"It's bad," he says without preamble. "Worse than I thought. The crowd's not the usual crowd. There's, there's people here I don't know, wolves I think, your kind, mixed in. And the fighter they've matched you against." He shakes his head. "I've never seen him before. He's not one of ours. He came with the new money. He's big, Evan, and he moves wrong, moves like you move, and I think, I think he's one of them. A wolf. They've put you in the ring against a wolf and told the crowd it's just a fight, and nobody watching except the ones who know will understand why you're about to be torn apart."
The cold floods through me, because there it is, the shape of the trap. Not a rigged human fight. A wolf, set on Evan in a ring, in front of a crowd who won't understand what they're seeing, a publi
