“Wha…?”
He moved his shoulder up and down again.
“I’m pretty perceptive,” he said numbly.
I mentally gathered myself together.
“Well, it’s bullshit,” I said, trying to convince myself of the words. “I’m just giving myself a little break before I haul my ass out of this snow bank, beat you to death, and head back home. All I have to do is make it down that mountainside, and then I’m done for good.”
“You’ll fight again,” Arden said. “Well, you will if you ever get out of this, which you won’t. If you did, this still wouldn’t be your last tournament.”
“Fuck you,” I said with a snarl. “I don’t quit in the middle of a fight. This is my last tournament, and it ends in victory just like my first fight and every one of them in between.”
“It never ends,” Arden said. “Franks won’t let you go any more than Rinaldo will let me go. Once they got you, they got you. You never get away from them completely, even when they tell you that you can.”
I might not have been as perceptive as he was, but I still knew he wasn’t talking about me anymore. He was talking about himself.
“Landon isn’t going to fuck me over,” I said. Everything Arden was saying rang true, aligning with my own thoughts, but I refused to agree with him. “I know him. He told me this was it, and he wouldn’t go back on his word. He’s like my fucking father.”
Arden chuckled.
“Yeah, I got one of those, too. He’s the reason I’m here, retirement or not.”
Arden pulled his arm across his chest and placed his hand under his head to get it off the snow. He looked into my eyes again. For a second, he didn’t look quite as emotionless as he had before. His eyes tightened a bit, and his jaw flexed as he spoke.
“We’re too good for them to just let us go,” Arden continued. “Even if they really want to, they’re always going to need us for something one last time.”
I stared at him as the words sank in, and I knew deep inside that he was right. If I did get out of this, Franks and Landon would let me off on my own for a while, but eventually there would be something else—just one more thing they needed for me to do. One more favor. One more fight.
“Fuck you,” I grumbled through clenched teeth. “I’ve got bigger priorities now.”
Arden nodded slightly, sniffed against the cold, and looked back to me.
“I got a girl, too,” he finally said. “Lia. Never thought that would happen.”
“Heh,” I chuckled, “tell me about it.”
The statement was rhetorical, but it seemed to put Arden in a more talkative mood.
“She doesn’t know where I am,” he said. “I sent her off to visit her mom for a couple of weeks. She’s going to come home, and I won’t be there.”
My mind played through the scenario he described, only with Raine and myself as the subjects. I pictured her coming into the condo and finding it empty. I thought about what she would do when it stayed empty through the night. I wondered at what point she would start looking for me and what she would do when she couldn’t find any trace of where I had gone.
She’d freak out. She wouldn’t know what to do, and there wouldn’t be anyone she could call to get any information. How long would it be before she gave up? Weeks? Months? Years?
“Lia came after me once before,” Arden said. “I ditched her in Arizona, but she still managed to find me again. She’s stubborn.”
“That sounds familiar,” I said. “I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as stubborn as Raine.”
“Raine?”
I tapped the edge of the picture.
“That’s her name.”
Arden huffed a breath through his nose.
“At least she’ll have her kid,” Arden said. “Lia’s stuck with the dog.”