Fear smelled like sour copper.
Jane had spent her entire life believing fear was sterile. She thought it was the cold sweat on her mother’s brow in the medical files, or the perfectly pressed silence of her father’s study when she failed a posture test.
But down here, in the subterranean fighting pits, fear was wet. It was thick. It was pouring off Ryan Thorne in suffocating waves.
He was hyperventilating. The silver-tipped riding crop hung limp in his fist, completely forgotten. He couldn't stop staring at her eyes.
Jane didn't blink. She could feel the change inside her skull. The ice-blue submissive gaze she had perfected for twenty-two years was gone, burned away by the heavy, tearing heat of the venom Michael had left inside her veins. Her irises were glowing. A luminescent, preda
