“We adding her to the roster?” the man asked with a raking glance at Alice. “She’s tall and strong, she’d probably start a lot of betting.”
“That depends on Grant here,” Cyrus said, voice silky. “He fights... or she does.”
It took every ounce of Graham’s willpower not to betray the rage and agony his words woke. Alice, in a cage. Alice, defending herself against one of Cyrus’ fighters. Alice, hurting.
“I’ll fight.”
The man scurried away again.
Was it the sedative that was keeping him from reaching his lion? Graham felt more himself with every moment... as much himself as he could be without the voice that had shared his head for so much of his life.
“Who are you people?” Alice demanded as they pushed her to the opposite side of the enclosure from Graham. “Why can’t I hear my..?” She didn’t finish, as if it suddenly occurred to her that they may not know about her bear.
“Can’t hear your animal? Isn’t that a nice trick?” Cyrus said smugly. “As well as providing us with this charming, isolated arena, Alistair Beehag had a whole arsenal of wonderful treasures that his nephew has quietly been selling on the black market. Oh, some run of the mill sedatives, poisons, hallucinogens, truth serums. But I was also able to snap up a good quantity of this particular drug—it forces a shifter to remain in their human form. You can mix it with a sedative, or administer it straight.”
Cyrus grinned as Graham finally realized what he intended to do.
It was going to be a do-over of his last fateful fight.
Only this time, he was going to be the one who couldn’t shift.
Chapter 33
Alice wriggled against the ropes holding her wrists, not exactly trying to hide her efforts, but trying not to be obvious. People in movies got out of stuff like this all the time. And if she’d had her bear...
She was so stupid, thinking she could just drive right up and save Graham single-handedly.
“One of these charming gentlemen was in the party of furries at the resort,” she told him. “He recognized me.”
“Yeah,” Graham grunted briefly.
“I see that whatever they gave you hasn’t made you more talkative,” Alice said wryly.
“Alice,” Graham said under his breath. “I’m...”
“I swear to God, if you apologize for getting me into this, I will kick you in the shins.” She eyed the guards. “I bet they’d let me, too.” Her voice gentled. “Graham...”
“I’ll give you lovebirds a moment,” Cyrus said, as there was a roar from a distant crowd and loud distorted music began to play. To the guards, he said, “Don’t take your eyes off of them.”
Alice eyed the guards, who were both holding rifles. More darts? Sedatives like Graham had been given? Real bullets? The lighting wasn’t good; it was fully dark by now, and the blinding worklight was pointed at them, making it hard to see anything outside of their puddle of light.
“Alice...” Graham said again. “I love you.”
It was a salve on the empty place inside her where her bear and the mate-bond had been. They weren’t gone, Alice reminded herself, just silenced. She’d heard about the drug that made shifters stay human from Neal and Tony; it was temporary, it would wear off and they’d be back to normal.
“I love you,” she replied.
One of the guards snorted in disgust and the other made a gagging sound. “Fucking shifters and their creepy mates,” one of them muttered.
Alice squinted at them through the blinding light. “They aren’t shifters,” she said thoughtfully. “Is Cyrus?”
Graham shook his head. “Has kind of a chip on his shoulder about it, too.”
“Stop talking,” the other guard commanded shifting his rifle suggestively.
Alice subsided to silence, continuing to try to do something with the knots at her wrists without being obvious about it.
Before she could manage to do more than give herself mild ropeburn, Cyrus was back.