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That now familiar awareness, like heat crawling across the back of my neck.

I twisted out from under Morales’s weight and shoved him off me, landing a solid hit to his ribs before creating space. My chest rose and fell hard, sweat already slicking my skin beneath the lights.

And then I looked. Even though I knew better.

Bett was here.

Not outside. Not in the damn parking lot where I’d told him to stay put.

Here. Way too close to the cage.

Hands wrapped around the chain-link like he was anchoring himself to it. Hair almost blond in the overhead lights. The perfect, angled planes of his face and the clear, sparking hazel of his eyes a stark contrast to the rusty grime of the warehouse.

Bett McNeely, golden boy of Demere University, did not belong here.

And yet here he stood, eyes locked on me with an intensity that made something low in my gut tighten.

He wasn’t watching like the others were.

There was no bloodlust. No enjoyment. No eagerness to see one of us fall.

He was watching me.

Every breath. Every shift of my weight. Every drop of sweat sliding down my chest. His eyes moved like a trail of fingers over my skin.

Morales charged again, and I met him head-on, driving him back toward the cage—toward Bett. The chain-link shuddered inches from Bett’s hands as Morales’s back hit it. I pinned him there, forearm pressed hard across his collarbone, and lifted my head.

Bett’s eyes locked on mine again.

For a second, the noise dulled. My hammering heart slowed to a deep, thudding rhythm.

I’d seen that look before.

In our dorm room. In the half dark. When he thought I didn’t notice the way his gaze tracked my body. When he’d watched me with someone else and pretended it was nothing more than annoyance.

This wasn’t annoyance. It was hunger laced with something he would never admit to.

Morales bucked beneath me and drove a knee into my thigh. Pain flared hot and immediate. I shifted, brought my fist down across his cheekbone once, twice, feeling the satisfying give of impact.

The crowd roared, and Morales cursed.

But my eyes kept coming back to Bett.

Blood trickled from a cut near my brow I didn’t even remember getting. The warm slide of it moving toward my eye. I wiped it away with the back of my wrapped hand breathing hard, chest heaving beneath the lights.

Let him see it.

All of it.

All of me.

The part of me that built this place. The part that stepped into the cage without planning to. The part that could take a hit and give one back twice as hard.

The part that was worlds away from his perfect veneer and his pristine life.

Morales swung wide. I ducked, drove forward, and we went down in a tangle of limbs and sweat and inevitability. I rolled, came up on top, and rained down two more clean hits before Avila surged in, shouting as Morales tapped out.

The bell rang.