Page 45 of Fool Me Twice

“I don’t know.” The fighter whimpered when Cane’s fist tightened in his hair. He was standing on his tiptoes now, trying to ease the pull on his scalp.

“Figure it out,” Cane said. “Now!”

“I don’t know,” the fighter repeated, face twisted with pain. “I came here early like normal. I didn’t have a knife on me. I don’t carry anything, ever. I don’t know where it came from. I just know that in the middle of the fight I knew I had it on me and I felt like it was what I had to do.”

“Knives just don’t magically appear unless you had help bringing one in!” Cane yelled, letting the guy’s hair go to punch him once in the mouth. The guy flew back against the cage bars, blood spraying from his mouth. Cane grabbed him by the jaw. “Who the fuck are you working with? What fucking caster cursed me? Give me the fucking name!”

“CANE!” Hart’s voice pierced the cloud of rage. “CANE, STOP!”

Cane trembled with the desire to smash this guy’s head in and find the answers he wanted inside. The guy whimpered in his grip.

“Cane, I mean it,” Hart said, quick footsteps coming from behind him, bouncing off the ring floor.

“Not now,” Cane growled. He didn’t have the time to handle Hart and his preaching.

“Yes, now,” Hart said, infuriatingly stubborn as always, soft hands gripping his wrist. “Listen to what he’s saying.”

Cane could barely hear anything over the thunder of his own heartbeat. Over the echo of ghostly laughter in his ears.

“Let him go,” Hart said sternly.

“No,” he said, tightening his grip on the fighter’s jaw until his knuckles turned white and the tattoos on his arms distorted from the veins popping under his skin.

He could crush him with one flick, fighter or not. Cane knew his own strength.

“I need you to let him go,” Hart said. That word made Cane pause. It was written into his being to respond to it when it was uttered by that voice. Because yes, he did know his strength, but Hart knew his weakness. “Please.”

“You’re playing a dangerous game, sweetheart,” Cane growled, low and menacing.

Hart was writing a contract between them right now. Cane would always give Hart what he needed. But that meant he could take what he wanted in return.

He heard Hart’s breath hitch beside him, felt his hands flex. “I know.”

When Hart tugged at his wrist again, Cane let it move. He opened his fingers and the fighter crumpled to the floor like he’d been steamrolled, curling into a ball and shaking. It didn’t make Cane feel anything.

“He was saying the same things Raph and Soph said,” Hart said, pulling Cane’s focus.

He fixed his eyes on Hart, a new target for the predator inside him. Hart swallowed, but stood his ground, meeting his eyes.

“They weren’t cursed,” Cane said, backing Hart up across the ring. “Apparently nobody is fucking cursed around here, so I’m just gonna handle shit my way.”

“No, you won’t,” Hart said, lifting his chin and fighting to keep his feet. “Something is happening, and that’s why I’m here, Cane. The incident we were looking out for just happened, and we have the man who did it here. Look past your anger and let me do my job.”

Cane felt his chest heaving with the harsh breaths he was taking. In the back of his mind he knew it wasn’t rational to want to argue with him. It was rage and loss of control forcing him to find an outlet for it. Fighting was instinct. Base and raw and ugly. Something tangible to unleash the beast inside him.

But Hart wasn’t the person for that.

No. Hart channeled Cane’s energy down a much different pathway.

The urge to take Hart to the floor now and lose himself in him was almost too hard to resist giving in to, but he held back. Barely.

There were still too many moving pieces on the board.

Beyond the betrayal that stung like another knife cut over the same wound, an aged one, Cane knew he wouldn’t receive the answers he needed his way.

He grabbed Hart’s arm instead. Not hard, but unyielding. “You’re not going with him alone.”

“You’re not coming,” Hart countered immediately.

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