Page 43 of Fool Me Twice

He didn’t need. He didn’t want.

Cane’s footsteps were heavy behind him, and then there were arms caging him in yet again. The hard body at his back pressed him forward this time. Hart’s heart began to hammer, and he braced a damp hand against the glass, but it didn’t help. He was crushed against it. Trapped. His body gorged itself on the contact, the rush of it making him dizzy as euphoria burst through his veins, almost making his eyes roll back in his head.

Cane dipped his nose into Hart’s neck and inhaled like he knew. “You still smell the same. Like a desperate little thing waiting for someone to take you apart.”

Hart gasped at the words, reaching back to push at Cane, only finding bare, hot skin under his fingers and becoming paralyzed.

It had been so long.

The fight started below, the crowd cheering and raucous. It was all muted and slow.

Blood flew and splattered over the floor inside the cage, bruises bloomed on the fighters’ skin, and people grew feral in their seats. As if they could smell the blood. The violence. As if they were sharks swimming in blood-tainted waters, waiting to strike.

Hart was in his own pool. He had his own shark showing its teeth at him. He was bleeding out all over, unable to stem it, watching it bloom like a flower. Cane only needed that tiny amount to smell it. Just a drop. Hart was completely at his mercy. Hiding the fact that he wanted to rip himself open to make the bleeding worse. Make it last longer.

Hart felt his hand on Cane’s stomach engulfed by a larger, calloused one, moving it down over the hard, heated skin. Down past the waist of Cane’s jeans, stopping just shy of the humid hardness that hid below. Teasing him with what he needed but never giving it to him.

Hart could feel what Cane wanted. He wanted him to ask. To beg.

Hart dug his nails into Cane’s skin in retaliation, even as his knees weakened like they wanted to fold and lower him to Cane’s feet.

“I hate you,” Hart breathed, forehead resting against the glass, breath fogging it.

“You don’t hate me,” Cane purred, licking along his jaw in one long stripe, like marking territory. It was disgusting. It was everything. “You hate that I know you. Better than your trainers. Better than your brothers. I know you.”

“You don’t—”

“Every sick craving. Every dark desire,” he growled the words into the side of his face, taking hold of his neck and forcing his head back. Hart whimpered. “You’ve breathed them all into my skin, sweetheart. I’ve taken you apart and I’ve seen every…single…one.”

Hart closed his eyes as the words settled into his bones and sank under his skin. He fell into the harsh touches he craved, hypnotized by poisonous words that sounded too close to the truth. He opened his mouth to finally ask, unable to help himself, when he was cut off by a loud scream.

Hart’s eyes shot open, and he looked down through the glass to see the flash of a knife under the lights, and then there was nothing but blood and chaos.

Chapter 10

Cane

Cane was used to seeing blood. In fact, he liked it. More violence meant more money.

What he wasn’t used to was seeing blood oozing from a fucking stab wound his best fighter had just dished out. In the middle of a fight. In the middle of the cage. For everyone to see.

The crowd fell eerily silent after the initial scream, like someone had frozen them in a morbid tableau. It was unnatural. The warehouse was supposed to be shaking with pent-up aggression. The scent of sweat, blood, and money was what fed it.

Not like this though.

Hart’s body trembled in his arms, a familiar shiver making its way down to his feet, but instead of eating it up, swallowing him and claiming him, Cane now had a barrage of other bullshit to deal with.

Motherfucker.

“Cane,” Hart whispered, but all Cane could see was red, the haze descending and sinking its claws in.

He slammed his open palm against the glass until it shook, distorting the image in front of them. And it was as if that somehow pressed play on reality again. As if everyone could hear it.

The noise rose to an unbearable level, echoing and deafening them both. It started like a tidal wave, slowly and from a distance, then grew until it swept over them all. People screamed, chairs scraped, there was glass shattering, and a thunder of steps as everyone rushed to get out.

Cane pushed himself away from Hart, marching to the door and throwing it open, ignoring Hart as he called for him to come back and to not jump headfirst into danger.

Danger was what he knew best.

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