before he reached me. To turn around, to walk back through the hallway, and pretend I’d never opened the door in the first place, because whatever this place was, I didn’t belong in it. No where even close to it.

The violence felt too real. The fight didn’t possess the polished, professionally controlled look that television fights had.

Maybe I was being a little too guliable, but this place was raw noise, sweat and blood under brutal white lights while grown men screamed loud enough to shake the walls. Money traded hands openly around me as people shoved for better views of the cage, arguing over bets while someone near the front laughed at the man still unconscious on the mat.

The music pounded hard enough that I felt it beneath my ribs, bass vibrating through concrete while heat pressed heavily against my skin from too many bodies packed into one room. Cigarette smoke curled through the air, thick enough to catch in the back of my throat, and mixing with sweat, whiskey, and the sharp metallic scent of blood.

I should have left. Instead, I stayed rooted exactly where I was while the crowd parted for Cain automatically. They didn’t do it out of fear, it was out of respect. That realization settled heavily in my chest as he stepped out of the cage and grabbed a towel from someone waiting nearby.

Nobody pushed into his space. Nobody shouted in his face the way they did with the other fighters climbing through the room. Men who looked dangerous in their own right shifted aside for him without being asked, while voices lowered slightly as he moved through them.

The room adjusted around him naturally, almost as if everyone here already knew where Cain Daniels stood inside this world.

A biker near the cage handed him a bottle of water. Another slapped his shoulder once while muttering something low enough that I couldn’t hear. Cain barely acknowledged either interaction.

His attention never fully left me, and that shouldn’t have affected me the way it did. But standing there with all that chaos around us, all I could feel was him getting closer.

He wiped blood from his mouth once without taking his eyes off me, then he started walking toward me again, his movements slow, controlled, and purposeful.

The closer he got, the more overwhelming he became, not just physically, though that definitely didn’t help, but because he was huge. Broad shoulders stretched beneath his leather cut, black leather hanging open enough that I caught flashes of sweat-slick skin and dark tattoos disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. White tape wrapped thick hands stained with blood, while veins stood out sharply along his forearms beneath the harsh white lights.

None of it looked performative, that was the problem. Nothing about him felt forced: the violence, the confidence, the authority, it all sat naturally on him.

My pulse climbed higher the closer he came, and I remembered being sixteen and catching myself noticing the tattoos under the sleeves of his black T-shirt before immediately feeling guilty about it afterward. Too old. Too untouchable. Too much somebody else’s world. A man I’d spent years unconsciously avoiding looking at too long.

Except standing here now, with blood drying across his knuckles and sweat sliding slowly down his throat beneath harsh lights, he didn’t feel untouchable…he felt dangerous.

He’d come to a stop in front of me close enough I could smell the scent of sweat, leather, whiskey, smoke, and something darker underneath it that settled low in my stomach immediately: heat, man…sin.

Dark hair brushed thick shoulders damp from sweat while silver threaded faintly through the darker strands near his temples. The small cut above his eyebrow continued to leak slowly down along the edge of his cheek, but he didn’t seem to notice it, or maybe he simply didn’t care.

His chest still rose steadily from the fight, and my gaze caught briefly before I jerked my attention back upward, mistake, because his eyes were already on me.

His gaze moved over me once: slow, measured. Not crude, worse…interested. Like he was trying very hard not to look too long and failing slightly anyway.

My throat tightened instantly beneath the weight of it, and his eyes landed briefly on my mouth before lifting back to my eyes. Not accidental, not long enough anyone else would notice, except me.

“You lost?” he asked quietly.

His voice, low, rough, older than I remembered, slid straight to my core. I swallowed hard and shook my head. “I came looking for a job.”

One side of his mouth pulled slightly, not quite a smile. Something rougher than that, like amusement wasn’t something that found him often, but I’d somehow managed to drag it out anyway.

“A job,” he repeated.

The way he said it made me suddenly aware of how ridiculous I probably sounded standing inside an underground fight club asking for employment. Still… I nodded.

His eyes held mine another second too long before he glanced once around the room behind me, checking the crowd. Checking who listened. Checking who looked at me.

The realization settled strangely low in my chest, then his attention returned fully to me again. “You should’ve stayed in the bar.”

His words landed low and rough, carrying the same edge he fought with, and standing this close to him everything in me begged to be closer. Idiot!

The heat rolling off his body wrapped around me while noise crashed through the room behind him; shouting, laughter, money exchanging hands.

Cain ignored all of it, his attention staying locked on me. Not openly intense, more as if he was trying not to look too long while doing exactly that anyway.

This was so not good.